The pre-Glastonbury Wordage Glut: Opinion, Intimations and Other Reflections in Anticipation Ahead of Saturday's People's Quiz Grand Final
Part I: The Professional ... was the US title for which Jean Reno film?
Wilt Chamberlain: "No one roots for Goliath".
But then again, he didn't really take any notice of any antipathy or resentment towards him, not when he was smashing scoring records on a regular basis and taxing acres of female booty. He didn't give a hoot. He was Wilt Freakin' Chamberlain: The Ass-Master. Not being a basketball legend, I must admit I'm a sensitive soul. Kinda. I was told that if a "pro" such as myself won the People's Quiz it would besmirch the very ethos of the competition, which I thought was to find "Britain's brightest brain". But why the "pro" status? From whence did it stem? Apparently, it was mainly because I happened to write, um, 60 questions for my paymasters every two and a half weeks, and therefore had a huge advantage over other contestants who had normal jobs. That, by the way, is an average of four questions a day. A mighty tally indeed.
I'm not miffed, miffled nor irate. Rather verging on the incredulous. The time is past for regrets. But not the time for trying to change people's preconceptions about chaps such as I. I am of the mind to ask where are "professionals" meant to play then? Our opportunities to appear on quizzes are limited as it is; getting blown out even before the audition stages by punk-assed TV researchers is a tragi-comic way of life for me now. So I ask myself and the world at large, are we meant to be pushed off to the Mastermind and Brain of Britain brainiac ghetto to be left stewing in our own radiant genius?
People think quiz-writers have an head start because they happen to carefully pick trivia tidbits from the teeming knowledge ether and this instantly puts them in a position of control and all-knowingness. They must have all the facts at their command.
Pardon my French, but this is bollocks. Sixty quiz questions every few weeks is nothing. I know people who write 300 questions every day. Seriously. My problem is that my trivia teasers/torturers are published in a section of the widely disseminated media on a regular basis, thus instilling some kind of weird "he is too powerful" prejudice in people should they find out that I wish to come down from my setting-throne to come compete against the lowly people who usually answer them. It's as if they think I have all the answers, and why should they bother? The truth is, I don't. I mean, not enough of them to ensure a crushing triumph. But answer me this: off the top of your head can you name any memorable quiz champion whose sole occupation at the time of their winning a prestigious TV or radio series has been as a professional quiz question writer? Struggling aren't you (as am I ... was BoB/FTO champ David Stedman one such person
But I mean, watch TPQ GF ferchrissakes! Anything can happen when winning depends on as small as matter as four questions. Quiz writers do have a nominal head start (the the time to research more than anything else), though this is negated if the show you are applying for is totally out-of-sync with the stuff you predominantly set.
Admittedly, I write loads of questions for the blog, but 97 per cent are "World knowledge" focussed and the chances of questions on Mongolian throat-singing or Swiss theologian Karl Barth ever coming up on a BBC1 prime time quiz show are as likely as the said Corporation deciding to pack their Saturday night schedule with a cerebral-smutty mixture of Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break and Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust epic Shoah.
The TPQ experience would be, as I envisaged from the start all those months ago (was it back in 1998 that we started on this show?) and repeated in unaired interviews (bastards), like being shuttled from competing on glistening grass pitches against the finest, world-class Champions' League opponents to a Sunday League mudbath where the quality of play is hampered by my being clogged to death by two-footed challenges; a horrendous playing surface pockmarked with holes a badger would disappear down; and a ball as dead as the eyes of Paris Hilton.
Therefore, on TPQ it was far more of a level playing field for everyone, really; my favourite status was greatly exaggerated. Admittedly, I had a better chance than most, I probably knew more GK than anybody else on the show (not that I was able to produce it at the crucial time), but still, when we were basically working with four lives from the start, the potential for a horrendous fall was always far greater than easy passage through the GF rounds. The percentages played out as I believed they would in the end, which is why I never said I would win it. My slack buzzer technique was exposed. Too late, too sluggish.
Truth is, my trivia-related earnings are practically negligible. I get decent pay for the weekday questions, then nothing more in the quiz-professional realm. I have to remind people that I have won a princely TV quiz sum of £50 from three cash-prize shows (that is NOT professional status money, no, sir). The winning total remains at fifty squids and now I fear a form of camera-induced pressure choke has taken hold for all time, despite the four years break from the TV arena (looking back I can recall similar horrible self-immolationary performances in key sections of the said quiz shows, e.g. One-to-Win).
