The pub is quieter tonight than it has been for ages. While it’s always nice to have a full house for a quiz, it is also nice to only mark 10 team sheets at the end of each round. It’s slightly surprising that there are not so many people in, because the snowball prize is massive, and I feel throughout the quiz that people are seeing it as just a slightly annoying distraction before we get on to the serious money. Actually it’s probably just me that’s seeing it like that. The quiz is fairly successful although some people dispute an answer involving Harrison Ford. All I can say is, I got the fact involved from an article in The Guardian, and they are not known as the Grauniad for nothing.

Once the tiresome business of the main quiz is out of the way, we’re onto the snowball. My number is 250, a nice round number, and not only that but the bar woman wrote down the amount in the pot for us to announce on the back of my ticket, so all possible omens are with me. And yes, my number is drawn, for only the third time in three years. Normally when a quiz setter’s ticket is drawn I feel deeply suspicious, but tonight I think anyone harbouring such thoughts is being incredibly uncharitable. I hurry up to the front of the pub, insofar as it’s possible to hurry half a metre, and pick my envelope. I feel good and I’m hardly hyperventilating at all at the thought of going home £650 richer.

“Clem Hemingway was the real name of which character from a popular British sitcom?“, says Marcus.

So I won’t be going home £650 richer tonight then. I can’t even offer a guess, and I’m then disgusted to find that the sitcom in question was the answer to one of my questions in round four. Luckily, no-one else in the pub knows the answer either.

Because the pot is so huge, up to three tickets are drawn each week these days, with the second and third tickets being worth a potential £250 and £125 respectively. The second ticket drawn belongs to a team who are trying to circumvent the “five tickets per person” rule by pooling their tickets, but Marcus is having none of it and ensures that the person who bought the ticket answers the question. The person they wanted to answer the question looks visibly pained as his team-mate gets it wrong. His misery is then compounded when the third ticket drawn belongs to the same person. “Please, please can’t I answer this one?” he pleads, just before his friend gets it wrong again. I’m delighted - if I can’t win the snowball I don’t want anyone else to either.

Try our questions here.

Evil Patrick is setting the quiz tonight, and the one time we stormed to victory in one of his quizzes has made us all forget the numerous other times we’ve floundered in them. All five of us are going to be here this week, and we think the odds on us making it two victories in two weeks are not too long. But Stu is running late, having apparently had an appointment with a Hong Kong tailor that over-ran. He arrives just after we’ve handed in the answers to round one, not looking very tailored and seconds too late to tell us that Reggie Perrin’s middle name was Iolanthe. But in the second round he shames us all by knowing the first three Irish winners of the Nobel prize for literature, while the four of us who are British score zero between us when trying to name the first three British winners.

The beer round answers this week are all terms relating to cricket, and despite Ivan’s deeply tragic knowledge of the sport and its history, we do not get full marks. Luckily this saves us from an argument over the tie-break. How many VCs have ever been awarded? We follow the average theory, as always. Oli says 1,200. I think this is preposterous, and I make a low guess to bring the average down, as do the others. But the answer is 1,356, and so it’s a good job we weren’t even in the running.

Round three contains a question that sounds slightly familiar. Who was originally lined up to play the Terminator before Schwarzenegger got the part? OJ Simpson is our bête noire, frequently coming up as answers to questions he has no right to be the answer to, and which we inevitably get wrong. But we think we’ve had this one before, so we put him down and for once he is the correct answer. We are also the only team which knows that hills with a relative height of more than 150m are known as ‘marilyns’. This is what passes for humour among fell-walkers, the Scottish peaks higher than 3000 feet being known as Munros.

In the final round we struggle to work out who might have invented Meccano. It’s French, according to Oli and Ivan, but that doesn’t help much. In the end, Pete writes down Hornby just for the sake of not having an empty box, and we’re amazed to find that he’s correct. But when we are asked whether it’s true or false that the element Cerium was named after the asteroid Ceres, Pete refuses to accept my assertion that it’s true, saying that they must both be named after Ceres the goddess of agriculture. It’s been almost a year since I said that Neptune was green but I still find it almost impossible to get my team-mates to accept my answers to astronomy questions.

We finish the evening in third place, and we’re all buying up slightly more snowball tickets than usual. Our shocking luck persists, though, and none of our numbers are drawn. Someone from a table who we suspect are pooling their tickets has his number come up, and wins £250 with a question about the first British team to win a European football competition. He answers London, apparently correctly, and we flounce out of the pub in disgust. We’ll be back next week though, for two reasons - firstly because there is still over £500 in the snowball pot, and secondly because we’re setting the quiz.

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.