It’s us in the hotseat again. Due to a series of miscommunications between us in the previous few days, we turn up to find we’ve got 70 questions between us instead of the required 40, and we have some whittling to do before things get under way. In the best tradition of quiz setting, about half of my questions self-indulgently reference my recent holiday, so I scrap about half of those in the cull.

At the end of the night, there is still over £1000 in the snowball. And, for the first time ever, Stu’s number comes up. Unfortunately for him, it’s a question about an architect who designed a fountain at Chatsworth House. Stu’s chance of a grand is gone, and the second ticket drawn belongs to none other than Evil Patrick. His questions asks for the father and son who were both prime ministers and who were not the Pitts, because everyone knows them. Patrick thinks for a few seconds, then his eyes flash red and he says “Greville”. Actually, the answer is Grenville, but his answer is judged close enough and he wins £500.  Even in the Prince of Wales, no-one is pedantic enough to begrudge him the winnings for the sake of one letter. Except me. A bit.  Once Patrick’s taken his money, there is £666 left in the pot…

Try our questions here.

The team tonight is me, Stu and Pete. We agree that it’s been a while and it’s definitely time we won, or at least got some money out of our evening. We start with a good first round, correctly identifying Jools Holland as the author of Barefaced Lies and Boogie-woogie Boasts, and Eric Gill as the sculptor of the statue outside Broadcasting House. I say that as if we all know all about Eric Gill, but actually I’ve never heard of him and I don’t think Pete has either. Stu’s the man with the necessary ridiculously obscure knowledge this evening.

Somehow in round two we avoid our normal collapse. Pete knows enough about hockey to say that it starts with a pushback, and between us we manage a pretty good stab at naming all the British winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. We don’t manage to work out the animal whose name is also the acronym for the Harry Potter equivalent of A-levels, which turns out to be newt rather than toad. We decide to have a few bitter recriminations, as I say I knew it would have a W in it and the others demand to know why I didn’t mention that. I did, but they weren’t listening.

When the results are read out, we’re in second, but Chris is tonight’s quizmaster and he seems to have taken some kind of offence at our team name and states very clearly that we are not going to win tonight. We thought no-one would be too upset by our comment on some Liberal Democrat leadership issues, but it seems Chris might be a hardcore Ming fan.

Can we even hold onto second place? Round three is pretty tough but a question asking for all the countries that border Algeria is a big help. I love this kind of question and we get all six right (Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali and Niger). And after much scribbling and disagreement, we also manage to name seven of the last eight foreign secretaries. The only one we miss out is the man who is in the job right now - his name’s Milliband or something, apparently.

As round four progresses, we discover that Chris is not a diehard Campbellite, but that Marcus has been spreading the vicious rumour that the ‘old git’ was Chris and that ‘ginger pisshead’ refers not to Charles Kennedy but to Evil Patrick. At least two other regular quiz setters think that ginger pisshead might refer to them. Patrick seems very offended that someone might call him ginger. We set the record straight, but still we don’t win - second place is ours, though, and we each go home £4.33 richer.

The team tonight is me, Pete, Stu and Stu’s new flatmate Ian. In their youth, Stu and Ian appeared on an Irish schools quiz television programme, losing in the first round but apparently in the most exciting round ever seen, in which they clawed back a 17 point deficit to take the lead with seconds to go, only to be retaken at the very last possible moment after a cheeky interruption from their opponents. Given this auspicious quizzing history we should surely be in contention tonight.

Ah, but it’s one of Evil Patrick’s quizzes. We won one of them once, but that was an unusual Patrick quiz because it wasn’t dominated by poetry and classics, and the sort of cerebral, cultural questions that young folk like us struggle with. Tonight’s is, but despite mostly guessing in the first round, we find ourselves second. Pete arrives incredibly late but just in time to tell us that the radio station that stopped transmitting on 30 September 1967 was not Radio Luxembourg but the BBC Home Service. How does someone in his mid-20s know such things?

We had thought that if we did really badly in the first round we might actually improve in subsequent rounds, but having come in second we know it’s all downhill. We’re asked which company, ‘appropriately’, Helen Sharman was working for before she became the UK’s first astronaut. I say Mars, my team-mates say Comet. I’m sure it’s Mars but I decline an invitation to veto comet, saying I’ll be happy just to be insufferable if Mars is the right answer. It is, and Comet is not just wrong but so wrong the quizmaster singles us out for specific ridicule. As people laugh almost hysterically at us, I don’t have a single word to say.

By the fourth round we need to make up six points even to get back into third place. It looks like an impossible task, and it proves to be just that. I try to save the day by claiming that the definition of callipygean is fat-arsed. Unfortunately it actually means ‘nice-arsed’ and Patrick says that anything derogatory about arses doesn’t get any points. We finish fifth again.

A snowball pot of over a grand and a half drives people to madness, and Stu goes over the edge with a five ticket purchase. It doesn’t help him - the first question is answered wrongly but the second question finally sees some money taken out of the pot. The question is which were the two states before Alaska and Hawaii to be admitted to the US, and the man whose ticket was drawn whips out a pen and paper and starts drawing crazy doodles to help him remember them. I’m sure this is outside the rules but he scribbles uninterrupted and eventually goes for Arizona and New Mexico. It’s the right answer and he’s £500 richer. There will still be £1000 or more in the pot next week.

I am an astronomer. Astronomers need to use telescopes. Telescope application deadlines come twice a year, every year, at the same time of year, without fail. Somehow I have never quite got to grips with this system, and this year I decided to go on holiday to far-flung parts of Eastern Europe just before the October deadlines. Thanks to this poor timing and resultant two weeks of working late, I haven’t been quizzing for a month. So tonight, I’m raring to go.

Our team title, let me specify clearly, is suggested by Oli this week. Unfortunately whatever comic impact we might have hoped for is lost when the quizmaster reads it out as ‘general election’ after the first round and then calls us ‘Gordon Brown etcetera’ for the rest of the night. As happens quite often, we’re in the lead after the first round, helped on the way by my recollection of the first syllable of ‘I’s name from Withnail and I. It takes me the whole round to get anywhere near it - I ignore all the other questions and simply make sounds beginning with M as I struggle to remember it. I get as far as ‘Mar’ before we have to hand it it, so we put Marwick. The answer is Marwood but the quiz master is generous enough to give us a point for it.

But from the lead there’s only one way to go, and week after week we find ourselves hurtling down the order as the rounds progress. It happens so often that it’s probably purely psychological now, and even if round two started by asking for the capital of France we’d probably get it wrong these days. By the end of the night we’re in a disappointing fifth, eleven points off the lead.

There is still the snowball. The pot is now so huge that the top prize is limited to £1000. Across the way from us, a team of despicable poolers have bought twenty tickets between them and seem to be thinking about getting the smuggest member of their team to have a crack at the question if any are drawn. Luckily their numbers don’t come up for the first question, which asks who is the third longest-serving manager in the Premiership, after Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger. The person on the stand doesn’t get it but one of the despicable poolers knew it. The second question names two albums and asks which band released them. Again, the person on the stand doesn’t know, and this time the entire team of despicable poolers shouts out “Whitesnake”. It seems they have very dodgy music tastes as well as a highly unethical approach to pub quizzing. The third question asks for the country whose name means hippo and whose capital’s name means crocodile. I’d have guessed Mali, which turns out to be the right answer. But the whole pot rolls over to next week, and even if someone wins £1000, there will still be several hundred pounds left.