Pub Quiz!

What’s that movie about a bus that can’t let its speed drop below fifty miles per hour otherwise it will explode? That’s right! It’s called The Bus That Could Not Slow Down! Ok, maybe not, but Homer Simpson’s much more descriptive title for the film Speed is what we decided to name our pub quiz team the other night. Yes, the other night I found out that the pub directly across the road from the flat (ten seconds away to be exact, it’s awesome) holds a pub quiz every Tuesday night and I was so keen to go, as I have never been to one before, I rounded up my flatmates who were about and charged them across the street.

We were the last team to arrive, as fashionably on time as the distance to the pub we had to travel allowed and started the night of in good spirits with a few pints and the picture round in front of us. It was as we continued to stare at the photos of minor celebrities* on the paper in front of us, though, that we realised we were probably unlikely to rank on the leader board by the end of the night. There was only three of us to pool knowledge (the table next to us had eight). It didn’t dampen our spirits though, for we managed to guess Kony 2012, if that is in fact his real name**, and we thought that was pretty good out of ten possible correct  answers.  The next round that followed further proved that we were out of our depths, and for a moment, it seemed, The Bus That Could Not Slow Down looked like it was about to slow down. The second round of questions, which was read out by the bar staff, was entirely London related and seeing as our team was made up of an Australian, a Frenchman and a Libyan (start your jokes now), our knowledge of the city was definitely not up to par with the rest of the bar (rhyme, boom!). Questions like “Name the tube station from the following clue ‘constructed a headdress’” (Maida Vale) and “What literary character’s statue is out the front of the Great Ormond Street Hospital” (Tinkerbell) had us completely stumped. Out of a possible ten correct answers in that round, we scored another solid one. We were fairly confident that the quiz was only for Londoners by this point when suddenly we moved to the Brand name round. In this round you had to guess the brand name from either its slogan or from a description of its logo. Seeing an opportunity to save ourselves from last place, we knuckled down and earned some of our dignity back by guessing correctly Pepsi, Subway, Adidas, Bentley and Audi. However, this did not save us from being in last place at intermission time.

Intermission during the pub quiz was quite interesting as it allowed you to refill your drinks (which we happily did) and listen to the quiz team scores at the halfway point. It is ridiculous what kind of names float about at a pub quiz and I love it. At this quiz there was obviously us, with the Simpsons reference, a team called Quiz All Over My Face, Arts and Crafts, A Team Has No Name, and a team poorly named Shitty Questions, just to name a few. If I’d been allowed to, I would have sat about until the end of time thinking up pub quiz team names. As the scores were read out, we weren’t too surprised to find ourselves in last place as we’d had to mark the table next to us during the marking stage before intermission and quickly found out that we’d done terribly (if we hadn’t know already). With a cheer, our team was read out first before the names spoken in ascending order until the leaders were revealed to be on twenty three points. Hot damn!

Wetting our lips with our new brews, we settled down for the second half of the quiz and were relieved to find the categories: Films, Sports and Music. Spirits high again, we blasted through the films with a score of seven out of ten and then immediately hit a roadblock when we realised all the sport questions were exclusively linked to England in some way. How the hell were we meant to know who won the “Golden Boot” in 1986, or who were the only Englishmen to have won the something-or-other in something***? We only scored four that round, out of a possible thirteen, as we could only answer what  two of the distances were in an Olympic triathlon, the length of an Olympic swimming pool and what the current world record is for the 100m sprint.

Feeling a little cheated, we settled in for the final round which required us to listen to snippets of songs and guess the names of both the song and the artist. In this round we did surprisingly well and more or less nailed every question. Somehow, between the three of us, our music knowledge was fairly extensive and we were able to guess even some of the more obscure songs that popped up. The only question we failed in the round was a song that we technically got right by name, but had been covered by a different artist (We guessed the original, they’d played the cover). All in all, we went into the final marking and read out of the scores and had miraculously moved four spaces up the ladder with a solid total of twenty six. We thought this was good enough, agreed to make the event a weekly thing, do our homework and return with a larger team the following week in order to beat the winners of the night who’d somehow got way out in front with a total of sixty three (it was the table of eight next to us, the bastards!). We're going to win the fifty pound bar tab next time, I swear it****.

In conclusion, it was a good evening, an excellent way to pass what would have otherwise been a dull Tuesday evening whilst testing your brain. As my girlfriend would later explain to me, it is sometimes a good idea to look ahead at the quiz that will be on in order to know what to research and refresh your memory on. The quiz we’d gone to had been a general (London) knowledge quiz, but if we’d gone to the special one on the Sunday beforehand it would have been The Office themed. “You’ve got to choose your quiz” my girlfriend had said and now I am tempted to hunt down every pub that has a quiz night and find out if anyone is doing Star Wars  themed quiz, or a Lord of the Rings themed quiz as these are both topics still fresh on my mind. Anyways, a good pub quiz is a good night out and I am certainly looking forward to the next one. If you happen to be about next Tuesday, free and up for a challenge, I’ll see you at The Grafton.

*Includes people of infamy

**It's not,.I mean, come on, who in the world would have the last name 2012?

***Literally what it sounded like to us non-brits

****Forgot to mention this earlier in the text. Entrace to the quiz is on q quid per person as well. Bargain!