Fun in Soho
I hate media quizzes. I love media quizzes. The feelings run alternate: steaming hot and exceedingly cold. They have been won, nearly won and lost in ignominy. The last one I had done before Wednesday night was a disaster. Sir Peter Stothard and Matthew Parris, yes, those scions of centre-right journalism, mocked me mercilessly. It was mildly shaming and very weird.
But this one was different. It was a buzzer quiz. On the buzzers. Against people who never do this sort of thing. I wasn’t up against Mastermind or UC champs. I was up against Zoo magazine. The might of FHM. Some colossi from something called T3. You get the picture. But the thing is, you can never underestimate meeja people. They know stuff in incredible detail.
Sony and a PR company (forgive me if I blur some factual details here) had rented out the old Raymond Revue bar, now called Too2Much, and set up a proper team buzzer-quiz set up to promote the new PS2 game Buzz! the general knowledge sequel to the music quiz of the same name.
It was 16 teams of four players each in a straight knockout tournament. Each match consisted of ten questions in which the time you got the correct answer in determined whether you got the most points. For instance, first place got 400 points, second 300, and so on until the lower places gained ten. Of course, you had to get the question right. Whoever top-scored in the match would win their team the game. I had thought that the burden of expectation would be reduced in the united effort, but it wasn’t so. They expected me to get first every time. Yikes and yikes again. I wasn’t feeling very well.
An Australian announcer who claimed that the buzzer makes the same sound as “his anal vibrator” and a bewitching, lipsticked dolly-bird with a backless red dress and absolutely no bra marshalled us throughout. They were imitating their computer game equivalents. They did a good job.
But, how do you spice up dull-looking contest that only engages eight of the 64 competitors? You ask people to don all sorts of amusing wigs and head-pieces. I wore the Cleopatra wig twice and the Cheerleader Alice band twice. Others had a Princess Leah (sic) Chelsea bun and Napoleonic brim. Had I shaken my pom-poms as requested I don’t think I could have handled the remote control very well. And apparently I can’t put on a wig to save my life. Being on the outside for our last two games threw up new challenges. The Backless One gyrated her posterior towards me and said: “Dance with me”, and for just a second I did. Bloody distracting it was. Must concentrate; must win money to bring me up to subsistence level; must defend honour of august organisation.
The adrenaline sickened me. Every repeated question made me feel a bit sicker, because that was one question that the other team knew and was liable to beat you on the buzzer. I was sinking so many green bottles of beer standing on our table that I might have edged out of the tipsy but alert zone, into what-the-bloody-hell is all this about?
But to be honest, I can’t remember much apart from going up to the set four times, holding the handset in a particular way and trying to remember such oft-repeated questions as what year were gnomes introduced into the UK or what breed of dog was Snoopy. The questions were fine. Only I couldn’t even get some straightforward questions on what is this flag (UN)? Where did the baskets in basketball come from (fruit baskets)? The beer which flowed copiously from the free bar blurred everything. The lights were bright, I suppose.
First we played ITV’s This Morning. A team of ladies. We caned them so badly, the host was begging us to show a little mercy. No chance. I scored 3500, 500 short of a perfect score. After waiting so long, we wondered, could all these free liquor have addled our razor-sharp minds? Apparently not.
Second we played the Playstation people. Speculation was rife that they had an advantage since they were involved in the game and would have “known the answers”. We beat them too. I prolly scored late-2800s. We were confused because we wore the wrong costumes for the icons we represented on the screens. So we had to persuade by the ancient art of shouting that it was we who were so utterly dominant.
This was UC accelerated for the Playstation generation. Imagine if they ran the show like this, in a mere three hours. Hmm…
Semi-final: The Guardian. This went down to the wire. It was so close. It was neck-and-neck all the way, but scoring 350 on the last question was enough for me to win the round by a mere 25 points – 2775 to somebody else’s 2750. I was in a high state of frenzy. The quiet, ruminative kind, shut off from the world. Such beer-strafed concentration still worked. The team-mate to my right had been muttering “we’ve lost, we’ve lost”, but never underestimate the talents of The O-Bomb (sorry). I suggested this could have been the real final, because we had despatched the other danger team.
