After two ethically questionable outings, it’s time for a return to the straight and narrow this week. We stick to the team number limit and sit well away from the question master. In the first round we have to name the two European countries whose anthems have no words. We all know that Spain is one of them, but no-one knows the second. Pete says it’s probably Bosnia because it’s unlikely that the two halves of the country would agree on any lyrics, and happily this is correct. We find ourselves in second on 17 points, as do about half of the teams in the pub.

Round two sees dissent break out as we have to name the five most densely populated countries in the world. Stu says Holland, but no-one else is entirely sure of that. Oli says that Malta and the Maldives are definitely in there, but I am certain the answers will all be city states. Stu says Holland is definitely one of them and if we don’t put it down he’ll be extremely angry. Reluctantly we put it down, but Oli is completely over-ruled. When the answers are read out, Malta turns out to be one of them after all. Oli is furious. Luckily he is so consumed by rage that he doesn’t actually hear that the Malidves are also on the list.

The beer round contains five sets of paired answers, all connected by a theme. After three pairs of questions we work out that it’s comedy double acts, and after Ivan tells us that Sammy McIlroy is the manager of Morecambe FC, we presume that the director of Underworld and husband of Kate Beckinsale must be called Wise. But when the answers are read out it turns out he is called Len Wiseman. “Morecambe and Wiseman?” says Stu, incredulously. “Clever question” says Pete. “Morecambe and WISEMAN?” says Stu, now becoming quite angry. Two teams overcame this trickery to get all the questions right and so we spend the first couple of questions of round three in the queue for the bar.

At the end of round three, we think the quizmasters might have said we have 36, when we actually have 46. But we’re not sure if we just misheard them and we would only be in fourth place anyway, so we play on. Then when the final scores are read out, we have apparently scored 10 for 54. This doesn’t entirely make sense, but we think we are outside the money anyway. I am not too fussed about complaining, but as the money is doled out to the winners, everyone else says we must find out exactly where we came, even if it’s sixth. So we query the adding up, and it turns out that the setters did think we were on 36 after round three, and they mis-read our fourth round score which was 18. We’ve actually got 64 points, and somewhat embarrassingly we are in fact the winners. The Ian Woan Memorial Team’s celebrations are interrupted as they are required to return the third-place prize and go home penniless. They’re more gracious about this than we would have been if this had happened to us.

The snowball is reaching epic proportions, and Pete and Ivan buy a colossal nine tickets between them. Evil Patrick is not about this evening so we all feel confident. When the prize is over £500, as it is tonight, punters have three chances to win money - if the first question is answered incorrectly, half the prize is then offered for another question, and then half again for a third if necessary. But none of our numbers come up, all the questions are answered wrongly, and we’ll all be along next week to gamble away a few more pound coins.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.