QuizList

New quizzes to know about:

O’Neill’s, 65 Cannon Street, EC4N 5AA.  Mondays at 6.30, £2 per person entry, cash prize plus spot prizes.  Yes, that’s the O’Neill’s chain which boasts the wonderful Smithwicks on draught, best ale in the world.

The Cuckoo, 115 Hemingford Road, N1 1BZ, boasts a new not-so-Fat Controller quiz on Monday evenings, 8pm , with a prize of a meal (for one).  Eddie the n-s-F-C will keep us posted on how this develops.

And check One-Off quizzes for details of EIA’s Year of the Tiger Charity Quiz Night, taking place on Thursday 11 February in Tiger Tiger in Haymarket, in aid of – you guessed it – tigers.

For some reason I got to thinking about what tv or film characters you might meet at pub quizzes, and here’s what I came up with.  Not all of these have actually participated in quizzes, but they represent some of the kind of characters you meet along the way.  Here we go:

Ian Beale (‘Enders):  the kind of person who will stop at nothing to win, just to prove a point.

Mr Garrison (South Park):  someone with a seemingly baffling private life, who has displayed an intimate knowledge of certain tv programmes.

Ken Barlow (Corrie):  not at all boring slightly avuncular older person who doesn’t know as much as he thinks.

McManus (Oz):  someone with an unjustified belief that their liberal intelligentsia credentials makes them good at quizzes.  I seem to remember McM getting a rude awakening on ‘Up the Ante’.

The Fat Slags (Viz, but I may be hallucinating to think they were on tv or film):  nothing at all to do with their figures but their endless ‘na-hah-hah’ing may sometimes be heard at quizzes…

Harry Potter: deeply annoying little twerp who seems to know everything and takes the high moral ground to boot.

Frank Gallagher (Shameless):  yes, folks, I have lost to characters as drunk as that, in a place not a million miles from the village…

But there is one tv character who above all epitomises a certain quiz type, with his endless facts, his equally (to Mr Garrison) mystifying private life, and his slightly on-the-spectrum presentation – who is it?  Answer next week, guesses to me (just for fun)…  cue dramatic music and closing credits!

This week is all about quizmasters.  Now, for a change this doesn’t signal a rant about how awful some of them are, but more about what resources exist and how to find a pub which might want your services.

Some of you will know my day job, some don’t;  in the course of it I sometimes venture into prisons and secure units and once I was asked by someone in one of these settings  ’what do you need to work in your profession?’  My reply was ‘a brass neck’ – not to do with the people you meet there but the frequently objectionable other professionals you encounter.  I would say the same about quizmastering;  don’t go into the area if you’re going to be overly sensitive about criticism of your fab questions and barracking about your accent etc.    The late Professor Propellorhead’s article on this site, http://quizlist.com/articles/thoughts-of-a-quizmaster/, will give you some indication of what to expect;  and we also have Bible John’s dos and don’ts: http://quizlist.com/articles/bible-johns-guide-to-a-good-pub-quiz/.

Quizmastering is a profession you can enter with very little investment – as regards the tools of the trade, all you need is questions (easily obtainable from the Web – see, for instance, this link http://www.quiz-media.co.uk/partners/id/115_6), answer sheets, and access to a microphone.  But how do you find a pub that wants your services as a QM?  The best way is word of mouth – ask other QMs, ask locals about which pubs used to do quizzes and might be interested in re-starting them, and best of all, ask those seasoned pub quiz teams that you just know spend (part of) the week trawling round other quizzes where there might be a ‘vacancy’ coming up.

Now, of course, there are some websites which (formally or informally) offer a matching service for QMs looking for a pub and pubs looking for a QM.  For a start, you can always mail QuizList and I’ll do my best to match QMs and pubs up.  I’m also thinking of creating an area where I can post these details which should remove the need for me to forward mails back and forth, and I will speak to Carl who is the technical genius on this site about doing this.  Will keep you posted. The redoubtable Dr Paul’s mine of quiz information did, I believe, also set out to offer this service, and has details of a book which will help would-be quizmasters  http://www.quiz-media.co.uk/partners/id/115_1.

Another correspondent’s  useful blog on ‘Today in History’ also has some quizmastering facts and a link to a book called ‘The Easy Quizmaster’:  http://todaysthedayquiz.blogspot.com/.