The Grand Final: 20 questions this time. We were facing the supreme trivia talents of Heat magazine. Yet, the more questions, the better it is for serious quizzers. You can only be lucky so many times, without fighting off the surge from someone who just knows. Questions were repeated. People on each team cancelled each other out with the major points. But slowly and surely, my score surged ahead. I was quick enough on the repeats (the first line of A Christmas Carol was recited again) and got the hard ‘uns. We had won by question 15. The Aussie announcer solemnly pronounced me a “genius” – what can you ever say to that? It’s only a quiz, mater? Nah, the ego needs such words of encouragement. They asked if we should continue the match. Of course! Routs don’t just stop because the other side has symbolically lain down. You continue knifing and bayoneting that corpse until the arterial spray is gushing in your mouth and up your nose. I ended with 4750. This was more than 2000 than any of their players. Victory. Money. PSPs. Free games. Photographs of us looking like prats. It all seemed a bit glorious.
So after you have the silly photos, you settle down and wait for the back-slapping to commence and vicious lies to circulate. People looked at us, and particularly me, in a different light. That may also have been due to the cumulative effects of the free bar.
Some centre-parted Tarquin from the Torygraph: “You’re a ringer aren’t you? Ringer!” (He pointed at me)
Some brunette trying to filch my last fag: “You lot are tight aren’t you?” “No, it’s just my last cigarette, I can’t. I can’t okay? It’s my last cigarette. Go and bother him (points at other team mate). I sold him loads a few hours ago!” (Actually, I should have just said 'bloody poor' but obviously the truth never washes with such people)
Bobbie (my senses were so overloaded with Beck's and cheap lighting I thought he said his name was Robin), tech correspondent, from The Guardian: “You are a king among men.” (Aw, gee, whizz, gosh, blimey, thanks)
A blonde woman: “I know you, 15-to-1 man…. I’m sending these pictures to the Press Gazette.”
They didn’t tell me their names, except for the aforementioned Bobbie - yes, THE Bobbie Johnson. Others just congratulated me and our team, shook our hands. My team pointed at me in the hope that the praise would be distributed in a means-tested manner. Was I in the land of the bodysnatchers? All this pointing and shouting. All this insanity. Then I talked to a pleasantly belligerent journo who had intimate knowledge of why Robert Elms is a twit without an original idea in his head. Journalists slagging off journalists always makes for amusing sport. It fills our hearts with a burnished joy.
Things were getting darker. In terms of lighting and subject matter.
I looked at the mounting battery of full Becks bottles and lifted my head to see Brigitte Nielsen’s uglier, butcher sister do her thang on the pole. Yeuch. This was one rump-shaker who plainly needed to be stopped before she made every feel sick. Possibly with a cross-bow. It seems there was a little of the Raymond left in this bar, because then another recent sex-changed dancer started showing us exactly why her legs were so muscley. I turned around and saw some pimp-looking fella, who was dressed like a camp Eskimo and had crazy, spiked hair like Normski. Our party was over and now the club’s dynamic clientele was making its presence felt. The stage set was packed up and some guy with a gut the size of the Rock of Gibraltar was pushing it out. I found my bag was soaked in beer. Paranoia set in about my PSP. I never knew I wanted a PSP, but now I owned one I wanted it in fulsome retrospect. Normski wanted my PSP, I was certain. No one was going to steal my precious thing. Those Eastern European types were circling me with their vulture eyes, waiting for me to leave my precious booty behind. I wrapped my stuff around me (convenient straps you know) and went to the toilet. This was the cue to leave. My work had been done. The place was dead anyway. It was time to go home and rub my new PSP value pack and estimate its eBay retail value. Two fellow team-mates stayed behind and I may have made them completely paranoid about their goody bags.
On reflection, a good night’s work. Plus, I can recommend the game. It’s got good questions and is fun, if a little too repetitive. Yet I also commend Sony’s generosity. It was mighty.
