Beadle

I ran a quiz last night for a large company for whom this was actually my 6th quiz. This clearly means they're going well, but creates its own problems. I have to make sure there are no repeated questions so have to go thoroughly through the previous quizzes and often use questions untried at corporate events. Also, I have to guard against familiarity with the format breeding complacency. Usually, with our quizzes, people are so impressed with the format and set-up itself that you've got them won over from the start.
However, these repeated quizzes have a really good atmosphere, loud and competitive. Usually, they're for 200ish people and over 20 teams, while last night it was only 10 teams/60 people so a bit less intense, but still a bit of a bear-pit.
They're also really long - I had to produce a good 2 and a half hour's material, which can sometimes open your eyes to good questions you don't use that often.
One of the participants came up to me half way through, told me Jeremy Beadle had died, and asked me if I could announce it because "Beadle meant a lot to a lot of the people here". I said no, i don't think it would be appropriate, it would bring the mood down, before realising he was joking - not about Beadle dying, which is sad, of course, but about the intensity of feeling about him in that room. People coming up to me and asking me to say certain things on the mic is quite common, and it took a while for me to negate my naturally amenable (cowardly) nature and say no to pretty much everything. The microphone is mine, all mine....

What, no Luis Guzman?....and no Todd Carty?

It's been suggested by a regular reader - as if such a thing exists, ha! the sheer conceit of it - that I introduce to the quizmaster blog a former feature of my somewhat overactive facebook page - the weekly list.
Concerned with my strict remit of keeping this page quiz,quiz,quizzish in its entirety, I pondered how to phrase such a list without spilling over into self-indulgent territory.
So, here is the cunningly phrased Q and A...
Q: Who are the QuizMaster's 10 favourite male actors currently at work in the world?
A: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christian Bale, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, Robert de Niro, Christopher Ecclestone (tho you wish he'd do more films), Owen Wilson, James McAvoy, Daniel Day Lewis, Christopher Walken.
Regular reader, and irregular reader, feel free to comment, provide your own answers.

Building Momentum

After the kids, back to the relative anarchy of an adult quiz, at a really nice roof bar in Soho, and it was actually the most fun quiz I've done in ages.
When you play a film clip for Question 3 of the first round and everyone is laughing hysterically just watching it, you know it's not going to be difficult to get the crowd in the mood, and you can really relax and enjoy running the quiz.
Occasionally, if a crowd is in too good a mood at the start, you know it spells a bit of trouble later on, as their 'mood' will only become more 'merry' and a quiz does require some element of concentration and control, listening and not shouting out, that kind of stuff. But last night, it was perfect, they were all just really loud and jolly all the way through, but very much involved in the quiz right to the last question. I think I chose the questions pretty well, and, always the bonus, we were fed and the food was really good.
The issue of food is an interesting one for the evening quizmaster. We never ask to be fed by our clients (why should they?) but it tends to turn out that over 50% of them very kindly offer us the same food that they are having or else an alternative. Which is always a bonus, but does raise the question of whether or not to eat beforehand - do I take the risk of an empty stomach and really enjoy the hospitality on offer (for example, last night, the food was of a quality that you'd pay a fair bit for) or do I hedge my bets, eat beforehand as one can't really have the expectation of being fed, and then have to turn down something lush, or perhaps eat it already full just because you feel you should never turn down a free meal. I usually opt for the stop-gap Nutrigrain scenario - (a classic quizmaster scenario) so the deepest pangs of hunger are staved off, but a good feed can be truly appreciated.
Gosh, I see Federer is losing, there'll be a question in this...

