The PEN is mightier than the ... Oh SOD it
A fifth time more unto the breach dear friends and the PEN quiz still does not cease to amaze with its glittery elements, Waugh-esque Cafe Royale setting and truly bloody hard questions. If only they did it every week. If only. Maybe, they do in heaven.
Once again I was on the team I have so gladly represented the last three times (the first, well that was with the so-called "enemy" ... no, they're brilliant and fine they are). And once again we had a different team of columnists, Shadow Cabinet MPs, assorted editors and freelancers like myself. I can't remember if last year's chosen ten was at all the same as 2007. An ever changing roster maybe reminiscent of the Graham Taylor approach to team selection (or was that Keegan? Or Hoddle? Well, they chose many different donkeys didn't they. Not that my team were donkeys. Au contraire. Call them the amiable bunch?) But I dunno. I tend to get sucked into the questions and lose all other powers of attention. Then time zips past light speed style as you get lost in another dimension. The dimension of QUIZ.
But this year was different. Each of the rounds was designed for buffs in that particular field. Last year literature informed all the rounds except music. This time it did not; something I didn't mind at all. No surprise then that the newspapers zoomed to the top of the field and previous publisher and agency winners were left to flounder in the lower reaches without their literary buoys.
No gimmes for what would be the point? Arts, news humanities and, obviously, literature fans are well served, as most of the people in this room could conceivably call themselves the premier experts in those fields in the entire country. Or at least they are the ones whose words on the aforementioned subjects command foot-upon-foot of column inches every week.
For instance, who set the history questions? It was none other than Antony Beevor, the Stalingrad man. And they were good ones too, picking out the particular quiz facts that bamboozle ordinary folk - asking what was the bloodiest ever battle on British soil to take one example. It is Towton, of course. "Details" questions generally reigned supreme, but then history can get very staid and dull without the little nick-nacks about sparrowhawk deployment in the Crystal Palace to amuse us.
"Unbelievably hard questions" was one remark, but I am increasingly blind to such distinctions. I am nor far more likely to guffaw when a relatively easy chestnut (as in one QLL Tuesday night's diamond anniversary questions) as if such things are beneath me. I am becoming an ultra-snob. And it is exacerbated by setting your own questions again and again. Your exposure to the easy stuff is minimised and when you come back into contact with it, it frankly looks as if it is only suitable for village idiots.
Looking around this amazingly diverse bunch of gilded aficionados of the written word, you notice things. Like, you can stack two Vikram Seths inside a Max Hastings. How fairy tale villain hideous David Mellor's face is. Doesn't James Delingpole look like some small, woodland elf who has entered hip human society and dressed himself purely according to the principles laid down in the fashion spreads found in GQ and Esquire (yes, I do now he writes about fashion)? Standing in the cloakroom queue and wondering where to look on hearing that Francis Wheen can't make the Bad Sex in Fiction award show and how dreadfully sorry he is about missing out it being awarded to a dead wife-stabber. It is very easy to gawp and watch the wildlife as if you were in a waxwork museum curated by the London Review of Books. Only, of course, these are real people getting stuck into their sushi canapes, salmon and mash for main and a dollop of ice cream with cinnamon-dappled tarte tatine for dessert. Yes, Alan Hollinghurst - he of The Line of Beauty renown - was back. But he was on The Guardian team. Why? He was their ringer and as was confirmed later he "knows everything".
Completely forgetting about the music and pictures and current affairs round, literature was entirely made up of quotes - the University Challenge disease. The Bulwer Lytton novel that started so auspiciously: "It was a dark and stormy night". Yep, Paul Clifford. The name of the fellow Joyce based his Ulysses character Buck Mulligan. Not a single idea, except that it is double-barrelled. But it wasn't so bad. If you knew character names you were halfway there. We got 7/10 on that round.
No, our deadly, debilitating problem - the one that cost us dear - was when to pay £30 to play our joker and double our points for one of five rounds. Playing your joker is a inexact science at best, and at worse a total lottery in which you discover you really know nothing about your strengths and weaknesses (at least in relation to the fiend doing the questions). Ben, our wonderful captain, described his fatal lack of decisiveness as being "milk-livered", but Film seemed to be a safe choice for our Joker. It wasn't our problem - wait, it bally well was! - that the setter went for some nasty bastards, including name three films from their taglines for one solitary point. THREE OF THEM! Ye gods. A quote from the Frears version of Dangerous Liaisons with just the words and the year it was released. Truffaut playing a necrophiliac journalist in a 1978 film! Ye god twice more. But the first fictional being to be Oscar nominated: I should have got that. Even if I thought Adaptation ended up a load of overblown silliness. As a result we only scored 5 and therefore ten points. Not enough.
