venta

Yesterday, a bunch of us headed off to check out a Sunday-night pub quiz in our local area. We used to be regulars at the Duke of Kent's Sunday-night quiz, until they sacked the guy who did it and replaced him with a vastly inferior bought-in quiz run by a guy who should never have been allowed a microphone. We've experimented with various alternatives, but nothing's really caught on.

Last night we trotted to the Grove, only to find that their regular quiz was off, and they had a one-night-only replacement. So we still don't know what it's usually like. However, last night's quiz had an interesting schtick that made it quite tactical...

The "Two For One" quiz was a straight fifty questions, with no themed rounds. However, we were advised right at the start that there were "only 25 answers" - ie each answer would appear as the answer to two different questions.

In the early stages of the quiz, of course, this makes no difference at all. However, later on, you can begin to match up pairs of answers and determine either than you've got something wrong, or make plausible guesses at questions you can't answer.

We eventually ended up with six problem questions:

- What is measured in Newtons? (We were confident that this was "force", but couldn't match it to anything.)
- Of what did Jesus say "they reap not, neither do they sow"? (Lilies, but again it didn't match anything.)
- In a children's story Jack Ketch, the hangman, gets hanged - but by whom? (We thought it was Mr Punch, but... no match.)
- What drink derives its name from the Hindi word for 5? (No idea, though we were guessing tea.)
- What cereal has been advertised since its launch by the character Sunny Jim? (No idea.)
- Which 1963 Hitchcock film has no musical score (No real idea - though we could name lots of Hitchcock films. Someone was pushing strongly for Psycho, but the rest of us weren't having any of it.)

In a regular pub quiz, we'd have been stuck there (and we'd have got no points for four of the answers). As it was, Jamie suddenly pulled the existence of a cereal called Force Flakes out of the back of his brain, and someone else noticed that Punch was a drink. Which, lining up the other two questions, prompted me to realise the lilies of the field "toil not neither do they spin" - the creatures which don't reap or sow are the birds of the air, which brought us neatly to Hitchcock's The Birds.

In fact we were smugly hoping to get full marks but failed, having put the same wrong answer for the modern day name for Mesopotamia and the country where OPEC was founded. Of our 6-person team, two people abstained, three were sure it was Iran and one thought it was Iraq. We went with Iran, partly down to majority vote and partly because the person saying it was Iraq could only cite the lyrics of a song by an obscure John McClure side-project as evidence. Sadly, the one (and John McClure) were right.

The quiz master had been a little clever about his choice of questions, and there were a few red herrings among them. We cautiously answered the question "Of what item of clothing does Dennis the Menace have a pathological fear?" with "slippers", and patted ourselves on the back when asked what Dorothy stole from the Wicked Witch of the West. Slippers! Hurrah!

But then one of the final questions was to complete the last line Rex Harrison says in the film My Fair Lady. "Eliza, where the devil are my....". Er, that would be slippers. Only after some fierce arguing did we locate an unmatched broomstick from a Harry Potter question, and realise that Dorothy steals slippers from the Wicked Witch of the East, and a broomstick from the Wicked Witch of the West. A few more like that meant there were plenty of wrong ways to match up the answers.

I suspect that it is a quiz format which favours people who have a lot of right answers already - once you have your answers mostly sorted out, you can unravel the last few. However, nowhere near as badly as the joker system used by the local Monday-night-pub quiz, which causes those who know all the answers to race ahead, and those who know all-but-one to fall dramatically behind. And I don't know that I'd want it every week, but it's a really interesting approach, and we had a lot of fun with it.