Quiz Kids

Did a quiz at a school in Hounslow yesterday afternoon - I think it's the third we've done for this particular place, so clearly they're liking our work. We don't do quizzes at schools that often - at least, we do a fair few for parents and teachers, but not that many for children, but enough to have a reasonable stock of suitable questions.
I guess teachers, of all people, see themselves as natural QuizMasters and wouldn't see the need to bring in someone from outside - at least that's my recollection from school, where several teachers seemed to enjoy their end-of-term funfunfun quiz a lot more than the pupils - who can forget Dr Rodgers' Chemical Blockbusters? 'Is it Protactinium, Sir?' 'No, boy, Praseodymium'....brilliant.
But, our quizzes are of course not quizzes in the American sense ie tests but something a little different and when I do go into schools to run quizzes the reaction is fantastic. You can see they enjoy being let off the leash, they enjoy the fact that they can show knowledge of things they're actually interested in (Music, film,TV, Sport etc) and the standard is often surprising.
Yesterday, it was extremely high, some teams hardly getting a single question wrong, which shows that I was choosing appropriate questions, but I guess underestimated how much they all knew - (I mean, what do i know about the teenagers of today? Have they seen ET? Yes, it seems. Do they know The Killers? Yes. Dan Dare? Erm...who - though to fair, they're not from the 50s, are they?)
It was good fun, then, very chaotic, i set up in the hall while the badminton class was going on (a reminder of just how smelly teenagers doing exercise are) and then as soon as I'd finished, rather than all sitting round and gradually dispersing to the bar while one or two come up and try to give a 'shout out' on the microphone, as happens at most adult quizzes, they'd cleared the area in about 10 seconds flat.
I've another quiz in Soho tonight, back to the norm, really and so it continues for the next few weeks. But, let me tell you, be not so fearful, ye Daily Mail raiders, ye phoners in to Nicky Campbell in the morning, not all the kids are hanging round on street corners wearing knives and brandishing hoodies, some of them are naming the 5 countries in the world that end with the letter L, and that can't be a bad thing, can it?

Hang the DJ

It's sometimes remarked that running a quiz the way we do, choosing questions as we go and responding to the mood of the participants, has similarities to being a DJ. There is, of course, one round where it is more explicitly like being a DJ - namely the music round. Which raises questions in my mind about what kind of DJ I would be....
Much as I take care in my own taste of music and have a reasonably merited reputation as a bit of a rock snob, on the guess-the-artist music round you're not going to get very far with Question 1; The Decemberists 2; Moby Grape 3; a bit more mainstream, it's a Super Furry Animals b-side... blank looks all round. But still, I ask myself, is there any excuse for the fact that I nearly always start my music round with 'it's all coming back to me now' by a certain long-faced Canadian (one of the people who regularly helps me thinks I have a secret Dion fetish) and follow it up with Deeply Dippy by the finest bald brothers in pop? Surely there is a middle ground, or maybe this IS where I release my darkest musical secrets ---I'm now wondering if i've mentioned two of the artists I often play so that it will encourage me not to play them again in future, as, no doubt, all my future quiz clientele our feverishly scouring this blog for any clues.
The times where a client does ask me to play music before or after a quiz give me a renewed respect for the skill and patience of DJs, both those who are tastemaking in swinging london's hippest nightspots and those who know how to get a tired and emotional wedding party clumsily bopping and congaing into the night.
So far, I've found you get asked 'Can you play something a bit more...modern' a lot, and the even more dispiriting 'Can i plug my ipod in and play my music'. At least when running quizzes, though we often get requests on style and content beforehand, which we're fairly happy to adhere to within reason, there isn't yet too much of an interactive 'request' culture - perhaps because people think we have a set list of questions which we can't change. Having said that, if someone shouts out 'ask a question about New Zealand/pottery/eggs/Thundercats' and I am able to comply within seconds, it tends to quite impress people, so perhaps we should introduce a new off-the-cuff 'Requests' round. Perhaps not.

'Cocaine Overdose Kills Ike Turner'...he was 76 years old, for heaven's sake...
This has been just one of a number of pretty grubby celebrity stories recently, a lot of taking drugs and dying going on. I remember in the past these kind of things would have rather passed me by, as my field of interest had self-imposed limits. But now, surfing through news sites, everything is of interest, anything might be ripe to be made into a question.
It can be interesting to see what people find acceptable and what people don't - generally you can pick an audience that'll enjoy a risque question and raise noises of mock-horror while you can tell when to steer clear. Personally, perhaps being a relative coward, I steer fairly clear of anything people might disapprove of when delivering quizzes but will write questions about most things if required.
It can be pretty surprising where the line will be drawn. We were writing a large batch of questions for a company to send out to venues, and I wrote a question along the lines of 'Which member of the 1966 World Cup team went on to manage Man city and southampton?' about a month or two after Alan Ball's death (they wouldn't have gone out into the venues till a few months later) only to be told it was 'too soon'. Too soon for what? Who would find that offensive? Would audiences collapse in tears and cry ' how can they even mention bally at a time like this?'
'Have they no respect?'
so, you can be a bit risque sometimes, create a mild frission, but, you know we're not comedians, we're not artists, we're not seeking to 'confront' or 'challenge' an audience, we're trying to help a group of people to entertain themselves, so there may be a question about Ike Turner, but it's unlikely to raise the temperature too much.

