The Eggheads Get Taken Down. To Chinatown.
Before I get to the heart of a mighty BH quiz I have been preparing and primping (which will come in an imminent post), I thought I should really link to the YouTube moment the Eggheads were done for - after all this time; was it really 27 years since they were last bested? - and handed a bunch of Oxford Brookes students more money than they could ever spunk on cheap lager and 2-for-1 pizza. And, naturally, let me go off on a few predictably wild tangents.
£75,000 was it? That's coke 'n' call girls territory for such young, elfin lads making their way in a new, booty-enriched world? Go on my lads. Party like Motley Crue. In the 1980s. Get some smoke-induced worry lines on your faces, bulging brown pouches under your eyes that tell tales of sleepless, hedonistic nights and the worn-out, dysfunctional hearts of men so many decades older. You won't regret it (says, I the eager corruptor).
Lucky blighters yes, (whose combined age is only slightly more than either Chris, Judith or Daphne on their own, if I have my year tallies right), but it just takes one wavy-gravy statistics question on the American justice system to undo a team of bred-in-the-bone Brit quiz stalwarts (though, personally, speaking from the comfort zone/bubble boy bubble of my bedroom rather than an ultramarine BBC studio soothed and sometimes scourged by ominous electro-keyboard chords, I would have assumed that as many US states would have wanted to pump their death row inmates with as much Sodium Pentothal as possible ... "Nail 'em up I say!" as one Life of Brian character remarked, though the modified version would obviously be "Shoot it up their arms, I say!").
Yet stats aren't proper trivia questions are they? Unless, er, of course, they are presented with multiple choices. No, wait they are trivia questions; they're not quiz questions. Not like the ones you'd get on MM o' UC, whose sacred initials we whisper with due reverence. They don't want no digits, they don't give no options. They the relative real deal. The respective individual and team apexes, or apices, or apexs, whaever. But that is the modus operandi of the Eggheads question masters, who I do believe are doing an increasingly spiffy job at this quiz-question lark - ooh, the first couple of years, got me thinking of that Butch and Sundance prequel now, in terms of overall quality that is. The multiples - 1/3 what yer chances eh? - give them the chance to reel out the stats and let the contestants/victims put their deeply held beliefs/prejudices to the test. And come out looking at least a bit silly. Yet numbers questions aside, and please for the love of all that's holy and decent and will keep me in good mental straits, keep those irksome slim things out of quiz shows' way, it is heartening to think that experience is endowing them with the correct easy-medium-hard judgement all quiz-writers need to master if they are not to be heckled, booed mercilessly or lynched outside pubs. Find the middle ground and such aural and physical violence can be avoided).
NB Judith's "That's shocking" remark on discovering 38 states still liked the capital punishment option betrayed something of the British liberals' perplexity when confronted with the American "lex talionis" lust for revenge. The past is a foreign country. And they just love executing people there.
YouTube is Killing Me
But on a completely random tip, why not watch Christopher Lee sing Name Your Poison from the would-be-a-cult-if-anyone-watched-it musical, The Return of Captain Invisible? It is so insane and weird (thanks mostly to Rocky Horror's "Bey of Baldness" Richard O'Brien co-writing the song no doubt) it makes me laugh and smile, and then sing along to the words once I have watched it for the 25th time. Lee/Dracula/Count Dooku/Saruman/Scaramanga grinning and bringing Arkin/Yossarian/Clouseau/druggy grandad from Little Miss Sunshine/terrified shrink from Grosse Point Blank to his knees with a paean to the joys of the booze that had struck down the aforementioned superhero in his prime. Brilliant, not least because Lee is a bloody good baritone, but also because it contains this short exchange - "You'll never change" and "And YOU will never win" - which I love for some unknown reason. The simplicity perhaps? The dual contempt and certainty in Lee's voice, as is more likely. These are the four-minute bursts of hilarious oddity that act like sirens on the shore for the YouTube addict. And there so many four-minute wastes of time ready to suck the hours from your existence.
Yes, I think I need to block this life-destroyer, just to save me from myself, as well as lots and lots of time that could be spent writing the next War and Peace (well, you have to be mightily ambitious when you dream of things that have an infinitesimal chance of actually happening; ambition when totally disconnected from reality has a kind of therapeutic-optimistic effect on all those who coddle it). No point in wanting to write the next Nick Hornby. Unless you are Hornby and have found that his sovereignty over the middle-class malaise fiction market has enabled him to get away with writing teenage malaise fiction for young adults, which will somehow, and ever so cunningly, sneak into the hands of grizzled adults like a blood stain seeping slowly then shockingly through a crisp white shirt (But I love Nick in my own way: the off-the-cuff critical meanderings that fill his Stuff I've Been Reading column in The Believer mirrors and seems to validate every sneaking suspicion I have about the world of books and the geniuses, frauds and lunatics who supply it with reams of words; I just wish he wouldn't write such fictional soft-issue driven guff).
