We’re back in the hotseat. When I say we, at first it looks horribly like it might just be me as my co-setters are nowhere to be seen at 9.05pm. I am frantically trying to think of twenty more questions when Oli turns up. Now we just need ten more, but luckily Pete appears just before we get really worried. He is ill, but has dragged himself here from his sickbed to deliver us ten questions and a beer round. Such is our dedication to the cause of setting a good quiz.

To make things more exciting tonight we multiply all scores by a million in the style of an eighties video game. This goes down quite well, with even the lowest scoring teams enjoying scoring 25 million points. At the end of the quiz, a team of staggeringly clever people who have come over from Belfast especially for the quiz take the victory with 75 million points. They won the beer round, and then amazingly one of them is in possession of the winning snowball ticket. He correctly answers the question to win £333, or half an Evil Patrick, and his team have taken a clean sweep. That doesn’t happen very often. Luckily, they will be safely back in Belfast next week and the rest of us will have a chance of winning something.

Try my questions here:

Round Two

1. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in 1910. Who is she better known as?
2. Where in recent years would you have found Double Bind, Marsyas, Raw Materials, Embankment and Test Site?
3. What’s the only country that borders Russia that has never been ruled by a communist government?
4. Which band, who’ve had 20 top 40 singles since 1996, were signed to Creation Records on the condition that they’d speak English when performing live? They had in fact been doing so but Alan McGee could not understand their strong Welsh accents.
5. What is the smallest country in the world that’s not in Europe and isn’t an island?
6. Which government committee meets in times of national crisis in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A?
7. Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee, Hogan from County Tyrone, Johnny McGurk who was scared stiff of work, and a man from Westmeath called Malone were among the crew of which ship?
8. In these days of modern technology, mp3 files are everywhere. What does the mp in mp3 stand for?
9. Which TV programme’s theme tune is performed by the Balanescu Quartet?
10. There are five non-EU sovereign states which use the Euro as their currency, and one territory administered by the UN. Name them all.

Round Four

1. When the pieces on a chess board are given their normal numerical value, what is the total value of all the pieces on the board at the start of a game?
2. Where would you find in a column, the sun, the new, the lazy one, the hidden and the stranger? For a bonus point, what would you find below those?
3. Which former countries had the following internet top-level domains? a) .cs b) .su c) .dd d) .zr
4. Which Atlantic archipelago takes one of its names from the French port of St Malo, and another from a former scottish royal palace in Fife?
5. Which biblical phrase epitomises the concept of Lex Talionis?
6. What is now the largest international airline in the world (ie carries largest number of people on international flights)?
7. Which island did the Knights of St John rule over before political upheaval forced them to take over Malta?
8. Which four African countries does the Greenwich Meridian pass through?
9. What do Blur’s fifth album, the Charlatan’s fourth, Genesis’ 12th, The Smiths’s first album and the Levellers’ third album have in common?
10. Which comedy which ran from 1989 to 1998 was written with the rules that the characters would never hug and never learn?