Unusually, I don't have any quizzes to run this week as generally companies are a bit entertainment fatigued after Christmas and the year really starts to kick in next week.
This gives a bit more time to work on other projects, such as making questions available to be downloaded from our site - www.quizquizquiz.biz - (watch that space) and restarting our weekly miniquiz on facebook and on our site, again, watch those spaces. No, not those ones, those...yes, those ones.
It is also a time to be doing the other major part of my job which is, of course, writing questions. High up on the list of things i get asked when people find out what I do is 'where do you get your questions from?', a question I have more trouble understanding and answering than you'd think. It almost slightly offends me, as if people are thinking that there is a central question centre i nick everything from, but more than that, i just think 'well, where do you think?' It's not exactly a limited field, making up questions from facts, is it? Billions of billions of billions of things have happened, and billions of those things have been accurately recorded - in my nearly 2 years at QuizQuizQuiz, I'd suppose I've written 10,000 odd...hardly pushing the boat out on the scope of human knowledge, is it? There's still plenty more in the pipeline, i'd hope...
It's a slightly facetious answer, I know, so to be fairer- i collect facts from everything i encounter in a week, i plough fairly scientifically through my memory, i search the internet, and i turn all those events into questions which i believe and hope bring out the most interesting parts of a fact, the part which will appeal to what people already know and what they'd like to know more of.
It's quite fun, it has increased, rather than dampened, my thirst for knowledge, and i am satisfied that there is a level of skill with which I, and my colleagues, carry it out that justifies our calling ourselves professionals in the field.
Having said all that, the reason i'm writing this blog now is that I spent an hour this morning trying to come up with questions and struggling to get beyond anything to which the answer wasn't Ryan Giggs, so I rather think i should tone down the self-satisfaction.
Who, along with Gary Speed, is the only player to score in every Premiership season?
Who, in the history of the Premiership, has 50% more assists than any other player?
Who is the only player to have played for the same club every season since the start of the premiership?
....it's a strange life....

Intelligence?

Facebook is, as far as I'm concerned, entirely for the purpose of whatever nonsense you can think of on a given day. For me, who has an awful lot of nonsense swilling around my head, it has been the ideal forum for releasing said nonsense without worrying too much about the consequences.
Of course, a blog has very much the same idea, but facebook has the added advantage of the increasingly ridiculous range of add-on applications to express said nonsense.
Talking of Nonsense, with a capital N, I come to IQ, that bizarre, inappropriately named concept which has held rather more sway in people's imagination in the last 100 years than it ought to have. Never a truer word spoken than that the only thing an IQ test really measures is whether someone is good at IQ tests, which ought to be a relatively pointless thing (as pointless, if not more so, than being good at pub quizzes, one might say!) but it has persisted in often being seen as a real measure of people's intelligence, capability, life skills etc.
I don't know my own IQ, nor do I particularly care. In idle moments in recent years, I did a couple of online tests which all seemed as disreputable and tacky as the next - needless to say, the range of score from test to test was pretty large, depending on a) how I was feeling b) how the test was weighted - I'm pretty decent with words and numbers, not so great with spatial awareness c) and most importantly, whatever random made-up utterly spurious number they give you!
Where's all this going? Well, Facebook has, you may have noticed, an IQ score application, which I've noticed various friends of mine taking and then displaying in recent months. Hardly surprisingly, they all had pretty high numbers (though i heard the complaint that as high scores went, this particular test didn't give particularly high scores) as you surely wouldn't proudly advertise a low IQ, would you , but this is where my delight in nonsense came in.
"I shall take this accursed test" I cackled to myself " and i shall subvert the whole elitist system - ha! - by scoring low and displaying it proudly!" In such moments I believe myself to be an art terrorist of the highest order, a modern day Debord, a KLF for the 21st century, rather than just an idle-minded clown who leaves his computer on when he'd really be better turning it off and going for a brisk walk. "Everyone shall see my low IQ, and immediately realise a) how clever and funny I am and b) how silly the idea of IQ and, in particular, people knowing each other's IQ, is"... so I took the test, and, reader, i nailed it - 100%, the big 0, 30 questions taken, 30 wrong answers. Imagine my surprise then to see the extremely average, unimpressive, figure of 63 come up as my score. Where the hell do they get that from? What could differentiate me from someone who scored, say, 42? Do I get that 63 for being able to turn on the computer, click the options, what? In a sense, I'd proved my point to myself, that the whole 'quota' thing was as random and muddy as hot egg, but, needless to say, my vanity came into play.. "it's not low enough that people will realise i'm kidding, what will my employers think" and so I mentioned to a few friends to look out for it, in an exaggerated, aren't I hilarious way. Well, needless to say, no one has even commented on it, or even, I imagine, noticed it. Perhaps those few that did spot it nodded sagely and said 'Ah yes, I already knew he was all talk and no brain, 63's about right' which tickles me. All in all, I seem to have attributed a bit too much time and thought to an 'intelligence' measure I have no respect for anyway, and should, in future, stick to the quizzes, the only true test of people's intelligence, moral rectitude, life expectancy and chances of getting to heaven.