Yet at the climax. after Will Self had performed the raffle duties in his "fucking mordant" yet hilarious manner (it's like free jazz, man, with literary and celeb references, man, especially with his riffing on the Nigella Lawson-made cupcakes, yeahhhh), we had surprisingly jousted into second equal with four others on 44 - The Guardian, HW Fisher, Faber and Penguin. I was shoved into the spotlight as Paxo got his reading glasses out and flicked through some papers, I then noticed Anne Ashurst materialise by my side (she wasn't on the Mills & Boon team, who finished dead last). But stone the crows, the easiest question of the entire night was then asked: "How many people ate at the Last Supper?". One of the publisher guys instantly spat-garbled the answer out as quickly as he could, while as ever I was not paying attention. My tie-break curse struck again. I was expecting a far more testing question and failed to even spout "13" just to show that, yes, I can parrot something I had heard a split second before. I walked back to my table in sullen shame. Oh well. Never mind. Even if I did mind a lot.
In the end, our decision not to play the joker on any of the three rounds in which we scored seven was a complete disaster that cost us the slinky glass trophy that the Mail on Sunday (Marcus Berkmann and his mob) received. But let's look at the bright side. Just for once. After a couple of years flailing in the middle pages, we had pulled ourselves back up to real respectability. Then again, a closer finish induced a different kind of disappointment: the frustrating kind that is far more emptier than the one you suffer when you are nowhere. It was a better and a worse species of disappointment - what might have been and so on. If only we had got that question or listened to Nigel for that one or written down my instinctive guess rather than think of it as dreamy speculation and put down something completely wrong in-shitting-stead. Self-examination gets inevitably worse.
But I think we had a lot more fun this year. We gave the toppermost position a good sniff. Next year that big slab of glass may be ours once again. It is lovely to dream of such fancies and, of course, utterly pointless when placed in the grand scheme of everything.
OH IT WAS THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE! Sorry. It never stops does it?
(Here's Jeremy Paxman's take on proceedings)
Once again I was on the team I have so gladly represented the last three times (the first, well that was with the so-called "enemy" ... no, they're brilliant and fine they are). And once again we had a different team of columnists, Shadow Cabinet MPs, assorted editors and freelancers like myself. I can't remember if last year's chosen ten was at all the same as 2007. An ever changing roster maybe reminiscent of the Graham Taylor approach to team selection (or was that Keegan? Or Hoddle? Well, they chose many different donkeys didn't they. Not that my team were donkeys. Au contraire. Call them the amiable bunch?) But I dunno. I tend to get sucked into the questions and lose all other powers of attention. Then time zips past light speed style as you get lost in another dimension. The dimension of QUIZ.
But this year was different. Each of the rounds was designed for buffs in that particular field. Last year literature informed all the rounds except music. This time it did not; something I didn't mind at all. No surprise then that the newspapers zoomed to the top of the field and previous publisher and agency winners were left to flounder in the lower reaches without their literary buoys.
No gimmes for what would be the point? Arts, news humanities and, obviously, literature fans are well served, as most of the people in this room could conceivably call themselves the premier experts in those fields in the entire country. Or at least they are the ones whose words on the aforementioned subjects command foot-upon-foot of column inches every week.
For instance, who set the history questions? It was none other than Antony Beevor, the Stalingrad man. And they were good ones too, picking out the particular quiz facts that bamboozle ordinary folk - asking what was the bloodiest ever battle on British soil to take one example. It is Towton, of course. "Details" questions generally reigned supreme, but then history can get very staid and dull without the little nick-nacks about sparrowhawk deployment in the Crystal Palace to amuse us.
"Unbelievably hard questions" was one remark, but I am increasingly blind to such distinctions. I am nor far more likely to guffaw when a relatively easy chestnut (as in one QLL Tuesday night's diamond anniversary questions) as if such things are beneath me. I am becoming an ultra-snob. And it is exacerbated by setting your own questions again and again. Your exposure to the easy stuff is minimised and when you come back into contact with it, it frankly looks as if it is only suitable for village idiots.
