Exile from the George
Last week I had the rare honour of doing a pub quiz with a bunch of fellow UC Alumni (not that BH lot) including three captains. Nick and Jonathan (Warwick), Ivan (UCL) and Rich (Bristol) all joined me at a pub quiz (we are joined in the quizzing-and-journo nexus). I had said: "You know we've all been on University Challenge"; only to be rightly rebuked: "I think we should keep that quiet".
Nick, Rich and I had been to a preview of the film Hard Candy (probably out in June) which is basically (putting my film critic hat on) "Little Red Riding Hood rewritten as an anti-paedophile diatribe by Dawson's Creek and Scream writer Kevin Williamson". It was provocative, but cold. The 14-year-old girl, who is naturally almost 20 in real life, looked like an elfin boy with a six-pack. Euhh. Not that I want underage film teenagers to be sexy, m'kay? She just annoyed the hell out of me. But that was an improvement on the beginning when I thought it looked like a slightly disturbing video for the new BMW that Gus Van Sant had a hand in directing. The one saving grace was the line: "I fucking hate Goldfrapp!" Seen in context it is quite a doozy.
So what happens when three UC quarter-finalists, traumatised by the lingering pain of crushing defeat (or is that just me?), are free slightly after eight o'clock. It doesn't take a leap of the imagination to say a strip-pub like The Griffin, but, no really, we did the quiz. After we had walked past it for about ten minutes, that is. I have a real problem with East London geography even when I have an A-Z in front of me.
It was a nice little pub on Curtain Road. Cosy and brown. We had randomly chanced upon it in the excellent Quizlist website, more because it was the only one that started at nine and was in central-ish London. And we couldn't be bothered to phone any others. As a result I had expected the worse.
The thing is stupid pub quizzes do my head in. I appreciate the need to have a majoroity of easy questions to quell the punters' ire, but there must be a fair share of the hard stuff (or at least, say, 20%). I've got so attached to the George in Dalston with the good quota of questions that provoked sheer befuddlement in me, that the passing of its much-loved incarnation, has left me searching for another. That isn't the Prince of Wales on a Tuesday, or anywhere else on a Tuesday. Tuesday night is league night. Nothing can change that. Except for summer and the lack of a league to fill it. So when the first picture answer was read out - "William H Macy" - and it was quite plainly Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Truman Capote I could have thrown a chair. Somewhere. But that was a false alarm, thank God. The wail of unified outrage put everything right and the lady quizmaster obliged by rescinding what she said, using the old excuse "I didn't write the questions!". Otherwise, there might have been a riot.
The questions were generally okay, if a bit easy. For example: who was the first Labour Chancellor to give a Budget speech in the 1990s? Who was the first president of South Africa? Which US president was a peanut farmer? And such hard chestnuts, if there are such a thing, as what occupation did Al Capone have on his business card? (Used furniture dealer).
We came slightly unstuck on such treacley subjects as: Is Desmond Lynam older than Paul McCartney? (Macca as Rich said, not Des as I had written down) How many eyelids does an ostrich have? (four or none we thought, we said none, it was four) How did some fella who played Tarzan give up the role, unintentionally? (Mauled by an elephant apparently), and also Jarvis Cocker supporting Sheffield Wednesday not United, as Sean Bean does. We didn't bother arguing that CREEP was the Committee not the Campaign to re-elect President Richard Nixon. It didn't look like it would do much good. The quiz looked so familiar. It used the same formula as the George (see previous post) but with one beer quiz and one jackpot round. It had the all the dreaded varieties of Littovel. In fact, it probably has the same owners.
In the end we won by five points and even got Peter Gabriel's and Kevin Keegan's ages (56 and 55) on the button. The guys marking our paper, I believe their names were Matt and Stuart, were overheard as saying: "This is fucking taking the piss", when they got to those two tie-break questions. But this gave us little satisfaction when we found out that they had won the £38 jackpot, correctly answering that Jeffrey Archer became the youngest ever member of the GLC when he joined in 1969. Feeling we had little other option, due to our deficiency of knowledge about local politics in the 60s, we put Ken Livingstone. "Will no one knock them off their perch?" the quizlady asked in a manner edging towards the rhetorical. Give me a few more weeks, and we shall find out. So we got the free drinks, and I got my celebratory rubbish brandy (which I didn't even want to drink in the end). It's the money though that matters. Innit? I left stumbling a little less than usual, but still stumbling. Bloody Littovel
In conclusion: a nice little quiz, but hardly the kind that will inspire complete fealty in those who do it. Good company though.