Sometimes, I think a "professional quizzer" is someone who is considered just too good and dedicated to the craft (or whatever bollocksy name I can attach to it) by TV production staff, viewers and opposing poor Jo Schmos, who recognised these ruthless coves kicking arse in other programmes, to compete against the masses of work-a-day contestants who send in the vast majority of show applications. It's not actually about the avaricious accumulation of prize money; it's about how seriously you take it.
When it comes to the cheap and lovely entertainment that be quiz, seriousness and hard work in the self-improvement department is frowned upon by practically everyone in this country who hardly know anything about the trivia world. Though, I'm not even so sure how seriously I do take it when I step up to the plate and do the thing on TV or even sit around chain-smoking in quiz league matches. I take it casual like: always smiling like an innocent, oblivious gimp-patsy. Or am I crying on the inside? Or is that internal bleeding? Hmmm.
I know my "Goliath-pro" status comes from an over-16 life spent doing quizzes sporadically, whilst yielding to the undeniable urge to write down questions because they helped cement the facts in my brain. To a certain extent. Then I started doing non-televised tournaments, sick of being rejected by such craphouses as 100% when I was only 20-years-old, because the BQC, WQC and EQC championships offered the best and fairest and possibly most enjoyable outlet in which I could compete against like-minded peers. It felt sooo comfortable. Fitted like a glove. In a way it felt like home almost straight away, especially when I found similarly aged brethren to indulge the curious silliness that lived in each of us and urged us to speak in glowing terms of trivia-fact volumes we had dug up from the darkest corners of secondhand bookshops.
Top 5 positions in GPs have became a pleasing bonus in recent years. It was easy to set into this groove, especially when you find out you feel you have something in common with other people so massive and all-encompassing that it forms an instantaneous bond. One good, overriding thing about this mild form of autism: there are always endless topics for conversation. Well, not so much conversation, more like a blockbuster tennis rally of facts and exposing of others' weak spots and mighty strengths. It does pass the time, you know.
My life isn't 24/7 quiz (ho ho, you say in disbelief). But it could be. I am so-so at the machines and can't be bothered to master them. I do only one pub quiz at the same establishment on average once every three weeks. I do one in every two events on the Quizzing circuit. I play in 3/4 of my quiz league games and never ever swot for those matches - wassa point? Hardly a packed schedule filled with lucre-ridden opportunities. More a pleasant, stimulating hobby that gets me out of my bed. Free pub drinks, yes; who can resist The George beer vouchers, but as for everything else, absolutely no big score chances. If that's rock solid proof of quiz professionalism I am Errol Flynn's decomposed ding-dong.
But having laughed at The Omen music ("They feared Olav because he was the son of Satan!!! The devil may have all the best tunes, but this fella has all the crucial quiz knowledge!") that accompanied my first real appearance on TPQ and found the Steph-beating-me stitch-up bloody hilarious too, I felt quite queasy that despite being the second youngest person by a marked number of years in the TPQ final I was built up, nay hyper-inflated into this super-duper Hot Favourite who would murderlise the opposition with consummate ease. Never mind that I always feared the buzzers (the evil contraptions that did for me on crucial sections of UC, One-to-Win, Number One and the FTO Grand Final final), especially when they shortened the two-minutes to 90 seconds in the first Strongest will Survive round, thus ensuring that loads of people would be up for the crucial buzzer question. Plus - and yes, the excuses are going to keep on coming - my right ear had popped. Everything I came out with sounded like I was underwater during the first round. What did I think sounded like to everyone? Oh, a drowning weirdo. I could have worked the old Stevie Smith pun in there, because it was true.
I knew that I had to anticipate better because if I had even buzzed in after five words I could have worked out the answer, but I didn't due to my annoying knack of having this in-built fatal one-second delay that the anticipatory intentions couldn't override. I really do think too much. Too many phantom options; no recourse to instinct.
"Small message service" was a sloppy mistake, and one I knew I was all too capable and afraid of doing since it was exactly one of those silly trivia niggles I have: "Short or small". Stuck in the grey zone of my GK, the similarity did me in. My major weakness on many questions are words and names that sound like each other, but whose even careful pronunciation cannot conceal the wrong option. I'm talking about the Ernest Bevin and Aneurin Bevan confusion. It cost me dear in a Brain of London heat. They spent a few moments clarifying that too.
I would say more about the the Tour de France, Wicked! and My Beautiful Game. But I will save the last particular niggle, and it is heee-yoooge, until later. I don't want to give away the ending, do I?
Part II: coming soon
Wilt Chamberlain: "No one roots for Goliath".
