We have just got back from taking part in a quiz night. A beekeeping friend is part of a group fundraising to renovate the garden by their village hall, and put together a beekeepers team. I didn't fancy our chances particularly, since I didn't think that between us we'd know anything about TV soaps, celebrities, or football, but it's the taking part that counts. And I enjoyed the last quiz I went to.
In fact the questions were set by the same person who did the previous quiz, and were designed for a rural, middle aged if not downright elderly demographic, so there weren't any football questions, and only one TV round. That required us to name the programme or ad associated with various musical excerpts, and one of the ads was for Hamlet cigars, which shows you how current the whole round was. I would have bet money on one of the questions being on the Hovis ad (Dvorak New World Symphony) and it was.
The theory of team decision making when I worked in the City was that the sum of the parts would be greater than the individual knowledge of any single member of the team. That only seemed to work with the beekeepers up to a point. It was lucky for us that the professional beekeeper turned out to have a good knowledge of geography and knew the capital of Bolivia, and handy that the only sports question was cricket, not football, and that the Systems Administrator knew the term for a score of one hundred and eleven runs (it's a Nelson). Our pop and rock music expert, who saved our bacon last time round with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of 1960s B sides and early hits of The Shadows wasn't on the team this time, and I thought we would be doomed when it came to the popular music round, but the Chairman's wife turned out to be a wizz at Acker Bilk and between us we pulled through respectably.
But we were too nice. Altogether too ready to defer to each other's doubts and opinions. So the professional beekeeper talked the SA out of nominating Holland as the country due East of Tendring in favour of Belgium, but the SA overruled the professional beekeeper's wife when it came to her knowing the capital of Lichtenstein, and she rejected my correct answer of Lloyds Bank as the advertiser associated with one of the musical extracts in favour of the wrong answer of British Gas. The professional beekeeper tried to cast confusion on whether it was the King's shilling men took to join the army, or whether that was to join the navy, but the SA and I stood firm that time.
It's just as well I wasn't left alone to complete the facial recognition round, since out of twenty present and past actors and musicians I was only completely confident of one of them, and that was Telly Savalas. Mind you, the picture of Forrest Whitaker looked nothing like him. They were very small pictures, and not terribly good quality printing, but I do suspect that I'm not very good at faces. That and the fact that most of the faces were definitely famous before my time. But I knew that the book featuring the character Benjamin Braddock must be The Graduate, on the strength of having seen the film, and that the advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer came from The Godfather and the line about being on a new diet for Paris was Emily's in The Devil Wears Prada.
In the end we won by a single point, after putting in a protest because we'd only been given seventeen out of twenty for naming the faces when we got eighteen of them correct. Forrest Whitaker defeated us (but it didn't look anything like him. I've watched him quite recently in Good Morning Vietnam and have more of an opinion on his face than most of the other nineteen), as did Jeff Bridges. The Chairman came closest when he mentioned the Baker Brothers, and Jeff Bridges is of course in The Fabulous Baker Boys, but the main strand of opinion at our end of the table was that the photo looked like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, and in the end somebody guessed Danny Dyer. I have no idea what Danny Dyer looks like, knowing him only as the butt of jokes on the Kermode and Mayo Film Review.
In theory I despise random knowledge, but the truth of it is that I only despise accumulations of facts on subjects I'm not interested in. Football, celebrities, plotlines from EastEnders or the capital cities of Latin American countries, why would I want to spend my evening being quizzed about such things (and scoring no more than three out of ten in every round?). But as soon as a quiz moves on to territory where I know the answers to more than a smattering of the questions I'm all eager attention.
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