Nick, Rich and I had been to a preview of the film Hard Candy (probably out in June) which is basically (putting my film critic hat on) "Little Red Riding Hood rewritten as an anti-paedophile diatribe by Dawson's Creek and Scream writer Kevin Williamson". It was provocative, but cold. The 14-year-old girl, who is naturally almost 20 in real life, looked like an elfin boy with a six-pack. Euhh. Not that I want underage film teenagers to be sexy, m'kay? She just annoyed the hell out of me. But that was an improvement on the beginning when I thought it looked like a slightly disturbing video for the new BMW that Gus Van Sant had a hand in directing. The one saving grace was the line: "I fucking hate Goldfrapp!" Seen in context it is quite a doozy.
So what happens when three UC quarter-finalists, traumatised by the lingering pain of crushing defeat (or is that just me?), are free slightly after eight o'clock. It doesn't take a leap of the imagination to say a strip-pub like The Griffin, but, no really, we did the quiz. After we had walked past it for about ten minutes, that is. I have a real problem with East London geography even when I have an A-Z in front of me.
It was a nice little pub on Curtain Road. Cosy and brown. We had randomly chanced upon it in the excellent Quizlist website, more because it was the only one that started at nine and was in central-ish London. And we couldn't be bothered to phone any others. As a result I had expected the worse.
The thing is stupid pub quizzes do my head in. I appreciate the need to have a majoroity of easy questions to quell the punters' ire, but there must be a fair share of the hard stuff (or at least, say, 20%). I've got so attached to the George in Dalston with the good quota of questions that provoked sheer befuddlement in me, that the passing of its much-loved incarnation, has left me searching for another. That isn't the Prince of Wales on a Tuesday, or anywhere else on a Tuesday. Tuesday night is league night. Nothing can change that. Except for summer and the lack of a league to fill it. So when the first picture answer was read out - "William H Macy" - and it was quite plainly Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Truman Capote I could have thrown a chair. Somewhere. But that was a false alarm, thank God. The wail of unified outrage put everything right and the lady quizmaster obliged by rescinding what she said, using the old excuse "I didn't write the questions!". Otherwise, there might have been a riot.
The questions were generally okay, if a bit easy. For example: who was the first Labour Chancellor to give a Budget speech in the 1990s? Who was the first president of South Africa? Which US president was a peanut farmer? And such hard chestnuts, if there are such a thing, as what occupation did Al Capone have on his business card? (Used furniture dealer).
We came slightly unstuck on such treacley subjects as: Is Desmond Lynam older than Paul McCartney? (Macca as Rich said, not Des as I had written down) How many eyelids does an ostrich have? (four or none we thought, we said none, it was four) How did some fella who played Tarzan give up the role, unintentionally? (Mauled by an elephant apparently), and also Jarvis Cocker supporting Sheffield Wednesday not United, as Sean Bean does. We didn't bother arguing that CREEP was the Committee not the Campaign to re-elect President Richard Nixon. It didn't look like it would do much good. The quiz looked so familiar. It used the same formula as the George (see previous post) but with one beer quiz and one jackpot round. It had the all the dreaded varieties of Littovel. In fact, it probably has the same owners.
In the end we won by five points and even got Peter Gabriel's and Kevin Keegan's ages (56 and 55) on the button. The guys marking our paper, I believe their names were Matt and Stuart, were overheard as saying: "This is fucking taking the piss", when they got to those two tie-break questions. But this gave us little satisfaction when we found out that they had won the £38 jackpot, correctly answering that Jeffrey Archer became the youngest ever member of the GLC when he joined in 1969. Feeling we had little other option, due to our deficiency of knowledge about local politics in the 60s, we put Ken Livingstone. "Will no one knock them off their perch?" the quizlady asked in a manner edging towards the rhetorical. Give me a few more weeks, and we shall find out. So we got the free drinks, and I got my celebratory rubbish brandy (which I didn't even want to drink in the end). It's the money though that matters. Innit? I left stumbling a little less than usual, but still stumbling. Bloody Littovel
In conclusion: a nice little quiz, but hardly the kind that will inspire complete fealty in those who do it. Good company though.
posted by That Quiz Guy at 8:09 AM
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