Quite funny in parts
But on the plus side, every round will be a beer round and we like beer rounds. The five rounds will cover the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, and I am already looking forward to the last two rounds. Pete, though, is a fifty year old in the body of a young man and has the first round covered. The seventies see us drop a few points, although we do manage to get three of the six Eagles albums released in the 1970s, purely on guesswork. Stu’s furious hatred of the Eagles doesn’t stop him getting one of the titles. Marcus and Chris, who organise the quiz and are one or two decades older than us, are in the lead at this point.
I start to get into my stride in the 1980s. Who was Rick Savage the drummer for? It’s a rare pleasure to be able to write down ‘Def Leppard’ in a pub quiz and I relish the moment. And the final question of the round is a song played over the stereo, from which we have to identify the band. It’s Deacon Blue and we have a brief debate on their merits. Stu hates them almost as much as he hates the Eagles. ”Dignity” is a classic track, I contend. Pete agrees - “Name a better song that name-checks John Maynard Keynes”, he quite reasonably demands of Stu. “Give me five minutes and I could write one” claims Stu.
The 1990s requires us to do some very easy things like name Radiohead’s three 1990s albums. We laugh at such simple questions and find ourselves second, three points off the lead, but beaten in this round by the Ian Woan Memorial Team, who dress like old men but are almost as young as we are. The older generation is fading fast, and they concede afterwards that while they were indeed around during the 1990s and we were not around in the 1970s, they were “how shall we put it? Not very interested”, according to Chris.
The final round is a tense affair and involves some unpleasant questions about Coldplay, but when the results are read out, we’ve won this round’s beer money, and sneaked into joint first place. Clean sweep? Surely one of us will win the snowball. Evil Patrick is absent this evening. But no, someone else gets a question about who entered the 1991 Eurovision song contest. He doesn’t know, and perhaps even if he did he would have feigned ignorance because to know that would just be seriously embarrassing. No-one in the pub admits to knowing it was Samantha Janus.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
My name is Ian Woan and I am 42 years old. I dress like an old man.