£75,000 was it? That's coke 'n' call girls territory for such young, elfin lads making their way in a new, booty-enriched world? Go on my lads. Party like Motley Crue. In the 1980s. Get some smoke-induced worry lines on your faces, bulging brown pouches under your eyes that tell tales of sleepless, hedonistic nights and the worn-out, dysfunctional hearts of men so many decades older. You won't regret it (says, I the eager corruptor).
Lucky blighters yes, (whose combined age is only slightly more than either Chris, Judith or Daphne on their own, if I have my year tallies right), but it just takes one wavy-gravy statistics question on the American justice system to undo a team of bred-in-the-bone Brit quiz stalwarts (though, personally, speaking from the comfort zone/bubble boy bubble of my bedroom rather than an ultramarine BBC studio soothed and sometimes scourged by ominous electro-keyboard chords, I would have assumed that as many US states would have wanted to pump their death row inmates with as much Sodium Pentothal as possible ... "Nail 'em up I say!" as one Life of Brian character remarked, though the modified version would obviously be "Shoot it up their arms, I say!").
Yet stats aren't proper trivia questions are they? Unless, er, of course, they are presented with multiple choices. No, wait they are trivia questions; they're not quiz questions. Not like the ones you'd get on MM o' UC, whose sacred initials we whisper with due reverence. They don't want no digits, they don't give no options. They the relative real deal. The respective individual and team apexes, or apices, or apexs, whaever. But that is the modus operandi of the Eggheads question masters, who I do believe are doing an increasingly spiffy job at this quiz-question lark - ooh, the first couple of years, got me thinking of that Butch and Sundance prequel now, in terms of overall quality that is. The multiples - 1/3 what yer chances eh? - give them the chance to reel out the stats and let the contestants/victims put their deeply held beliefs/prejudices to the test. And come out looking at least a bit silly. Yet numbers questions aside, and please for the love of all that's holy and decent and will keep me in good mental straits, keep those irksome slim things out of quiz shows' way, it is heartening to think that experience is endowing them with the correct easy-medium-hard judgement all quiz-writers need to master if they are not to be heckled, booed mercilessly or lynched outside pubs. Find the middle ground and such aural and physical violence can be avoided).
NB Judith's "That's shocking" remark on discovering 38 states still liked the capital punishment option betrayed something of the British liberals' perplexity when confronted with the American "lex talionis" lust for revenge. The past is a foreign country. And they just love executing people there.
YouTube is Killing Me
But on a completely random tip, why not watch Christopher Lee sing Name Your Poison from the would-be-a-cult-if-anyone-watched-it musical, The Return of Captain Invisible? It is so insane and weird (thanks mostly to Rocky Horror's "Bey of Baldness" Richard O'Brien co-writing the song no doubt) it makes me laugh and smile, and then sing along to the words once I have watched it for the 25th time. Lee/Dracula/Count Dooku/Saruman/Scaramanga grinning and bringing Arkin/Yossarian/Clouseau/druggy grandad from Little Miss Sunshine/terrified shrink from Grosse Point Blank to his knees with a paean to the joys of the booze that had struck down the aforementioned superhero in his prime. Brilliant, not least because Lee is a bloody good baritone, but also because it contains this short exchange - "You'll never change" and "And YOU will never win" - which I love for some unknown reason. The simplicity perhaps? The dual contempt and certainty in Lee's voice, as is more likely. These are the four-minute bursts of hilarious oddity that act like sirens on the shore for the YouTube addict. And there so many four-minute wastes of time ready to suck the hours from your existence.
Yes, I think I need to block this life-destroyer, just to save me from myself, as well as lots and lots of time that could be spent writing the next War and Peace (well, you have to be mightily ambitious when you dream of things that have an infinitesimal chance of actually happening; ambition when totally disconnected from reality has a kind of therapeutic-optimistic effect on all those who coddle it). No point in wanting to write the next Nick Hornby. Unless you are Hornby and have found that his sovereignty over the middle-class malaise fiction market has enabled him to get away with writing teenage malaise fiction for young adults, which will somehow, and ever so cunningly, sneak into the hands of grizzled adults like a blood stain seeping slowly then shockingly through a crisp white shirt (But I love Nick in my own way: the off-the-cuff critical meanderings that fill his Stuff I've Been Reading column in The Believer mirrors and seems to validate every sneaking suspicion I have about the world of books and the geniuses, frauds and lunatics who supply it with reams of words; I just wish he wouldn't write such fictional soft-issue driven guff).
posted by That Quiz Guy at 10:12 AM
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