It’s us in the hotseat again. Due to a series of miscommunications between us in the previous few days, we turn up to find we’ve got 70 questions between us instead of the required 40, and we have some whittling to do before things get under way. In the best tradition of quiz setting, about half of my questions self-indulgently reference my recent holiday, so I scrap about half of those in the cull.

At the end of the night, there is still over £1000 in the snowball. And, for the first time ever, Stu’s number comes up. Unfortunately for him, it’s a question about an architect who designed a fountain at Chatsworth House. Stu’s chance of a grand is gone, and the second ticket drawn belongs to none other than Evil Patrick. His question asks for the father and son who were both prime ministers and who were not the Pitts, because everyone knows them. Patrick thinks for a few seconds, then his eyes flash red and he says “Greville”. Actually, the answer is Grenville, but his answer is judged close enough and he wins £500. Even in the Prince of Wales, no-one is pedantic enough to begrudge him the winnings for the sake of one letter. Except me. A bit. Once Patrick’s taken his money, there is £666 left in the pot…

Try our questions here:

Round One

1. Who were the two winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?
2. Which band, writers of a christmas song regularly named as the best ever, took their name from a gaelic phrase meaning “Kiss my arse”?
3. What lasting contribution to political terminology was made by the French National Assembly of 1789?
4. What nationality are the following people: Mountaineer Rheinhold Messner? Architect Oscar Niemeyer? Writer Ariel Dorfman?
5. It was initially founded by a soft porn internet search engine company, and takes its name from the Honolulu airport terminal transfer bus. It’s now among the top 10 most popular websites in the world. What is it?
6. In Italian it’s called the snail, in Chinese it’s the little mouse, in Croatian it’s called the Monkey, and in Danish it’s the elephant’s trunk. We don’t really have a word for it in English, but most people will use it many times every day. What is it?
7. Which 2006 film featured a villain whose name means ‘The number’, who suffered from haemolacria?
8. In which European country would you find a province called Moldavia, a mountain called Moldoveanu, and a monastery called Moldovitsa? Clue: it’s not Moldova.
9. In which European country would you find the breakaway Republic of Pridnestrovie, a pro-Russian enclave whose president is called Igor Smirnov?
10. Great Britain is the 8th largest island in the world. Name the seven islands that are larger.

Round Two

This was Oli’s round.

Beer round

1. Which country’s name comes from the Arabic for ‘Land of the blacks’?
2. Ahn Jung-Hwan, Michael Laudrup, Paolo Wanchope and Gary Lineker have all played football in which league?
3. In which city would you find the Castello de Sforzesco, Galleria de Vittorio Emmanuele II and the Basilica de San Lorenzo?
4. The dinosaurs are thought to have become extinct after an asteroid six miles across hit the earth. Off which peninsula does the impact crater lie?
5. Who was exhorted to join the Caravan of Love in the Isley Brothers’ 1985 single?

Tiebreaker – when I travelled through the breakaway Republic of Transdnistria recently, how much in total did I have to pay in bribes to enter and exit?

Round Three

Stu’s round: rest of the questions appearing imminently.

1.  
2.  
3.  
4. What first was marked by the sale of a book called “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought” by Douglas Hofstadter, in July 1995?
5. Lochaber, Sutherland, Lewis, Skye, Bathgate, Linwood, Methil and Irvine all feature in the lyrics of a 1987 hit single, followed by which two words?
6.  
7.  
8.  
9.  
10.  

Round Four

1. Who is currently the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds?
2. Which national newspaper recently published a correction in which they apologised for having misspelt the word misspelt, twice, in a correction the previous day?
3. What is the etymological connection between the words television, homosexual, liposuction, neurotransmitter and sociopath?
4. What is unusual about the theme tune to ‘Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em’? You might expect the same to be true of the theme to Morse, but it’s not.
5. Which football club played in the Premiership from 1999-2001 but currently lie 19th in League Two, the lowest league position of any ex-premiership club?
6. Which head of state, assassinated by his own bodyguards in 2001, briefly fought alongside Che Guevara in 1965 before Che said “Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour” and their revolution was abandandoned?
7. In the Eurovision song contest, what rule, in force from 1966-1973 and 1977-1999, would have prevented Waterloo from winning the contest in 1974 if it had ben in force then?
8. Which sportsman is Lewis Hamilton named after? And which sportsman is Bryan Habana named after?
9. Who was the last person before Lewis Hamilton to score a Formula One victory in their debut season? It happened in 2001.
10. The national airline of Australia is Qantas. What does Qantas stand for?