What I did at the British Quiz Championships Part 1

Here it is! Part one of a report with very short sentences about the British Quiz Championships. Ooh, I remember my first. It was 1999. We were all worried about the Millennium bug and how we were going to celebrate New Year watching a "River of Fire" on the Thames. Ended up more like a ... whoops, going into I Love 1999 mode. I'm sure there will be many more opportunities for pointless nostalgia in the coming years.

Back to the very recent past.

I was in Shropshire. Lord knows where...

Friday 20.54
We have just begun the Pairs competition. I am partnered with Gareth, reigning UC champion with Manchester, but other thoughts are taking over. I feel rubbish. Brain is sluggish. There's no TV in my cabin! There's another one. What to do? Apart from read books, socialise and act like a normal, talkative human being.

I'm glad I brought my laptop and a few DVDs (Primer, Nine Queens, Rag Tale), though as always I get very paranoid about thieves taking my precious shiny Powerbook from me.

But let's cast thoughts of skilled midget burglars rifling through my stuff far from my mind, there's a quiz on. Questions must be answered or paired with abysmal guesses.

First, there is a five-part question to decide our start positions on the top, intermediate and basic levels for the competition. The sooner we get it the better position we get. We don't even offer an answer and find ourselves at table 12.

Unfortunately, I didn't identify the person from the debut novel clue. It was Jigsaw so it must have been Barbara Cartland. This is not a good sign. If the brain is not working on such foundation subjects as literature then this will be a very dispiriting weekend.

Then on the first round of questions. I put Cherbourg when I know it is Rochefort for a Jacques Demy film starring Catherine Deneuve. I have even written a question about it on this blog. I even reminded myself on how to differentiate between the two. Yet, it was all in vain.

It is a team competition: always go for the more obscure answer in such situations.

21.21
More brain-farts. The Pussycat Dolls are playing. It is the song Bleep. The PDs have become quite the quiz subjects now since they burst on to the scene with one of those massive global girl group hits that get into your head and proceed to drive you insane like some musical brain parasite (I know the term is ohrwurm or thereabouts)

The competition is slow to start. Lots of waiting around. Pairs is difficult to comprehend without the sure hand of a super-efficient organiser, I guess. Or maybe it is just my head. A heavy August has taken its toll. If I get through this weekend it will be a miracle.

22.02
Our combination is working and we have made it to the top tier of three teams. We get to sit on perches looking down on everyone else.

Wild guesses going in and being rubbish. We put down answers we know are wrong. Obviously, they do not come out right. There's a Stan Boardman dance track (don't worry there was classy music on display). Make of that what you will.

I make a jokey complaint to Chris about his not having any film questions (I conveniently forget the Les Demoiselles de Rochefort) without a classical music/instrumentation connection. This is because I am narked off with myself for not getting Master and Commander or The Alamo. Little did I know this was an egredious error. A very egredious error.

There is a question asking for the seventh largest city in Germany. Naturally, we write down every single one in the top ten. Except for Dortmund. *Bite knuckles in frustration*

It won't finish at 22.30. Schedules for inaugural events are often written more in hope than taking into account the reality of people. They always overrun run run run (great song by Phoenix).

22.12
Relegated to Table 4. We saw this coming.

Bah. Knew I should have put "Epsilon". It's Greek letter is on the page! It could never be delta. Shoddy.

22.49
The last round is 25-questions. We fill all the spaces. Aren't we blessed with great filling ability? But I do wish I had read through my BH quizzes beforehand. I had decided not to, and then saw that there were at least three questions they would have helped with.

We get 17 out of 25. Bayley and Pat get 21 which is the top score. They win the competition by a few country miles. On aggregate we get the third highest total of all the pairs, so not a bad job. When Moby and Kevin announce their total of 16, I go "Yes!" and do the fist-thrust. It's tongue-in-cheek, I tell myself. Kevin disconsolately tells me that he never went back to change Aeneid to Illiad for one question.

23.48
In something possibly called the Lodge. It is like a university junior common room. Everything here reminds me of school/uni, as it should. It's a PGL centre (whatever that stands for: "for when Parents Go Livid", I dunno) where kids shoot arrows and sing songs in happy unison away from home.

As ever conversation is a relentless barrage of trivia questions lubricated by beer, which is heaven in a way.

A feeling of slight satisfaction descends on me. As does a feeling of slight numbness. I am tired. Train journey, taxi etc takes its toll. John Frith, I believe shouts out Museums & Categories. Some wag, is it Barry?, shouts out "Ashmolean", as is his perfectly cromulent guess. 90 per cent of museum questions do demand that Oxford institution's name for their answer.

