The Only Pharoah Monche Tune I Have On My Laptop

So me and Chris H went back ... to that pub with the new guy. Last Monday night. The new guy who I've decided to rechristen Jambo - he looked like a sort of Jambo. And you know what? I can't say there has been a dip in professionalism. Jambo takes it seriously. I believe our new quizmaster has set himself the task of setting a more pleasing and interesting quiz. It's just a pity that I think it's a bit rubbish.

Jambo looks like a sort of suave Roma with longish greying locks; the kind of capricious solo-dude who flounces into town, takes up residency in a drinking establishment and then spends the rest of the time trying to sow his seed in females of all ages and sizes. Of course, I'm just going on a flight of fancy. Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much about the Speed episode of Father Ted. What else? Perhaps a Levellers fan who had finally taken his hair out of dreads, and learned to dress a bit better just by shopping at River Island instead of foraging for rags at the local tip, I suppose. Onto his QM MO: He doesn't just fly in and fly out like Whassisname. He drinks at the bar and converses with his fellow pub patrons long after he finishes the job. By the looks and sound of it, Jambo feels like he can build a warm rapport that will last for all time, so grateful are we for his quizmaster skills. You can imagine him before, brooding in the corner and waiting for his time to come, waiting for that wiry fella with his crappy quiz to shove off. That time has come. He wants to put his stamp on the quiz ab initio. There is physical evidence for this. Our answer papers are headed with two-words that leave us in no doubt: Jambo's Quiz. That told 'em! And us!

I did like his opening shot though - the picture round. Pretty straightforward. Nothing obscure. He's even put the Skeleton lady in. But the picture of a T-Rex? He missed a trick with an apatosaurus there, I reckon. Evidently, he doesn't have a predilection for sticking the less well known members of the Sex Pistols into the mix. So we get ten. It's always nice to win the first beer quiz, and in the end we do. Strange that we never used to.

We drop nine points and win by one. We do not figure 76 as the number that is a trombones, or the thing that links a bishop and two pieces of wood (I say clogs, the answer is mitre joint ... a mitre joint ... grrr), or that hardpaw is also called distemper in a dog and that the SAS wear beige berets. We also omit the Industrial zone from the four original areas in The Crystal Maze. And I spent so many hours of my youth watch people fall and get wet and make silly squealing sounds in search of the shiny glass testicles. However, I'm thinking that the only one I should have got is distemper because it was the only intelligent answer I proffered. The word arthritis was inscribed instead. Never mind. We have stood firm against the weekly Neighbours AND topical question too (dear God, no ... you're saying the Kennedys actually split up? When did that happen? I'm must have been busy ... with my life). Although I'm thinking Neighbours is the worst TV subject in a quiz in the entire world. For being such a huge vat of potential facts and yet being so utterly worthless and insignificant at the same time. A paradox. A paradox. A most ingenious paradox.

Jambo yaps so much that you think Chas 'n' Dave should write a song about him. Then a bulb goes off in your head. You realise he's also a stand-up comedian; an all-purpose entertainer who wants to tantalise you with facts and amusing bon mots spoken heartily into the microphone like:

Reacting to a team called First Lesbian Experience: "Surely, it should have been your second by now?"
And...
Reacting to the wrong answer that suggests another name for the Public Gallery in the Commons: "The Spitting Gallery would make Prime Minister's Questions more interesting."

And some of the rules as printed on the answer sheet that said something along the lines of:
1 No jazz on the jukebox
3 If you want to dispute anything please go to www.forf*ckssakeitsonlyaquiz.com

Then there were the quips about "always having a question for the ladies" about the symbol for Do Not Drip-Dry and "always having one for the Northerners" (a Northern train station). Quite a wag. This guy does not read The Guardian as Whassisname so evidently did. He is a member of The Sun's congregation I guess. And probably owns an stunningly comprehensive video collection featuring the likes of Jethro and Roy Chubby Brown.

Now I envision the perfect career for Jambo: warm-up man. He could be no worse than the one who wreaked a terrible, terrible revenge for his spluttering career on the poor souls who comprised the audiences at my University Challenge recordings. The wraith of awful comedy echoes in my brain to this very day.

Ah, wraith. Which brings me back to the second beer quiz. It makes me wonder if one of the barwomen is actually Rogue from the X-Men and in glancing contact has drained all quiz knowledge from me during the short interval. Practically every answer produces the same thought process: "I should know that but don't and can't be bothered to think about it properly because the Littovel is already working its dizzy magic". Number of capsules in the London Eye? 48? Nope, 32. What sport uses the term "bedposts"? Polo? Nah, it's ten-pin bowling. For the first time in my quiz-life I forget that the Viscount comes above a Baron. To be honest I can't even conjure up the title Viscount, instead naming the other four and picking Earl. Viscount Althorp couldn't even help me in my hour of need. Embarrassing, I know. The face turns a nasty shade of scarlet at such indelicate times. Nor did our now weary minds yield the derivation of 'bootlegging'. It goes on like that, question after question. What's that word popping into my head? Retirement?

In the end we have got our lowest ever score at the George quiz. In the twenties, somewhere. I don't want to elaborate. I'm still narked over choosing straight-laced, dull-as-a-butter knife doctor Jack over dirty no-goodnik grubby guts Sawyer as the man voted sexiest character on TV's Lost. Sometimes you have to think with your id. Or libido, I'm not sure.

Thankfully, we realise that everyone was quite miffed by the questions too when we hear the QM's remark: "A lot of you found that very difficult indeed". As the QM, I thought he could have at least realised that when he wrote the bloody things. There's nothing sadder than a QM who doesn't know the potency of his question selections. I should know. I learnt my lesson with that pair about embroidery.

