It’s a return to the Prince of Wales after a long absence for me, Stu and Oli tonight, and surely the omens are good as it’s just over four years since we first turned up here, and just under four years since we filmed our first round of University Challenge. As always, I turn up late, but I redeem myself slightly by knowing that the artist originally known as Richard Melville Hall is the high prince of middle class coffee table music, Moby.

After the first two rounds, we’re in third place. We do quite spectacularly badly on the beer round, though, struggling to two correct answers out of six. We somehow manage to care about the tie break anyway, arguing far more furiously than is possibly justifiable over how many episodes of Frasier there were. We are close to the answer but some other bastards get the beer.

I like the third round the best, because it includes some questions about Formula One. I believe my knowledge of it is unsurpassed - in an episode of Mastermind I happened to watch a few weeks ago, it was someone’s specialist subject and I outscored them by five points. The first Pole on pole (nice question) was Robert Kubica, and the Singapore Grand Prix this year will be unusual because it will be run at night, thanks to another hare-brained scheme from midget Machiavelli of motorsport, Bernie Ecclestone. Sadly, Formula One questions are rare at the Prince of Wales, while cricket questions are unpleasantly common.

We think we’re in third place at the start of round four, but we have probably miscounted because when the final scores are read out, we’re in the horrors of fourth place, the legendary “just outside the money”. It’s an inauspicious return to Highgate. We’ll hope for better things next week.

Tonight we return to the hotseat for the second time in 2008.  I’ll put up the questions shortly.

The only thing I recall from tonight’s quiz is a question about Jorge Luis Borges. Dave (formerly known as Annoying Dave, but he hasn’t won the snowball in quite a while and thus can lose the insulting prefix, for now) is setting the quiz tonight, and asked us last week if we happened to know how to pronounce Jorge Luis Borges. We gave advice, but it was not heeded and the question seems to be about George Lewis Bodges. But pronunciation doesn’t matter - the important thing is knowing what George Lewis Bodges described as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’. We do know that - it’s the Falklands War.

Our performance throughout the evening is unremarkable and we fail to return to winning ways. Has our blazing form in the early months of 2008 faded away?

As predicted, we haven’t turned up for weeks, because two wins in two outings means we’re dead certs for a disaster. And so it proves. A challenging evening ends with us in fifth place. There are only eight teams in the pub. Perhaps the cause of our downfall is that we are doing two pub quizzes simultaneously. Oli’s brother is in a pub in Brighton, shamelessly texting us every couple of minutes. We do better in Brighton than in Highgate, managing third place down there. Sadly it’s winner takes all in that pub, and we go home financially, morally, ethically and generally poor.

This year so far we have roughly alternated between winning, and losing spectacularly. It seems to be an unbreakable law of quizzing that it’s impossible to win two weeks in a row. Tonight, we lack both Ivan and Pete’s dad from the winning team of two weeks ago, so we feel sure it’s going to be challenging. Things start badly when we are asked who was voted as the most Scottish person in the world by readers of the Glasgow Herald in 2003. This is the Prince of Wales so it’s unlikely to be the obvious choices, but who would have thought it would be one of the most disturbing children’s entertainers of all time, Jimmy Krankie? What makes this particularly aggravating is that I’d actually suggested it, but no-one took me seriously. I hadn’t intended it seriously, though I tried to pretend I had afterwards.

But things get better. The last person to be named as a murderer by an inquest jury, we correctly guess, was Lord Lucan. And a statue recently unveiled in Caerphilly by Anthony Hopkins has to be of Tommy Cooper. By the beer round, we’re in the lead.

Our five questions which can earn us a round at the bar tonight are linked by a theme. The theme turns out to be arses. Five different words for rear end are the five different answers, and barely has question five begun (”What 1990s television programme…”) before we are writing down Bottom. The tie-breaker is then simple: what’s the highest score ever recorded in a game of Scrabble. The usual average theory is followed, and the usual disputes arise. I offer something well over a grand, on the basis that I’ve scored over 500 points in a game of scrabble so it must be way higher than that. Everyone else thinks it’s far lower. We end up offering 900 or so, and as it turns out we’re closest because it’s 830.