This is only scratching the surface of what’s available – let me know of any good resources I’ve missed.  Quizmasters – keep doing those quizzes, we do appreciate your efforts even though we don’t say it,  but for god’s sake please don’t download that picture round with Mr (Bastard) Men on it ever again…

An N1 pub is looking for a reliable quizmaster to host a quiz once a month on Tuesdays.  They might be persuaded to change it to Mondays.  Let me know if you want your details forwarded to them.

Slow week , two fairly un-brilliant quizzes visited, and NC and PH proved hard to detach from the quiz machines.  Most pubs now seem to have the same model of games machine and it has a boring selection of games – once in a while when I happen on ‘Trivia for Dummies Version 1′ or ‘Quiz City’ it’s good…  ‘Beat the Landlord’ or whatever it’s called started with promise and has, I think, been hammered by too many professionals;  the crossword one isn’t bad but some original new games are needed.  I started off liking ‘Choose to Lose’ but then you get those awful spates where your choices are reduced to two…

Finally, for all would-be or veteran quizmasters, visit QuizList next week for the QuizMasters’ special, when I will be trying to put together a few resources for that group of people about whom I am frequently critical…

Word of a rare Friday quiz has reached me.  Apparently it’s early evening and in:

The Windmill, 44 Lambeth High Street, SE1 7JS, 020 7735 1698.

Any more details, let me know.

And recently I’ve revisited two quizzes which some time ago I used to be found at semi-frequently.  First of all, we have the Victoria, North Hill, N6, which has changed its quiz night a few times and now settled on a Monday.  It’s taking a break at the moment but persisted through the first flurry of snow.  What’s good is that each round carries a separate prize;  what’s not so good is that some of these were fairly nasty-looking  sweets or similar which we gave back;  what’s good is the final ‘jackpot’ round where you have to reach a certain number of right answers out of twenty to scoop the takings.  The possibility exists of a rollover.  Anyway, I believe the quiz is taking a break in January.

Then on Tuesdays we have the Washington in England’s Lane, NW3,  a long-running quiz which temporarily shifted to Monday nights.  This is the standard ‘Redtooth’ format with the final wipeout round – get one wrong and your score for that round is wiped out, get all right and you gather an extra five points.  I am glad to say that we won and had an enjoyable evening sharing a big table with various other groups who dropped in and out and listening to stories on the architecture of Belsize Park (!).  The QM experienced some barracking and unfortunately wasn’t running the jackpot on the night we were there, which was a bit of a pity;  the only other complaint I had was that when the time came to get a taxi a staff member offered me a number where the controller had never heard of the Washington and also seemed puzzled at the concept of ‘England’s Lane’ …  Nonetheless, well worth a visit.

Complaints on the hardness of the ‘mystery place’ quiz!  Sorry.  Will do better…

During a slow week for quizzes, and a good week for snow, the only information I have to impart is that if you go to a quiz onthe events of 2009, brush up on your MPs’ expense claims.  It pays to know who claimed for horse manure and toilet seats.

So you couldn’t guess the place name?  Shame on you.  One correct guess given to me verbally, so that person is the winner, and many incorrect ones by e-mail.  Here we go:

It has at least 15 namesakes in the USA,  and contains a prison, cathedral and castle.  Well, no more explanation is needed on these clues.

Nineteenth century literary connection:  there are actually several, but Dickens was closely associated with this place.  And this ties in with ‘think of a metal roster, then turn it round:  ‘a metal roster’ might be  ‘a chrome list’, which is an anagram of Cloisterham, the setting for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and believed to be based on our place.

Walk up a prominent street there, and you might find yourself in Pennsylvania:  Fort Pitt.

A defensive afterthought nearby has given us a word which entered the English language:  well,  here’s how Wikipedia defines this – ‘Fort Borstal was built as an afterthought from the 1859 Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom, by convict labour between 1875 and 1885.’  So now you know….

Famous near-carthorse:  ‘Carthorse’ is nearly an anagram of the place name.

Sometimes grouped with other neighbouring places around a geographical feature:  the Medway Towns.

An old Roman Road runs through it:  Watling Street.

Nearby football team has blue as a prominent colour:  Gillingham.

In 1998, something happened this place which makes it (to my knowledge) unique among English places for what it hasn’t rather than for what it has:  it lost its status as a city, making it possibly the only ex-city in England today…

And if you still don’t know where it is, well, reader, I married him.

Haven’t decided whether I’ll run another one of these in the immediate future, so to keep you going, think about what the following might have in common:  Fireworks, skip lorries, the pips on Radio 4, the bleeps on ‘Mastermind’, text message signals?  (Answer:  the dog is scared of all of them…)