E­asy Does It?

Not all my regular readers are Charlton fans, nor indeed necessarily have any interest in football at all, so in the absence of a league programme this weekend, and given that international games leave me cold, particularly when they are friendlies, this is an ideal moment to return to quiz matters.

Regular quizmaster Alex was at the helm last week, and there was quite a respectable turnout, as there had been the last time he was asking the questions. As you may recall, the quiz is undergoing a period of change: there has been a switch from Monday night to Thursday night, which is not proving all that popular with the old guard, to be honest. This change was designed to attract more people as Thursday is regarded as more convenient, or better in some other undefined way.

Numbers, however, except in those weeks when Alex has drummed up trade around his place of work, have stayed more or less the same, and were very low indeed the week before last. And Edu had totally disappeared.

However last week saw the return of Edu, who had been finishing his thesis, and the return of the founder members of the Old Farts, and something like a return to the way things used to be, i.e. we didn't win. Our friends the OFs, back to something like full strength, did, and Edu's team came in third, the newer visiting sides (one of them consisted of about 11 people by the end, and they still came last) bringing up the rear. Mind you, we were without Mush, and his presence might well have made a significant difference.

Once again talk turned to the question of dumbing down. The policy is to include a goodly proportion of easy questions, so that new people don't get put off, but to include a fair sprinkling of much more difficult questions, so that the eternal competition between the three long-standing teams might continue in the same way.

As a kind of arithmetical strategy, this in fact does work. However it is, for me at any rate, making the quiz a trifle dull; well, it is less of a challenge. However there are those who say that the quiz is so very much on its last legs that desperate remedies are called for. Maybe, but whether these are the right ones, I am not at all certain.