Normally we expect a slump in form after the beer round, but tonight, fuelled by dry roasted peanuts from our 15 pounds of bar money, we manage to hold on to our lead, and for the first time ever we’ve won on two successive outings. Next time we come we are bound to crash horrifically, and I predict that none of us will come for weeks in a vain attempt to avoid Fate.

Two thirds of the Dream Team is here tonight - Stu says Tuesdays are conspiring against him and is at work, and Ivan is in Scotland, but the rest of us are here to see if we can make it three wins out of five appearances in 2008. I am writing this three months late, and I have no idea what happened, except that we won, and I wouldn’t like to let this go unrecorded.

We all know that after a dominant win comes a humiliating defeat. This is why, since our last outing three weeks ago, everyone’s been coming up with bad excuses and avoiding the quiz. Oli and I eventually decide to turn up and take one for the team.

Chris is setting the quiz, and he’s a fan of the dirty North Londoners who beat the dirty West Londoners in the league cup the other day. He takes offence at our team name, which doesn’t surprise us at all, and tells us we’re not going to win. That doesn’t surprise us either. Even if we called our team ‘Chris is a legend’ we wouldn’t be fighting for the title tonight.

At the end of round one, we’re four points off the lead, which is not so bad. But at the end of round two we’re already in freefall, some 12 points off the pace. This is despite a good question about a current Premiership footballer who played for Liverpool in 1995 and who was a fashion model in 2005. We struggle for a while before I realise it’s ex-Watford keeper David James. Being a hornets fan is surprisingly useful for pub quizzing. But the slump continues, and our main mission is to avoid total humiliation. We define avoiding total humiliation as being less than 20 points off the lead at the end of the quiz, and to our surprise we manage it. We’re miles outside the money but we’ve got a half-respectable fifth place.

The snowball is worth quite a bit at the moment. My ticket has a round number on it and I feel sure it will be drawn, but it’s not. At least Evil Patrick hasn’t been called up. The question begins “No two fermions…” and already I know that the answer will be the Pauli exlusion principle. If I was back on University Challenge I’d have been on the buzzer and ten points would have been mine, but I’m not on television, I’m at the Prince of Wales, and all I can do is stand around looking gloomy. The ticket holder offers Planck as the originator of the principle. Chris knows that I know the answer and thinks I might be the only person in the pub who does. But there are a couple of other scientifically-minded people in tonight so even that minor glory is not to be mine.

So we know that a good win is always followed by a crushing defeat. Next time we come we’ll be testing the hypothesis that the opposite can also be true.

We’ve assembled a Dream Team this week - Pete’s dad is around for the first time in ages, as is Ivan. We should be in with a good chance of a second victory in four weeks, and if there are any cricket questions we’ll be laughing. Well, I’ll be groaning but Ivan will be laughing.

One of the questions in round one is which painting depicts a scene at a farm near Flatford Mill. I say it’s The Hay Wain, but Pete and his dad both say it’s American Gothic. I don’t like to try to overrule both Hinstridges at once so we put American Gothic. I should have overruled them. Such are the disadvantages of a team of six. Luckily, the advantage of a large team is that at least one of us knows the answer to almost every question. We’re in a solid-looking second at the end of the round.

Round two sees us leap into the lead, pulling out four points where we’d been two behind. We then get all five answers correct in the beer round - they are the five films recently nominated for best film in the 2008 Oscars - but so do several other teams. The tie-breaker requires us to guess the total number of epsiodes of Dallas, and we apply the usual average theory. Pete, Stu and Pete’s dad are going for numbers in the three hundreds; Oli, Ivan and I are going for sub-100 guesses, so we end up on a bit less than 200. The answer is 357 and most teams were closer. I offer my apologies and head to the bar.

