Requiem for a Pub Quiz

I only do one pub quiz regularly: The Prince George in Dalston on Monday nights. It is two quizzes in fact. The first starts at 9pm and is a picture quiz plus twenty questions. The second starts almost after the other and has twenty questions plus the all-important three-question jackpot round. First, second and third in both quizzes get drinks vouchers spendable, naturally, only at the bar. The jackpot prize normally hovers around the £75 mark, which is always nice (can there be anything as satisfying as counting out dozens of pound coins that you have won in your local pub?). I believe the reason that I keep going back – apart from the fact that some friends live around the corner on Dalston Lane – is that victory is not assured and more often than not, I win hardly anything. Like the masochist I am, I keep going back determined to do better next time, while convincing myself that everyone else is cheating on their mobile phones. That’s what repeated failure does to you.

But the questions are the main thing. And, maybe, also their predictable routine. The questionmaster, we shall call him Whassisname, always asked questions about writers like Tolstoy and Arnold Wesker and albums by the likes of the Mad Professor and Booker T and the MGs. Phobias? Check. Foreign cities? Check. Who played the male or female lead in such films as Sibyl (Sally Field)? Check. Did you know what Karen Carpenter’s doorbell was? It was We’ve Only Just Begun (we put Somewhere Over the Rainbow dagnabbit). That was the kind of interesting question you got.

And no matter how many times he did "On this day"-style questions you would never remember to look up dates on Wikipedia just to see what happened in anticipation. Every week you would pound the table in frustration at yourself and inability to look beyond the short-short term. And we would never get the True or False questions, and whenever there was a riddle question my brain would instantly give up.

The questions were always tough but fair, and certainly did not insult your intelligence. We would sometimes win the second quiz, and once before Christmas won the jackpot (to our complete surprise). I guess the spark of victory was enough to give hope that complete dominance would arrive in the near future, but that never happened. That kept it interesting.

So we expected this to continue till, let’s say forever. This habit would become our reliable trivia crutch.

Only thing is they went and sacked Whassisname on Monday. He will no longer do the quiz though he will be doing The Rosemary Branch’s quiz, wherever that may be. Why? I have no idea. It was not as if the quiz was emptying the pub of all and sundry, like anthrax being dispersed in an American senator’s office. There was never a spare table by the time the quiz was up and running. Instead they’ve apparently given it to some guy called Simon, who is alleged by a person I know to be "a curmudgeon" (not my word lawyer-people). Was it because Whassisname was too expensive? Do the pub owners and bar staff know what they’re doing? It’s bloody annoying. Now Simon may set the greatest pub quiz the world has ever seen; the kind of quiz that will solve world hunger and wipe out global poverty, but why fix something that isn’t broken? It seems we live in an insane world where Alan Yentob is allowed to make programmes about chairs, Leo Sayer is going to be number one again and certain people don’t know the value of a good pub quiz. I have to credit Whassisname, not only for his impeccable question selection, but also his choice of Christmas prizes: Titleist golf balls and Fuller-infused chutneys and salsas, and big chunky red pens. Who else would have thought of them? Who? You? Father Christmas? The Ghost of Telly Savalas? I think not.

Anyway, on Monday for the first time ever we won the by a huge margin of nine points then flopped in the second, before completely missing the point of one jackpot bonus question on the number of potential jurors who ticked the ‘we think they’re crooks’ box at the Enron trial. As per usual, I drank too much Littovel Czech super-lager on an empty stomach, thereby forgetting the sozzled legacy of other George pub quiz nights out, and staggered to the bus-stop half pissed and starving for a chicken doner kebab, which I tried and failed to obtain in King’s Cross. (I knew I should have had those two double cheeseburgers from McDonalds before I got to Dalston, but no, history repeated itself.) Instead I had a half-pounder, to which I added more cheddar cheese and ketchup when I got home and proceeded to watch episodes of Chapelle’s Show series 2. I must confess: I cannot get enough of the Rick James and Wayne Brady skits. They are piss-your-pants funny and the sooner you acquaint yourselves with their hilarity and utter genius the better it will be for you and the entire world. If we are always laughing then when can we find the time to sink a rusty dagger into each others’ backs?

Perhaps, you might also say, you might do better at quizzes if you didn’t eat such complete shit all the time (woah, I never mentioned my KFC habit), and I’ll reply: "Look I did buy some ready meals today, but there are also some blueberries that I bought out of guilt and will ignore until they are past their sell-by date, and this is really turning into a saga now."

Peace out, Bitches.

Afterword: I’ll give Simon the once over in coming weeks.