We’ve been coming to the Prince of Wales for almost five years now, and in all that time I think I’ve been the first to arrive no more than once. I still owe Oli dinner for losing a misguided bet that I could arrive by 8.30pm if I wanted to. Tonight, the tables are turned, and Oli and Stu are both catastrophically late. I do round one more or less by myself, but it’s nice and easy. I’ve watched “24 hour party people“, and I know that the 1976 gig that virtually everyone who ever did anything in Manchester all claimed to be at was headlined by the Sex Pistols. Oli and Stu turn up just in time to tell me which countries turned the G6 into the G7 and then G8, and we manage to drop just one point to find ourselves in the lead.

You’d think that by tripling the brainpower between rounds one and two, we’d start running away with it. Sadly it doesn’t work that way. Asked which former Leicestershire County Cricket Club player said of being bowled out for a very low score in a match against Germany, “I always score one against the Germans”, we work out eventually that it’s Gary Lineker, but that’s pretty much the sole bright spot as we slip into second.

The third round is a Prince of Wales classic. The answers are all connected in that they can be spelled using only letters that score one in scrabble. We know what these letters are, and we start off in blazing form, but we’re undone by what is by far the easiest question of the round. What could refer to, among other things, a Scottish singer, and locally unwanted land use? Marcus enunciates the last bit very clearly, emphasising each word. I think he’s just being slightly pretentious, perhaps, but somehow we fail to notice he’s actually giving us the answer, which is the first letter of each of those words. We’re just about the only team in the pub that doesn’t get this. Disastrously we’ve dropped from a podium position into sixth, and it doesn’t get any better in the fourth round. Our confidence shot, we stagger into a lame seventh.