quiz night

This evening I went to a quiz night.  A friend who is fund raising for a memorial garden at her village hall helped to organise it, and rounded up a little group of fellow beekeepers to form a team.  I haven't done a quiz for years, and didn't expect to be much use, since my failure to follow soaps, sports results, celebrity gossip or any pop music more recent that Lloyd Cole and the Commotions practically fits me to be a High Court judge.  A massive vagueness about dates doesn't help either.  I am always amazed if we have Radio 2 on in the car when PopMaster comes on, and the Systems Administrator answers 1973 or 1976 with great confidence, and is right.  It's an approach that used to get me into trouble at school with history, since it seemed to me that as long as you knew that the Stuarts came after the Tudors but before the Industrial Revolution, whether something happened in 1663 or 1664 was besides the point.

But it was with friends, and for charity, and as long as I was willing to chuck my £3.50 entry fee in the tin and buy some raffle tickets it probably didn't matter.  And I was not entirely useless, getting the opening lines of 1984 in the literature round plus a couple of films from their straplines, including Saving Private Ryan which was good going since I have refused to ever watch it.  Even more surprisingly I managed to identify the catchphrase Yes But No But Yes But with Vikky Pollard despite having never seen even one episode of Little Britain, which just goes to show how self-referential the UK media is.

It was a clever quiz, or at least it produced tightly bunched answers.  The winning team scored 99.5 out of a possible 120, we got 96, and the quiz master said that half the teams got over 90.  We would have done a great deal worse if we hadn't had a music virtuoso on the side, who spotted The Hollies and Paul and Paula within about the three beats of the opening riff, correctly identified an early track as being by Tyrannosaurus Rex which predates T Rex (for which teams only got half a point, ditto Marc Bolan), and is probably still kicking himself for failing one music question, which was to name the band behind Black Betty.  I didn't know that, despite it being a staple of school discos, and the only other track that came from my era was one by The Police (Sting also accepted).

You can see how people remember the dates of current affairs, or don't, as you listen to their hissed discussions trying to answer a quiz.  If something happened while you were on holiday that can help nail it down.  One team member said he could even remember the road he was driving along when he heard a piece of news on the radio, but unfortunately then couldn't pin down the year of the holiday.  I was sure that the last big foot and mouth outbreak was while I was still at Writtle, but we ended up one year out on 2002 instead of 2001.  We were all fairly dreadful at advertising slogans on our team, and not much better at the original names of famous people.  I never knew that Fred Astaire was originally Frederick Austerlitz.  Shame, if there'd been a point for knowing Ginger Rogers' crack about doing everything that he did but backwards, and in high heels, we'd have got that.