Pub Quizzes - pubtastic or pub bores?

That said The Village is also a pretty good pub so when these two things intersect I can see great things happening (good friend lives round corner so know it well - Walthamstow Festival soon?)

I have been trying to organise a Week Of Quiz but slightly scuppered by lack of Friday / Saturday quizes. I am solid - but for news and soaps you want Emma on your team, she really does have brain like a bin. Best Pub Quiz in Crouch End is at The Railway.

Though it is true that I am surprisingly good at plucking random facts from murky depths. And as I have the best writing I always insist on being the writer. Which means that when we have rows about the name of the Scottish warden in Porridge and everyone else refuses to believe that it was Mr Mackay ('no, no Emma, his real name was Fulton Mackay, your poor weak girl's brain is mistaken') I get to put the right answer and win a valuable point.

Number 1: questions which are just stupidly, stupidly obscure and mean that you have to guess. That's not a quiz, that's a raffle. I've got little to no time for these questions "What's the name for a group of..." where the answer's just made up. A legsplit of synchronised swimmers? My arse.

Number 2: shouting out "Yes!" when you get a quite basic question right (e.g. What is the name of the handyman in Postman Pat?). The stock response to this should be to a) shout "First time in a pub!" - a line I came up with for whenever young-looking pubgoers spill drinks etc. or b) shouting "That your first point?" The only exception is if you deliberately shout "Yessssss!" after each answer's read out to pretend you're doing really well. Hilarious.

Number 3: furious text messaging/sly phoning to try and find out answers. Yeah, fair enough if you've got 28 out of 30 and want the last couple just to be sure (there's beer tokens at stake here!) but when you've got 15 right yourselves it's just a waste of time.

Number 4: drinking from 1pm, arriving at the quiz at 10.20, just in time to see your mates win th customary gallon of ale on the quiz and take £100 out of the "Pick a key to the box" bit, only to split it between them and not give you any for being drunk as fuck.

One of these comes from painful personal experience. I'll leave the other three up to you lot. I'm sure Pete's got a few.

Also: what's the pub quiz answer you're most proud to have got right?

A mate called my mobile from a pub quiz once. 'Is Pete there?' 'No, this is my mobile, why should Pete be here?' 'I'm doing a quiz and need to know if a gibbon is a monkey or an ape'. I paused to think about it and gave him the right answer (which I have now forgotten). 'You paused, I'm not putting that down'. And so he lost the quiz. Ha.

I like the idea of their being exotic. I was in San Francisco earlier in the year, and went to a pub quiz in an English bar. Come to think of it, I can imagine Americans finding it all exotic - going to an English bar, eating fish and chips, and answering loads of strange questions. Nice one! Sorted.

Quizzes in general have been a sore point, however, since the time myself, Stevie T and The Pinefox played trivial pursuit against Dastoor, The Madchen and Carsmile Steve. I'm not sure that we even got one piece of pie. Some people just know too many silly facts.

And not only did I manage to name eleven Celtic managers (see above), I did them in chronological order. That was just showing off though, as the question only wanted a number, not the actual names. That'll be the one I'm most proud of getting right.

Actually, the one I am most proud of (or saddened by) was at a music quiz and I was the only person in the pub to identify which album started with the words "Oh why do you..."

And, for posterity -

Martin O'Neill
Kenny Daglish (caretaker)
John Barnes
Dr Jozef Venglos
Wim Jansen
Tommy Burns
Lou Macari
Frank Connor (caretaker, not very long - two games?)
Joe Jordan (caretaker, one day)
Liam Brady
Billy McNeill

We actually got four wrong but the quizmaster gave us an extra point because he is a pervert.

B-but I got the debatable one right, but no-one believed me as everyone else but me misheard the question so I was over-ruled. I like to think it was a carriage of justice (is that the opposite of a miscarriage of justice?)

Me and Ally C are planning back to defend our honour tonight. You up for it N.?

I hate pub quizzes. I know lots of stuff yet they steadfastly refuse to tailor them around me, thereby making me look foolish (well, they did tonight anyway).

(there's a great picture of the event in my illustrated child's history of england)

(i googled it to check and it says she was a "pavement cabbage seller"!!)

(oh and it was the 17th century as I have now g00gled it too. It gets a fair bit of coverage, and I feel rather foolish for not ever having been aware of this as I like to think I know a fair bit of Scottish history)

Actually I'd volunteer to run one, but I think we have some experts here at running these things, so I'll just volunteer on a contingency basis if e.g. Pete doesn't want to.

http://www.indietorrents.com/bitbucket/annie.JPG

I wish I could go.

also.. she's busy that day! isn't she supposed to be at Trash?

also annie has long hair now (see pic on barima in london thread)

It was out of 60 - I got 57. The only ones wrong were "how many siblings does Celine Dion have", "which act comes first in the Guinness Book of Hit Singles" and "which showtune starts with the lyrics Isn't it rich, are we a pair.

Send In The Clowns

Who, of a certain age in Britain, doesn't remember Brian & Michael? (Plus, as you note, he got the title wrong anyway)

I need to do this quiz next time I'm in Glasgow I think, to subsidise the trip.

is there any point in having questions, that no-one knows the answers to (including the quizmaster, if not for his piece of paper)?

I asked PF, to tell me the first line of 'ulysses', from memory, and he did but he wasn't totally SURE, that he'd got it exactly CORRECT and, now, I can't REMEMBER, either. it was definetly RIGHT, though. what a question.

Of course, that's as far as I ever got with "Ulysses", ha ha

Possibly not all that interesting coincidence -- when I started going to the first pub quiz in Norway a couple of months after it started (by an Englishman, obv), our team name was "Jedermann sein eigner Fussball"!

i went to the Village quiz once but the guy doing it was a complete nonce - forcing us to listen to Spacehog and Warm Jets and telling us how good they were. we won tho.
-- Freelance Hiveminder

haha he ALWAYS plays the Warm Jets! Very strange. Huey's right tho, it's a great quiz, and bloody hard too, which is always fun.

I went to the quiz at The Winchester on Archway road last night. I lost our team a round of shots by wrongly convincing all six of them that the most frequently-picked lottery number was one of my regular numbers. They thus swapped the correct answer for one of mine, and we lost.

It all got ugly when one of our team then got the quizmaster to announce that not only did we lose because of me, but also, I own the entire back catalogue of Chris de Burgh. Bastards. Good quiz anyway...

Argh, this is going to bug me all day now.

Gordon Haskell was in Stackridge between leaving King Crimson and releasing his solo album "It Is And It Isn't" - his Stackridge legacy appears only to be "(No-one's More Important Than) The Earthworm". We got no points because I didn't know exactly which months of 1971 that period encompassed.

Counter-argument: he's been shit since 1980.

("since 1980")

they asked for the first four words.

"stately," plump buck milligan... ?

Did't CdeB got all concepty around the time of "Crusader"?