But then again, he didn't really take any notice of any antipathy or resentment towards him, not when he was smashing scoring records on a regular basis and taxing acres of female booty. He didn't give a hoot. He was Wilt Freakin' Chamberlain: The Ass-Master. Not being a basketball legend, I must admit I'm a sensitive soul. Kinda. I was told that if a "pro" such as myself won the People's Quiz it would besmirch the very ethos of the competition, which I thought was to find "Britain's brightest brain". But why the "pro" status? From whence did it stem? Apparently, it was mainly because I happened to write, um, 60 questions for my paymasters every two and a half weeks, and therefore had a huge advantage over other contestants who had normal jobs. That, by the way, is an average of four questions a day. A mighty tally indeed.
I'm not miffed, miffled nor irate. Rather verging on the incredulous. The time is past for regrets. But not the time for trying to change people's preconceptions about chaps such as I. I am of the mind to ask where are "professionals" meant to play then? Our opportunities to appear on quizzes are limited as it is; getting blown out even before the audition stages by punk-assed TV researchers is a tragi-comic way of life for me now. So I ask myself and the world at large, are we meant to be pushed off to the Mastermind and Brain of Britain brainiac ghetto to be left stewing in our own radiant genius?
People think quiz-writers have an head start because they happen to carefully pick trivia tidbits from the teeming knowledge ether and this instantly puts them in a position of control and all-knowingness. They must have all the facts at their command.
Pardon my French, but this is bollocks. Sixty quiz questions every few weeks is nothing. I know people who write 300 questions every day. Seriously. My problem is that my trivia teasers/torturers are published in a section of the widely disseminated media on a regular basis, thus instilling some kind of weird "he is too powerful" prejudice in people should they find out that I wish to come down from my setting-throne to come compete against the lowly people who usually answer them. It's as if they think I have all the answers, and why should they bother? The truth is, I don't. I mean, not enough of them to ensure a crushing triumph. But answer me this: off the top of your head can you name any memorable quiz champion whose sole occupation at the time of their winning a prestigious TV or radio series has been as a professional quiz question writer? Struggling aren't you (as am I ... was BoB/FTO champ David Stedman one such person
But I mean, watch TPQ GF ferchrissakes! Anything can happen when winning depends on as small as matter as four questions. Quiz writers do have a nominal head start (the the time to research more than anything else), though this is negated if the show you are applying for is totally out-of-sync with the stuff you predominantly set.
Admittedly, I write loads of questions for the blog, but 97 per cent are "World knowledge" focussed and the chances of questions on Mongolian throat-singing or Swiss theologian Karl Barth ever coming up on a BBC1 prime time quiz show are as likely as the said Corporation deciding to pack their Saturday night schedule with a cerebral-smutty mixture of Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break and Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust epic Shoah.
The TPQ experience would be, as I envisaged from the start all those months ago (was it back in 1998 that we started on this show?) and repeated in unaired interviews (bastards), like being shuttled from competing on glistening grass pitches against the finest, world-class Champions' League opponents to a Sunday League mudbath where the quality of play is hampered by my being clogged to death by two-footed challenges; a horrendous playing surface pockmarked with holes a badger would disappear down; and a ball as dead as the eyes of Paris Hilton.
Therefore, on TPQ it was far more of a level playing field for everyone, really; my favourite status was greatly exaggerated. Admittedly, I had a better chance than most, I probably knew more GK than anybody else on the show (not that I was able to produce it at the crucial time), but still, when we were basically working with four lives from the start, the potential for a horrendous fall was always far greater than easy passage through the GF rounds. The percentages played out as I believed they would in the end, which is why I never said I would win it. My slack buzzer technique was exposed. Too late, too sluggish.
Truth is, my trivia-related earnings are practically negligible. I get decent pay for the weekday questions, then nothing more in the quiz-professional realm. I have to remind people that I have won a princely TV quiz sum of £50 from three cash-prize shows (that is NOT professional status money, no, sir). The winning total remains at fifty squids and now I fear a form of camera-induced pressure choke has taken hold for all time, despite the four years break from the TV arena (looking back I can recall similar horrible self-immolationary performances in key sections of the said quiz shows, e.g. One-to-Win).
Sometimes, I think a "professional quizzer" is someone who is considered just too good and dedicated to the craft (or whatever bollocksy name I can attach to it) by TV production staff, viewers and opposing poor Jo Schmos, who recognised these ruthless coves kicking arse in other programmes, to compete against the masses of work-a-day contestants who send in the vast majority of show applications. It's not actually about the avaricious accumulation of prize money; it's about how seriously you take it.
