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...