The Perfect Pub Quiz

You’ll be able to hear me on the radio soon, although you’ll have to pay careful attention because my appearance is brief. It’s during an episode of Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz (Radio 4, some time in April, then on the BBC Sounds app), in which the audience ask him questions and he asks questions of them.

While most of his questions elicited a simultaneous response from many of the audience, it seemed that I was the only one who knew the answer to his question about two properties on a Monopoly board. That said, there were quite a few questions I couldn't answer!

The question was not untypical pub quiz fare, which was sort of the point of the show, to highlight the difference between the standard pub quiz questions and the slightly more obscure ones.

The point of pub quizzes – any quiz in fact, with the possible exception of University Challenge – is to pitch questions at a level where most people can take an educated guess, or – as Sinha himself said – they will at least have heard of the answer when they are given it.

I have always been a great fan of quizzes. Years ago, I used to take part in a monthly quiz at The Chichester Hotel in Rawreth, near Wickford, run by the local Rotary Club to raise money for charity. It was always very well attended, and very competitive. The team I was in won on quite a few occasions; we had some very intelligent people, with knowledge of a broad range of subjects.

Going back even further, in my teens and early twenties I played for the Romford FC Supporters Club team in a quiz league based on football (see Who Play At Annfield? And Other Questions). We used to take that quite seriously at times, going as far as to revise and practice during the season we actually won the league.

The football quizzes were all based on information in the Rothmans Football Yearbook, and access to the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today when I stopped quizzing at The Chichester, so the questions were compiled from reference books. The internet has made quizzes easier, and harder. Compiling a set of quiz questions – and I’ve done it a few times – is easier with the internet, but somehow less satisfying. Even with the internet, verifying that you have the right answer to a question – assuming you’re not downloading an off the peg set but are actually making them up yourself – requires some patience and perseverance because, as we know, just because something appears on more than one website, that doesn’t make it right.

Having not taken part in a quiz for some time – years, maybe – I was at one with friends and family last Saturday. We came second (out of twelve teams). How close a second I don’t know, as the scores weren’t revealed, but we might have come closer had we known that a Jaffa Cake is a cake, not a biscuit (those binary choice questions are harder than they sound – well, they are if you don’t actually know the answer), or the name of Benedict Cumberbatch’s recent film, The Power of The Dog (I knew it was the something of the dog, but frustratingly couldn’t recall the full title).

Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz, although a BBC show, was not recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House, but at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green, a more informal venue that better lends itself to the sort of audience participation the show thrives on.

The Backyard Comedy Club was founded and is owned by Lee Hurst, who those of you with long memories will remember as a panellist on the light hearted sports quiz, They Think It’s All Over, in the 1990s. Hurst has some forthright views on covid, and in 2021 he was banned from Twitter for sharing abusive tweets about England’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty. His many covid-sceptic, and often wildly ill-informed, tweets have frequently provoked ridicule, like this one likening covid to the plague:

Given those forthright views - he opposes masks, vaccinations and lockdowns, for instance, and seems to think that covid is a hoax - I wonder how he feels about the BBC’s requirement that everyone attending provides proof of a negative lateral flow test (LFT) taken within the previous 24 hours when attending their shows, even at his venue?

I guess that the BBC – and other venues that have similar requirements – will have to stop asking for proof of a negative LFT soon, as the provision of free tests ends at the end of March 2022, and I believe that the government website stops accepting such test results then as well (although I may be wrong on that, I can’t find definitive proof either way).

Some people will have no choice but to pay for tests. NHS frontline workers – among others – will likely still be required to take regular LFTs after 1^st April, at a cost of around £50 per month. At a time when many people’s finances are being squeezed to the bone by paltry pay rises and rapidly increasing energy, fuel, and food prices this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for many.

On the other hand, I have little doubt that our Members of Parliament, whose pay will increase by £2,200 in April, and who – if they represent seats outside London – can claim the cost of their electricity and gas on expenses (in 2020-21, 316 MPs claimed for their energy bills, many claiming more than the average household’s bill of £1,100), will get their LFTs free if they need them.

Energy prices have got so out of hand that, according to Iceland supermarket boss Richard Walker, some food banks are rejecting potatoes and root veg because people ‘can’t afford the energy to boil them.’

Meanwhile, despite the widespread belief that covid is behind us and that we really no longer need masks, social distancing or testing, cases and deaths remain stubbornly high. As at 23^rd March, the last week has seen 592,459 new cases (up 20%), and 836 deaths (up 122). Is covid over? Seems not; saying it is does not make it so.

Having veered somewhat off-topic, I’ll finish with a thought about quizzes that will have no doubt occurred to many of you.

There are only so many questions that can reasonably be posed in quizzes – especially TV game shows with members of the public as contestants – and only so many question setters for those shows.

As a result, questions get recycled over and over again – it’s not unusual to hear the same question, modified slightly perhaps, but still the same question – in different shows, even two shows on the same evening.

As the blurb for Sinha’s show explains, ‘The problem with quizzes is that the same questions keep coming up… the more quizzes you do the more predictable they get.’ The show ‘kindly explains why the questions are a bit rubbish, before offering up not only a better question, but also the fascinating stories behind the answer’.

For those reasons, I recommend you have a listen to Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz, and not just because you’ll hear me.