When it comes to the cheap and lovely entertainment that be quiz, seriousness and hard work in the self-improvement department is frowned upon by practically everyone in this country who hardly know anything about the trivia world. Though, I'm not even so sure how seriously I do take it when I step up to the plate and do the thing on TV or even sit around chain-smoking in quiz league matches. I take it casual like: always smiling like an innocent, oblivious gimp-patsy. Or am I crying on the inside? Or is that internal bleeding? Hmmm.
I know my "Goliath-pro" status comes from an over-16 life spent doing quizzes sporadically, whilst yielding to the undeniable urge to write down questions because they helped cement the facts in my brain. To a certain extent. Then I started doing non-televised tournaments, sick of being rejected by such craphouses as 100% when I was only 20-years-old, because the BQC, WQC and EQC championships offered the best and fairest and possibly most enjoyable outlet in which I could compete against like-minded peers. It felt sooo comfortable. Fitted like a glove. In a way it felt like home almost straight away, especially when I found similarly aged brethren to indulge the curious silliness that lived in each of us and urged us to speak in glowing terms of trivia-fact volumes we had dug up from the darkest corners of secondhand bookshops.
Top 5 positions in GPs have became a pleasing bonus in recent years. It was easy to set into this groove, especially when you find out you feel you have something in common with other people so massive and all-encompassing that it forms an instantaneous bond. One good, overriding thing about this mild form of autism: there are always endless topics for conversation. Well, not so much conversation, more like a blockbuster tennis rally of facts and exposing of others' weak spots and mighty strengths. It does pass the time, you know.
My life isn't 24/7 quiz (ho ho, you say in disbelief). But it could be. I am so-so at the machines and can't be bothered to master them. I do only one pub quiz at the same establishment on average once every three weeks. I do one in every two events on the Quizzing circuit. I play in 3/4 of my quiz league games and never ever swot for those matches - wassa point? Hardly a packed schedule filled with lucre-ridden opportunities. More a pleasant, stimulating hobby that gets me out of my bed. Free pub drinks, yes; who can resist The George beer vouchers, but as for everything else, absolutely no big score chances. If that's rock solid proof of quiz professionalism I am Errol Flynn's decomposed ding-dong.
But having laughed at The Omen music ("They feared Olav because he was the son of Satan!!! The devil may have all the best tunes, but this fella has all the crucial quiz knowledge!") that accompanied my first real appearance on TPQ and found the Steph-beating-me stitch-up bloody hilarious too, I felt quite queasy that despite being the second youngest person by a marked number of years in the TPQ final I was built up, nay hyper-inflated into this super-duper Hot Favourite who would murderlise the opposition with consummate ease. Never mind that I always feared the buzzers (the evil contraptions that did for me on crucial sections of UC, One-to-Win, Number One and the FTO Grand Final final), especially when they shortened the two-minutes to 90 seconds in the first Strongest will Survive round, thus ensuring that loads of people would be up for the crucial buzzer question. Plus - and yes, the excuses are going to keep on coming - my right ear had popped. Everything I came out with sounded like I was underwater during the first round. What did I think sounded like to everyone? Oh, a drowning weirdo. I could have worked the old Stevie Smith pun in there, because it was true.
I knew that I had to anticipate better because if I had even buzzed in after five words I could have worked out the answer, but I didn't due to my annoying knack of having this in-built fatal one-second delay that the anticipatory intentions couldn't override. I really do think too much. Too many phantom options; no recourse to instinct.
"Small message service" was a sloppy mistake, and one I knew I was all too capable and afraid of doing since it was exactly one of those silly trivia niggles I have: "Short or small". Stuck in the grey zone of my GK, the similarity did me in. My major weakness on many questions are words and names that sound like each other, but whose even careful pronunciation cannot conceal the wrong option. I'm talking about the Ernest Bevin and Aneurin Bevan confusion. It cost me dear in a Brain of London heat. They spent a few moments clarifying that too.
I would say more about the the Tour de France, Wicked! and My Beautiful Game. But I will save the last particular niggle, and it is heee-yoooge, until later. I don't want to give away the ending, do I?
Part II: coming soon
posted by That Quiz Guy at 12:56 PM
2 Comments:
I'm with you on the 100% experience; I got something like 45/50 on the audition paper at age 14 and got blown out, while my mum auditioning at the same time got on only to get demolished by Ian Lygo on his 6th show (I still think I'd have had a shot at beating him on her questions, but that's probably just me...)
Dear Mr. That Quiz Guy,
I have tried to make an online pubquiz (almost) without multiple choice answers, would you like to list it on your site?
http://www.7pubquizquestions.com
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