Looking around this amazingly diverse bunch of gilded aficionados of the written word, you notice things. Like, you can stack two Vikram Seths inside a Max Hastings. How fairy tale villain hideous David Mellor's face is. Doesn't James Delingpole look like some small, woodland elf who has entered hip human society and dressed himself purely according to the principles laid down in the fashion spreads found in GQ and Esquire (yes, I do now he writes about fashion)? Standing in the cloakroom queue and wondering where to look on hearing that Francis Wheen can't make the Bad Sex in Fiction award show and how dreadfully sorry he is about missing out it being awarded to a dead wife-stabber. It is very easy to gawp and watch the wildlife as if you were in a waxwork museum curated by the London Review of Books. Only, of course, these are real people getting stuck into their sushi canapes, salmon and mash for main and a dollop of ice cream with cinnamon-dappled tarte tatine for dessert. Yes, Alan Hollinghurst - he of The Line of Beauty renown - was back. But he was on The Guardian team. Why? He was their ringer and as was confirmed later he "knows everything".
Completely forgetting about the music and pictures and current affairs round, literature was entirely made up of quotes - the University Challenge disease. The Bulwer Lytton novel that started so auspiciously: "It was a dark and stormy night". Yep, Paul Clifford. The name of the fellow Joyce based his Ulysses character Buck Mulligan. Not a single idea, except that it is double-barrelled. But it wasn't so bad. If you knew character names you were halfway there. We got 7/10 on that round.
No, our deadly, debilitating problem - the one that cost us dear - was when to pay £30 to play our joker and double our points for one of five rounds. Playing your joker is a inexact science at best, and at worse a total lottery in which you discover you really know nothing about your strengths and weaknesses (at least in relation to the fiend doing the questions). Ben, our wonderful captain, described his fatal lack of decisiveness as being "milk-livered", but Film seemed to be a safe choice for our Joker. It wasn't our problem - wait, it bally well was! - that the setter went for some nasty bastards, including name three films from their taglines for one solitary point. THREE OF THEM! Ye gods. A quote from the Frears version of Dangerous Liaisons with just the words and the year it was released. Truffaut playing a necrophiliac journalist in a 1978 film! Ye god twice more. But the first fictional being to be Oscar nominated: I should have got that. Even if I thought Adaptation ended up a load of overblown silliness. As a result we only scored 5 and therefore ten points. Not enough.
Yet at the climax. after Will Self had performed the raffle duties in his "fucking mordant" yet hilarious manner (it's like free jazz, man, with literary and celeb references, man, especially with his riffing on the Nigella Lawson-made cupcakes, yeahhhh), we had surprisingly jousted into second equal with four others on 44 - The Guardian, HW Fisher, Faber and Penguin. I was shoved into the spotlight as Paxo got his reading glasses out and flicked through some papers, I then noticed Anne Ashurst materialise by my side (she wasn't on the Mills & Boon team, who finished dead last). But stone the crows, the easiest question of the entire night was then asked: "How many people ate at the Last Supper?". One of the publisher guys instantly spat-garbled the answer out as quickly as he could, while as ever I was not paying attention. My tie-break curse struck again. I was expecting a far more testing question and failed to even spout "13" just to show that, yes, I can parrot something I had heard a split second before. I walked back to my table in sullen shame. Oh well. Never mind. Even if I did mind a lot.
In the end, our decision not to play the joker on any of the three rounds in which we scored seven was a complete disaster that cost us the slinky glass trophy that the Mail on Sunday (Marcus Berkmann and his mob) received. But let's look at the bright side. Just for once. After a couple of years flailing in the middle pages, we had pulled ourselves back up to real respectability. Then again, a closer finish induced a different kind of disappointment: the frustrating kind that is far more emptier than the one you suffer when you are nowhere. It was a better and a worse species of disappointment - what might have been and so on. If only we had got that question or listened to Nigel for that one or written down my instinctive guess rather than think of it as dreamy speculation and put down something completely wrong in-shitting-stead. Self-examination gets inevitably worse.
But I think we had a lot more fun this year. We gave the toppermost position a good sniff. Next year that big slab of glass may be ours once again. It is lovely to dream of such fancies and, of course, utterly pointless when placed in the grand scheme of everything.
OH IT WAS THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE! Sorry. It never stops does it?
(Here's Jeremy Paxman's take on proceedings)
posted by That Quiz Guy at 4:27 PM
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