We actually haul ourselves into third equal position and lose the tie-break anyway (an appallingly over-ambitious guess of the length of The Vatican's borders ... I let watching the climax Eurotrip overrule all common sense).

Of course, the jackpot round is the only thing of any material and therefore ultimately satisfying worth and self-validation. Well not tonight. For shame. We fail to get a single jackpot question. But in my opinion, and looking at the size of this post it's quite a big one, jackpot q's should not be: "What is larger: Arizona or Italy?" Then I realised that his j-q's displayed a tragic paucity of quiz-setting imagination: what are the mascots of the Turin Winter Olympics and something about a French-sounding mountain which he says is the tallest in Italy and is not Mont Blanc? (I thought was the Il Gran Sasso d'Italia). Yes, it's Jambo's fault. Completely and utterly. We quizzers are blameless. And I've never been to Italy. So there.

Yet you can deduct a pattern in the setting. The most trivial of trivia areas: Monopoly properties, train stations, sporting terms, peer titles, quaint-sounding occupations, cleaning symbols, angles in maths, ages on entering things, etc etc. It is the paper-thin stuff that some people think is always asked in quizzes because they are meaningless rituals that merely pass the time in a public house. Stuff that the most hardcore and academic of us quizzers view with the same dual disdain and horror one might view a dollop of dog doo-doo on the tip of our shoes. Stuff that has been gleaned from a bloody quiz reference book like Pear's, or even, God forbid, another quiz book, where you would expect to find such stultifying questions that undoubtedly destroy brain activity. I haven't read a crappy pub quiz book ... since 1998.

And that's the thing, the crux of the matter: it's a pub quiz, what did I expect? Challenging posers analysing the legacy of Marxist philosophers? Or questions about bodgers (whether the mash potato-loving puppet or the chair-makers)? And I have to admit, I don't do many pub quizzes. I need to wise up.

But wait, time for more pathetic excuses, it wasn't like shooting sardines in a tin can was it? This was a "difficult-easy" quiz. It wasn't a comparatively hoity-toity (though not in my opinion) intellectual one like the Prince of Wales in Highgate, nor a lowest commond denominator one like you might find in a pub dunked in loud primary colours and lit like a high-tech bordello, and nor was it a pleasantly easy, sometimes stimulating one like the Barley Mow.

It played to all the trivia chestnut areas, but went for the hardest option every time. So you get an annoying pub quiz where guessing by one and all is inevitable. It becomes a lottery, albeit one with far better chances of winning that the one provided by Camelot. I much preferred the old chap, who was unkindly commemorated in the name of one of the teams - The Previous Quizmaster Is A Sex Tourist. There's no need for that sort of spurious slanderous speculation. Not when he gave us nice questions on dub MCs and Arnold Wesker.

Wrapping it up, maybe: our guest team members this week were Cat and Sam. They contributed at least two good, stand-alone answers I can recall right now at 4 in the morning as I feel a vicious migraine slowly overcome me (mmm, Summer Fruits Resource Shake ...medicinal): what train station serves Warrington and what links Muswell Hill, Waterloo and Other People's Lives? (Bank Quay and Ray Davies). On a brighter note, I was pleased that my own skills of deduction overruled my total rubbishness at remembering football team's nicknames; what football team is nicknamed The Brewers? ("Think of a town that brews beer and (in the QM's masterly words) "had been doing very well but have had a bit of droop lately" ... you see what he did ... brewers and droop ... he should be penning material for Jim Bowen ... so what about Burton Albion ... I saw that tabloid headline about the FA Cup "BURTON CURTAIN" ... yeah"). A small victory. I bet you that tomorrow I won't be able to remember which team are nicknamed The Bees despite researching a question about them the day before. Cat deemed the quiz "a little evil" and she's a little bit right. It's actually banally evil. Frustrating and evil. Unthinkingly evil. Silly evil. The kind of evil that drives people into the arms of more accommodating pub quizzes and makes me think of footnotes like ... Cat and Sam recalled last doing a pub quiz with a son of John Peel's. Was he good? Hmm. Apparently, he phoned up his girlfriend to tell him something about a keyboard layout. Therefore he cheated in brazen fashion. Tsk. The mobile phones and pub quiz. A conflict for the modern age. If they got into a fight, I don't think the pub quiz would stand a chance would it? The mobile phone would probably turn up with some cool, high-tech weaponry and use its speed to put the pub quiz out of its drink-sodden misery. I have to say though that quizzes have an odd effect on the brain chemistry of many individuals. Ultra-competitiveness is one symptom.

And you know, having written this, I am well aware that these scribblings of a sleep-deprived wise-ass may give Jambo good cause to stick a pitchfork in the most tender parts of my body. In that case here's a personal plea: why not try and change my mind. Write a better quiz. Please? Better than spattering my guts all over the pavement with a rusty hook, whilst you laugh and inhale the glorious, life-enhancing blood vapours that are rising from my twitching carcass, downed in the act of much expected vegeance. We are all civilised people, up to a point. And it's only a quiz!!!

So will I go back? Course I will. If, of course, I can assure myself that he will never ever read this and come at me with wildly milling arms and many swishing shiny blades.

Also...
Don't expect me to ever subject a pub quiz to such a searching, long-winded and possibly unhinged analysis ever again. It's a certain time of night and I can't get any sleep. This is my way of fighting the periodic bouts of insomnia. So write and write I will ... into the morning light. Good night.