On a far smaller note
Cillit Bang! I’ve seen this advert twice on TV today. Today, not Tuesday. Barry Scott? Who he? Why he? And I still have not idea what Cillit Bang is. Sounds like a weird Cornwall village, not a cleaning product.
But this one was different. It was a buzzer quiz. On the buzzers. Against people who never do this sort of thing. I wasn’t up against Mastermind or UC champs. I was up against Zoo magazine. The might of FHM. Some colossi from something called T3. You get the picture. But the thing is, you can never underestimate meeja people. They know stuff in incredible detail.
Sony and a PR company (forgive me if I blur some factual details here) had rented out the old Raymond Revue bar, now called Too2Much, and set up a proper team buzzer-quiz set up to promote the new PS2 game Buzz! the general knowledge sequel to the music quiz of the same name.
It was 16 teams of four players each in a straight knockout tournament. Each match consisted of ten questions in which the time you got the correct answer in determined whether you got the most points. For instance, first place got 400 points, second 300, and so on until the lower places gained ten. Of course, you had to get the question right. Whoever top-scored in the match would win their team the game. I had thought that the burden of expectation would be reduced in the united effort, but it wasn’t so. They expected me to get first every time. Yikes and yikes again. I wasn’t feeling very well.
An Australian announcer who claimed that the buzzer makes the same sound as “his anal vibrator” and a bewitching, lipsticked dolly-bird with a backless red dress and absolutely no bra marshalled us throughout. They were imitating their computer game equivalents. They did a good job.
But, how do you spice up dull-looking contest that only engages eight of the 64 competitors? You ask people to don all sorts of amusing wigs and head-pieces. I wore the Cleopatra wig twice and the Cheerleader Alice band twice. Others had a Princess Leah (sic) Chelsea bun and Napoleonic brim. Had I shaken my pom-poms as requested I don’t think I could have handled the remote control very well. And apparently I can’t put on a wig to save my life. Being on the outside for our last two games threw up new challenges. The Backless One gyrated her posterior towards me and said: “Dance with me”, and for just a second I did. Bloody distracting it was. Must concentrate; must win money to bring me up to subsistence level; must defend honour of august organisation.
The adrenaline sickened me. Every repeated question made me feel a bit sicker, because that was one question that the other team knew and was liable to beat you on the buzzer. I was sinking so many green bottles of beer standing on our table that I might have edged out of the tipsy but alert zone, into what-the-bloody-hell is all this about?
But to be honest, I can’t remember much apart from going up to the set four times, holding the handset in a particular way and trying to remember such oft-repeated questions as what year were gnomes introduced into the UK or what breed of dog was Snoopy. The questions were fine. Only I couldn’t even get some straightforward questions on what is this flag (UN)? Where did the baskets in basketball come from (fruit baskets)? The beer which flowed copiously from the free bar blurred everything. The lights were bright, I suppose.
First we played ITV’s This Morning. A team of ladies. We caned them so badly, the host was begging us to show a little mercy. No chance. I scored 3500, 500 short of a perfect score. After waiting so long, we wondered, could all these free liquor have addled our razor-sharp minds? Apparently not.
Second we played the Playstation people. Speculation was rife that they had an advantage since they were involved in the game and would have “known the answers”. We beat them too. I prolly scored late-2800s. We were confused because we wore the wrong costumes for the icons we represented on the screens. So we had to persuade by the ancient art of shouting that it was we who were so utterly dominant.
This was UC accelerated for the Playstation generation. Imagine if they ran the show like this, in a mere three hours. Hmm…
Semi-final: The Guardian. This went down to the wire. It was so close. It was neck-and-neck all the way, but scoring 350 on the last question was enough for me to win the round by a mere 25 points – 2775 to somebody else’s 2750. I was in a high state of frenzy. The quiet, ruminative kind, shut off from the world. Such beer-strafed concentration still worked. The team-mate to my right had been muttering “we’ve lost, we’ve lost”, but never underestimate the talents of The O-Bomb (sorry). I suggested this could have been the real final, because we had despatched the other danger team.
