Jeopardy

Once a fortnight, three of my colleagues and I enter a team into the pub quiz at The Old Brown Shoe. A local pub for local people…

In many ways, it’s a theme pub – old brown shoes adorn the shelves. You can buy Strongbow or Kilkenny. Frighteningly, the bar staff already know that I tend to drink Tiger. A basket of fish and chips makes for a filling meal half way through the quiz.

It’s quite nice, once a fortnight, to get a little taste of home.

Anyway, my team consistently finishes third, which results in us winning some bottles of beer. The quiz is generally played in good spirits.

Until three weeks ago.

We’d finished third, as ever, one point behind the joint leaders. There was a tie-break question to decide on the winner. One of the teams involved was on the table next to us. The other was sitting next to the quiz master. Both teams had to answer a multiple choice question, and get their answers to the quiz master within 30 seconds.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the tension was palpable.

Both teams handed their answers in. The quiz master went through the answers. Then he announced that the team next to him had won, because the team next to us hadn’t got their answers to him within the allotted time.

The losing team lost the plot.

“Fix!” one shouted.
“We weren’t given a count down!” cried another.

Already amused, I watched with growing interest as two of the team members became more and more indignant, the quiz master looked more and more embarrassed, and everyone else looked closely at the contents of their beer glasses.

Then, most thrillingly of all, one of the losers bellowed:

“It’s not fair, because the distances we had to go to give you the answers weren’t equidistant!”

The fact that this outburst was grammatically mangled, coupled with the pathetic sentiment behind it, only increased my mirth. I only stopped laughing when one of the victims of this terrible injustice asked me what I was laughing at.

I was in Sri Lanka with a couple of my quiz team members and I read an interesting article about pub quizzes in Columbo. Apparently, after humble, fun beginnings, the quizzes became more serious, with pubs offering big prizes in order to gain more custom. 10,000 rupees was the top prize at the most popular venue. This led to teams hiring “professionals” – you know, geeks – who are given a “victory bonus” and a weekly salary.

We decided against attending.

On our return, we attended the quiz at the Old Brown Shoe, and the team that had been the victims of the tie-break a fortnight before were not there. However, there was a notice on every table saying that teams should stop texting people to find out answers. We also discovered that the quiz at the Old Brown Shoe is about to start running weekly, instead of fortnightly, and the prize money is being raised.

We’re currently talking contracts and victory bonuses with a science teacher colleague.