I notice for the first time in my life that the year 1847 is emblazoned on Carlsberg cans: containers for alcoholic being great sources of trivia if you can concentrate on them long enough to overcome any incipient drunkenness. Of course, I could have noticed this before but may have suffered from predictable alcohol amnesia afterwards.

Bayley is firing out questions on The Movie Book. Strings of them on Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall and so on. Film questions that play to my strengths are always welcome when one is fading.

Saturday 01.35
I retire to bed but decide to watch some of Rag Tale. It is diabolical. Tabloid editor has affair with deputy editor Jennifer Jason Leigh, wife of the paper's owner, and decides to save his ass when the said owner finds out.

Filled with brilliant character actors - Bill Paterson, John Sessions and Simon Callow - but apart from that it uses crazy camera angles, slips into monochrome when it feels like this and has a plot about as believable as Dan from Roseanne becoming the King of England. Er, wait.

What I am doing watching this crap at two in the morning? I think I am actively trying to ruin myself. The smoking is obviously not enough.

03.30
Fire alarm! The initial reaction is to think it is part of some annoying nightmare, but no, it is bad early morning reality. I had fallen asleep dagnabbit! The noxious piercing sound fills my room, which has begun to remind me of some of the choice scenes from Friday the 13th, and forces me out into the cold and to the sports hall where we gather like extras for a George Romero movie. This is what we look like in the middle of the night and it ain't pretty. Hair is a particularly unruly sight.

Beth starts hitting Ian because he has got The Movie Book out again. I'm not entirely sure where my sympathies lie but it is something I don't mind one bit.

08.50
Whoops. I seem to have set off the fire alarm with my extremely steamy shower.

It was a bloody ordeal getting it going in the first place. Pulling, turning, squeezing the shower things for about five minutes and then finding out all I had to do was push.the main blighter in. Thing is once I do so it doesn't want to stop. It's a fricking runaway shower. A desperate sweat breaks all over me and I just get dressed. The fire alarm then goes off.

We gather in the sports hall again. The hair situation has improved, though everyone has cemetery eyes.

I don't confess my fire alarm starting to anyone. I keep schtum and feel sheepish.

When I walk back to my cabin I notice a PGL guy leave my room and think "I don't want him to think I'm the guy who started it". So I wait around looking ... sheepish. I go back in when he is a safe distance away and in absolutely no danger of looking back at me and staring me down with nasty accusatory eyes.

09.05
The Euroquiz begins: 180 European-style non-British biased questions. They are terribly hard. In fact they are some of the hardest questions I have ever seen. I seem to have reaped what I sowed, what with all those very very hard questions I send out into cyberspace. Damn myself for being so hard.

Also, some say that this is too early for a quiz. The "some" were right. The "some" are probably on a beach in Barbados. Still partying the night before away.

However, there are quite a few SHKs that I cannot for the sheer lovely life of me recall. The star of Whale Rider for instance. I can see the DVD case. I can even remember her two-second cameo in Revenge of the Sith. Yet it still doesn't come. I ask Moby. He says: "Keisha Castle-Hughes". My knuckles are getting quite mashed by now.

10.29
Just realised there's no Coke I can buy anywhere on site. Is it because feeding such highly concentrated amounts of sugar into the packs of children who roam the site will turn them into a bunch of wild, rushing nutjobs hellbent on pyromania and annoying adults? Neither is there any sugar for the coffee. It's Sweet 'n' Low or some pathetic non-sugar replacement. I blame the kids for my incompetent performance. Yes, the kids. Those darn pesky kids.

Then again listening to the cacophony of insane monkey noises emanating from the sports hall suggests they are already hyper enough to start embarking on a wave of petty crime and vandalism. Yep, they're definitely the ones who started the fire alarm at 08.50 this morning. Not me.

10.30
Chris says: "You have one minute to write down your guesses"

Eric replies: "I started with guesses".

Oh we laugh heartily because it is SO true.

We mark up. I ask Pat to put the answer Neo-realism and cross out Vittoria di Sica (because I hadn't read the bloody question properly) before it is read out. He doesn't and quite rightly so.

I finish 4th, which is okay. I suppose. Everyone has found it tough. This is good because while you are doing an ultra-difficult quiz and you are coming up with nothing, it is all too easy to assume that everyone else is speeding through it with the ease of a child prodigy doing a Maths A-Level. Then you find out the quiz made everyone want to cry too, and all is right with the world again.

Part 2 (The Individuals! The Team! Oh the Pain!)