The Grand Final: 20 questions this time. We were facing the supreme trivia talents of Heat magazine. Yet, the more questions, the better it is for serious quizzers. You can only be lucky so many times, without fighting off the surge from someone who just knows. Questions were repeated. People on each team cancelled each other out with the major points. But slowly and surely, my score surged ahead. I was quick enough on the repeats (the first line of A Christmas Carol was recited again) and got the hard ‘uns. We had won by question 15. The Aussie announcer solemnly pronounced me a “genius” – what can you ever say to that? It’s only a quiz, mater? Nah, the ego needs such words of encouragement. They asked if we should continue the match. Of course! Routs don’t just stop because the other side has symbolically lain down. You continue knifing and bayoneting that corpse until the arterial spray is gushing in your mouth and up your nose. I ended with 4750. This was more than 2000 than any of their players. Victory. Money. PSPs. Free games. Photographs of us looking like prats. It all seemed a bit glorious.
So after you have the silly photos, you settle down and wait for the back-slapping to commence and vicious lies to circulate. People looked at us, and particularly me, in a different light. That may also have been due to the cumulative effects of the free bar.
Some centre-parted Tarquin from the Torygraph: “You’re a ringer aren’t you? Ringer!” (He pointed at me)
Some brunette trying to filch my last fag: “You lot are tight aren’t you?” “No, it’s just my last cigarette, I can’t. I can’t okay? It’s my last cigarette. Go and bother him (points at other team mate). I sold him loads a few hours ago!” (Actually, I should have just said 'bloody poor' but obviously the truth never washes with such people)
Bobbie (my senses were so overloaded with Beck's and cheap lighting I thought he said his name was Robin), tech correspondent, from The Guardian: “You are a king among men.” (Aw, gee, whizz, gosh, blimey, thanks)
A blonde woman: “I know you, 15-to-1 man…. I’m sending these pictures to the Press Gazette.”
They didn’t tell me their names, except for the aforementioned Bobbie - yes, THE Bobbie Johnson. Others just congratulated me and our team, shook our hands. My team pointed at me in the hope that the praise would be distributed in a means-tested manner. Was I in the land of the bodysnatchers? All this pointing and shouting. All this insanity. Then I talked to a pleasantly belligerent journo who had intimate knowledge of why Robert Elms is a twit without an original idea in his head. Journalists slagging off journalists always makes for amusing sport. It fills our hearts with a burnished joy.
Things were getting darker. In terms of lighting and subject matter.
I looked at the mounting battery of full Becks bottles and lifted my head to see Brigitte Nielsen’s uglier, butcher sister do her thang on the pole. Yeuch. This was one rump-shaker who plainly needed to be stopped before she made every feel sick. Possibly with a cross-bow. It seems there was a little of the Raymond left in this bar, because then another recent sex-changed dancer started showing us exactly why her legs were so muscley. I turned around and saw some pimp-looking fella, who was dressed like a camp Eskimo and had crazy, spiked hair like Normski. Our party was over and now the club’s dynamic clientele was making its presence felt. The stage set was packed up and some guy with a gut the size of the Rock of Gibraltar was pushing it out. I found my bag was soaked in beer. Paranoia set in about my PSP. I never knew I wanted a PSP, but now I owned one I wanted it in fulsome retrospect. Normski wanted my PSP, I was certain. No one was going to steal my precious thing. Those Eastern European types were circling me with their vulture eyes, waiting for me to leave my precious booty behind. I wrapped my stuff around me (convenient straps you know) and went to the toilet. This was the cue to leave. My work had been done. The place was dead anyway. It was time to go home and rub my new PSP value pack and estimate its eBay retail value. Two fellow team-mates stayed behind and I may have made them completely paranoid about their goody bags.
On reflection, a good night’s work. Plus, I can recommend the game. It’s got good questions and is fun, if a little too repetitive. Yet I also commend Sony’s generosity. It was mighty.
On a far smaller note
Cillit Bang! I’ve seen this advert twice on TV today. Today, not Tuesday. Barry Scott? Who he? Why he? And I still have not idea what Cillit Bang is. Sounds like a weird Cornwall village, not a cleaning product.
posted by That Quiz Guy at 11:56 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home