Quiz Bungee Jumping?

Second quiz of the year last night, a quick hour's work in the more typical environment of a city pub for a big bank. Fitted in a lot of material, went pretty well, they had lots of fun, it was very competitive, a good standard.
Naturally, because we're based in London, we have most experience in quizzes in the city, so we know this kind of clientele pretty well , and they are, in a sense, our ideal audience.
Still, every quiz is different and there are always little surprises, so you can never get complacent about thinking you know your audience too well and not preparing properly and reacting to the atmosphere.
Heard a good/bad line last night which i may use in future: Sometimes I ask the question 'Who would have killed you if you were a victim of patricide? Someone said 'Patrick'.....deathly hush....sorry, that's the kind of thing that amuses me and will be making its way to a quiz near you.
Was helped last night by Ronald Stewart, who has been kind enough to place a link to this blog on his own, on http://blog.treasurelondon.com. Ronald is in the same field of 'corporate events' as us, running treasure hunts around London.
You notice that companies are always looking for new ways to entertain and 'bond' their employees, and, obviously, I'm all for it. It would be good to combine some of the options - quiz paintballing, for example- every question you get wrong, you get splatted. What could go wrong?

Up to the oche

First quiz of the year last night, then, in dart's own Frimley Green which was busier than Oxford Street last night (I gather it was a bad night for the wobbly dutchman Co Stompe at the arrows), though it was pretty quiet to start with in the pub where I set up.
The quiz was for about 40 people for a software company who turned out to be from all over Europe, which obviously affects the kind of questions that will work at a quiz.
Questions about uniquely English culture and English events may well be met with blank looks and bemusement - furthermore, the pub quiz is itself a uniquely British phenomenon, and it is interesting to see people from other countries gradually get a grip on and then throw themselves into the quiz as it progresses.
So, in selecting questions, I made sure that all the questions about Tv/Film/Music etc were at the very least american-based and likely to have been universally syndicated, and in other rounds I threw in a lot of questions about European geography etc, avoided questions about cricket in the sport round.... you get the idea.
The aim in running a quiz is not to test people but to make everybody, even the person who hates quizzes and is worried they don't know anything, feel smart and enjoy the occasion by knowing things they didn't think they knew and working answers out they wouldn't have known about at the beginning.
So, if I spot a team who does badly in the first round and looks a bit disgruntled, i throw into the next round a question or two that they is hopefully in their specific area. For example, the team who started badly last night seemed to be almost entirely made up of Germans, so a question about Steffi Graf here, a question about David Hasselhoff, a powerballad.... and it works! gratifying to see that team singing along to Africa by Toto. My work here is done...

Round 1: Question 1

So what's the point of this?
As minority interests go, the diary of a quizmaster (or is that quiz master) must be more minority than most.
So why am I doing this and who do I think might possibly be interested in reading it?
I guess we can look at the words that will follow over the next few months as an attempt to answer that question, as i have no idea at the moment. Let's just see how we go, shall we?
Practically speaking, I will be writing about my experiences as a quizmaster - no, QuizMaster, that's best - running quiz nights up and down Britain and perhaps beyond. This, strangely, is what I do for a living, and the responses I get when I tell people this, ranging from wide-eyed incomprehension through hysterical laughter (the most common) to a strange envious delight, at least lead me to think that there might be some worth in charting this niche occupation.
We'll see.
Anyway - first quiz of 2008 tomorrow, a corporate event in Frimley, Surrey - Frimley, of course, currently the centre of the known universe as the venue for the BDO World Darts Championship. An ideal place to start, and hopefully i'll be able to provide half the entertainment of Martin 'Wolfie' Adams and of course Ted ' The Count' Hankey.
Interesting year ahead for my company, QuizQuizQuiz (yes, and proud) as we can hopefully continue to expand and branch out into different quiz avenues, or quavenues (there'll be a lot of that).
Ready to spread the quiz magic.Is Frimley ready? Answers later.