Tonight the team is me, Oli and my friend Eldrik, who knows lots about tennis and mountain bikes. In all the time I’ve been coming to the Prince of Wales I think there have been two questions about tennis, and none about mountain bikes, but never mind. We start off by correctly guessing that Bernard Matthews is the person who was called in by Krushchev in 1964 to modernise the Soviet poultry industry, after a brief moment of confusion when I mistakenly suggest Bernard Manning. Our main struggle in the first round, though, is to think of a team name. Eventually we come up with a suitably tasteless reference to a recent event, and it gets a good laugh when it’s read out. Sadly our score gets a bigger laugh, because for what we think might be the first time ever, we are in last place.

Luckily round two looks a bit more promising. What’s the hottest planet? Oli leans across and says ‘Venus’, a bit unnecessarily seeing as I’m an astronomer. We also manage to recall from somewhere in the depths of our current affairs recollections that a man called Andreas Grassl became well known as the mysterious Piano Man. He got famous by turning up soaking wet on a beach and then not speaking to anyone for four months, which seems as valid as any other reason. Thanks to him, we’ve moved up four places, to a slightly less embarrassing 11th out of 15.

The beer round turns out to be about astronomy, sort of. The six answers are the surnames of the first six people to walk on the moon. We only get one of the answers right, an unhelpful one which gives us the surname of the sixth man on the moon. And who, really, has ever heard of Edgar Mitchell? Well, maybe we should have done – he recently came out as a crackpot. He believes that life is widespread throughout the universe (which is an entirely sensible belief), and that UFOs have been visiting us for the past 60 years, although governments have covered it all up (which is not).

Unusually for us, we seem to be getting better as the quiz goes on: after round three we’re up to ninth, and round four we blaze through, getting the second-highest score. One question in round four asks us which two Labour MPs, other than Gordon Brown, have been in the cabinet ever since 1997. Oli is the undisputed political geek of the team, but he comes close to losing his crown here, when he gives us Jack Straw but can’t think of the second one. To demonstrate his geekery, he starts writing down every single member of the cabinet, to try and work it out, and eventually correctly decides it’s Alistair Darling.

But there are not just four rounds tonight: there is a bonus round, in which dances are described in words and we have to identify them. A team of three blokes might not be expected to do well with such a round, and indeed we do not. We confuse the Macarena with Saturday Night by Whigfield, and Saturday Night with the Locomotion. We do manage to get YMCA at least, but the end result is that we finish eighth. It’s a bit better than last, but only a little bit.

Vast sums are up for grabs with the snowball. With more than 500 pounds in the pot, if the first question does not yield a winner, another ticket is drawn and half the money is offered. And if that doesn’t get got, a third ticket is drawn for a quarter of the cash. I’ve got a tenner in my hand and I’m almost tempted to buy the maximum five tickets instead of my usual one, but I resist. Eldrik doesn’t buy a ticket, saying that there is simply no way he would ever know any of the answers. As it turns out, though, he knows that the river over which the Millau Viaduct soars is the Tarn. Luckily, the person required to know this doesn’t, and we’ll all be back next week to yearn once more for filthy piles of cash.