My favourite question in round three asks who is the youngest person ever to score a point in Formula One. It’s my favourite question because I turn out to be the only person in the pub who knows that it’s Sebastian Vettel. By the end of the round we have an eight point lead, and even with our abysmal record of collapsing in the later stages, we think it would be hard to lose this one.

The final round sees us agonising for a very long time about US states and their capitals. These are a pub quiz standard but tonight’s setters have given us an impressively original take on it. We have to work out which state and its capital have common male names as first syllables, which have common female names, and which has a male name for the state and a female for the capital. Oli says ‘Alaska and Juneau’ startlingly quickly, suggesting he might actually have thought about this question beforehand. While Pete writes down all 50 states, I suggest Kentucky and Pete’s dad says the capital is Louisville so that seems to sort out the male syllables. We struggle for a while on the females, narrowing it down to one of Louisiana, Maryland or (possibly) Pennsylvania. The capital of the first one is Baton Rouge and the last one is Harrisburg, so we think it must be Maryland. But what’s its capital? Stu suddenly remembers that it’s Annapolis, and even though it turns out that the capital of Kentucky is not Louisville but Frankfort, we’ve done enough to preserve our lead and take a dominant victory.

But the Dream Team will be losing a member, at least temporarily. The newly Doctored Ivan is moving to St. Andrews to do teaching and research. We’ll just have to hope that Pete’s dad can make it along more often than he has done in recent months, or that the frequency of cricket questions in Prince of Wales quizzes drops dramatically.

We’re back in the hotseat. When I say we, at first it looks horribly like it might just be me as my co-setters are nowhere to be seen at 9.05pm. I am frantically trying to think of twenty more questions when Oli turns up. Now we just need ten more, but luckily Pete appears just before we get really worried. He is ill, but has dragged himself here from his sickbed to deliver us ten questions and a beer round. Such is our dedication to the cause of setting a good quiz.

To make things more exciting tonight we multiply all scores by a million in the style of an eighties video game. This goes down quite well, with even the lowest scoring teams enjoying scoring 25 million points. At the end of the quiz, a team of staggeringly clever people who have come over from Belfast especially for the quiz take the victory with 75 million points. They won the beer round, and then amazingly one of them is in possession of the winning snowball ticket. He correctly answers the question to win £333, or half an Evil Patrick, and his team have taken a clean sweep. That doesn’t happen very often. Luckily, they will be safely back in Belfast next week and the rest of us will have a chance of winning something.

Try our questions here.

Buoyed by last week’s victory, we’re all keen for tonight’s quizzing action. Oli and Stu are fed up with me being late every week, so I tell them I will buy them both dinner if I get there even a second after 8.45pm. I arrive at 8.50, but luckily they are both later and I can pretend to have won the bet.

So, will tonight see a second victory on the trot? By about the fourth question we think it’s already clear that it won’t, and by the end of the second round we know we’re not even in with a chance of the money. Our aim now is just to avoid humiliation. At least by starting off near the bottom of the field we can avoid the usual slump in form.

The beer round requires us to guess which is longer of six pairs of Wikipedia articles. We spend a long time trying to work out what would be longer out of Charles and Diana, and Mercury the planet and mercury the metal, arguing like there is some logical way to work it out when really we all know this is pure guesswork. We manage to guess four out of the six, but other people have managed to get five, and we enter the last half of the quiz drinkless. By the fourth round, we’re more than 20 points off the lead. We decide that if we score more than half of whatever the winning team gets, we’ll consider that a moral victory. When the scores are read out, our final tally is 33 points, and the winners have 64. We are so happy that everyone else in the pub thinks we’ve won and give us evils.

Evil Patrick is on the winning team, and to no-one’s great surprise but everyone’s despair and disappointment, his number comes up in the snowball yet again. Luckily he doesn’t win it this time, and the pot will roll over. Next week’s quiz will be set by a crack team of UCL graduates and will be a tremendous evening for sure.