Pub Quiz Report
Pub: The Shakespeare in Stoke Newington. Near the route of the 73 bus. The pub used to be part of the same ‘chain’ that runs the Rosemary Branch in De Beavoir Town, but might not be anymore. Anyway, plenty of seats, interesting decor (ie, it’s built up over time rather than part of a makeover). Good beer, Czech vibe as regards the lager.
Quiz: Two rounds of 20 questions, followed by a 4 question jackpot round at the end. Starts at around 9pm on Monday night, with final answers delivered at last orders or thereabouts, depending on the speed with which contestants return their answers to the QM. ‘1 per team member per round – maximum of 5 per team, though this rule can be flexibly observed.
Prize: First prize in each round – ’20 voucher for use at the bar. Second prize in each – ’10 voucher. Jackpot round is all the cash from the first two rounds – last night had ‘120 up for grabs.
Questions: Good range of difficulty to produce the usual bell-curve of results. Still not enough ones that could be worked out through lateral thinking, nor are there many clues in the questions.
The quizmaster: Not as good as the bloke who used to do it, but still reasonable-ish. He thought our team name for round one was the wittiest of the many offerings based around rude combinations of words related to the Rugby World Cup Final.
He really blotted his copybook with the tie-breaker though. We were tied for first place with 5 teams each with 15/20. I’m still cursing Uranus now, having shilly-shallied between Saturn and Uranus and breaking a golden rule of quizzes in talking myself out of the first answer that came to me, and thus talking yourself out of the right answer. Anyway. The question was ‘In what year were seminal punk band Bow Wow Wow formed’. One member of our team was thinking early 1980s, whereas others (alright, me included) thought that in the absence of knowing when this might be, the use of the words ‘seminal’ and ‘punk’ would indicate something in mid-to-late 1970s bracket. We were wrong, and suggested to the QM that the question was slightly misleading, and that if he wanted to ask a simple question – ‘when were Bow Wow Wow formed?’ then he should just ask it without adding subjective judgements as to their seminality. He disagreed, arguing that since Malcolm McLaren was their manager, they were a punk band, and again, because of McLaren’s involvement, they were seminal. We were suspicious of his reasoning leading to our team name for the second round being ‘Punk was over by 1979’.
Will I go again? Yes. Having come second in Round Two. we have a ’10 voucher to be spent in the pub by next Monday.
Anything else?
– The guy who played Nigel in Eastenders was a contestant.
– You can buy pizzas from the pizza joint next door and bring them into the pub.
– There is slightly amusing graffiti in the gents.
– The sink in the gents has little cold water pressure, but good pressure on the hot water, which appears to be heated in Hell itself. Be careful, hygiene fans.
– The hand dryer is piss poor in the gents.
– The Pork scratchings were stale and proved that more packaging = poorer quality fried pig back fat.
Final Thought: Whatever happened to Cheese Moments? They are advertised on both Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries, but no-one has them. Ever.