I arrive strangely early at the pub this evening. Stu and Oli are already there but still, it’s not even 9pm. Is it because I sense good things in the offing tonight, or is it just an accident? Who knows? Either way, the quiz starts well and we’re in second place after round one. We hold on to the spot in round two, rise to joint first in round three, and remarkably we take an outright victory with a sterling performance in round four. We also come very close to winning the beer round, only narrowly missing out with a poor tiebreak guess. We share out 24 pounds between us and we’re very satisfied with our second win of 2010. But for reasons which are about to become clear, I can hardly remember the actual quiz. The reasons are snowball tickets number 45 and 46, which I bought way back in round two. It’s been almost six years since we started coming here, I’ve bought one or two tickets every single time, and my number comes up about once a year on average. Every time it does, I get some stupidly hard joke of a question about cricket, fail to [...]

This month I am ridiculously busy, preparing a paper on some of the first results from the Herschel Space Observatory. But I escape from the office for a brief couple of hours to make it to the quiz. I am horrendously late even by my own standards, and arrive at the start of round 3. My arrival must surely be the reason we rocket astonishingly up the order, from 10th to 3rd. My only real contribution is knowing that Robbie Coltrane played Eddie Fitzgerald, better known as Fitz from Cracker. None the less I feel like I must deserve the credit. I have no idea what it must mean, then, when round four sees us plunge back down to 8th. Disappointed, I head back to the office for a few more hours of work.

Tonight only Ivan and I can make it. I’m in training for some endurance mountain bike races, and I’m running late so I decide to cycle up Highgate Hill straight to the pub, instead of up Archway Road to my house and then to the pub. I took on Highgate Hill once before, slightly too soon after eating, and felt sick all evening. Tonight I do a bit better, but it’s a hell of a hill and I’m destroyed by the time I get to the pub. As a result, I contribute almost nothing and we finish poorly. Must remember to keep cycling and quizzing separate in future.

We start this evening on blazing form. Prince of Wales quizzes often have a “nice easy one to start”, but tonight’s is about Icelandic corporate raiders. Despite this, we work out why Baugar named their offshoots Kcaj and Arev. They must be fans of Coronation Street, which I never watch and know nothing about, except that I know there are characters called Jack and Vera. After this complicated start, we get almost full marks and find ourselves in the lead. There is only one way to go from here. Round two is a bunch of questions which have an easy answer and a hard answer. We are big enough fans of the Manic Street Preachers to name both their songs which have “Life” in the title (and they are both masterpieces), and there’s a cricket question for Ivan as well. We hold narrowly on to the lead. But then we begin to slip. The patron saint of Jersey, we guess, is St. Helier, but then there’s a question about a sitcom which ran from 1979 to 1981 and then returned in 2007. We argue fiercely, very very nearly write down To The Manor Born and then decide to write down [...]

There are only seven teams in the house tonight. It’s the quietest night in years, so we have to fancy our chances of getting into the money. The quiz is pretty easy tonight, by Prince of Wales standards, even including a question asking for the capital of Australia. Such straightforward questions are manna from heaven for us, but also to everyone else in the pub. We find ourselves in fifth at the end of the first round. Luckily our form improves, and we get into second place. The beer round answers are all cricket grounds, but even Ivan doesn’t know that the SWALEC stadium is one of the test cricket grounds. I don’t even understand what test cricket is, let alone where it’s played, but I berate him anyway. We finish the quiz in joint third place. The quiz masters have overrun a little bit and decide that it’s not worth a tie-break to sort out who wins the five pounds of prize money, and we get £2.50 for our efforts – 83.3p each for me, Ivan and Oli. It’s probably the smallest prize we’ll ever get at the Prince of Wales.

I am late again. By the time I arrive, I’ve missed most of the first round, and the team name has unfortunately been chosen. But I’m just in time for a Formula One question so I should be able to redeem myself. It’s a question about three time world champions, and I inexplicably fail to remember that Niki Lauda was one of them. The next question is about Buzkashi, a national game involving a goat corpse. Which country’s national game is it? I’m sure it’s Afghanistan. The others want to put Mongolia. I’m sure it’s Afghanistan but I’m chastened by my earlier failure and so I keep quiet. It’s Afghanistan. By the time of the beer round it’s clear we’re not going to be troubling the money, so we concentrate hard in the hope of salvaging something from our evening. It’s an excellent beer round – the quiz master showed his small children some classic album covers and noted down their descriptions of them, and now we have to name the classic album from the descriptions. We get Led Zeppelin IV, Velvet Underground + Nico, Parklife by Blur, Screamadelica by Primal Scream, and Autobahn by Kraftwerk despite me trying to [...]

I am very late; so late that I’m almost sacked from team. They’re doing OK, but I know that Wilbert Vere were the first two names of Awdry and they don’t, so I am allowed to stay on, until round two anyway. They have everything else covered, and we find ourselves high up the table. Keith and Anne are setting the quiz tonight. Apparently their beer rounds have been rated as too hard so they’ve dumbed this one down especially. The first two answers are Jimmy Hoffa and Marie Celeste, and I feel sure the connection has something to do with the Osmonds. But it’s simpler than that, it’s just things to do with disappearances. We get all six questions right, and it’s down to the tiebreak. How long is the longest golf course in the world? We guess 779 miles and hand in our sheet. The answer is apparently required in kilometres but we can’t be bothered to multiply anything by 1.609 right now. We say, go with the flow. 779km will do. The answer is 1365km, but we’re closest anyway, and we enter round three with thirst slaked. One of the questions in round three involves book titles [...]

There are 19 teams in the house tonight, the biggest field ever seen. The Prince of Wales is not a big pub and it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta on evenings like this. The quizmaster faces a daunting task of marking furiously between rounds. He doesn’t do himself any favours by starting the quiz ten minutes late, and is forced to read out the questions in the style of a horse racing commentator. We dominate in round one. We did this last time out as well, and we know the form: we will do really badly in round two and squander the five point lead. We all agree that this will be a difficult task, but we concentrate hard and manage to do it – after round two we’re in second. We’re impressed that we pulled this off and there are handshakes and congratulations all round. Round three has a nice question about Harry Nilsson and Mama Cass – she died in his flat, as did Keith Moon, and everyone at the Prince of Wales knows this because every regular quiz setter seems to have asked this question. But who had hits in the 1990s with covers of their [...]

2009 was a poor year for us at the Prince of Wales. We didn’t win the quiz, nor the beer round, nor (obviously) the snowball. Would 2010 be any better? We start the quiz on blazing form. We know everything in round one, except for one question – what was the first oscar-winning film to have an all-male cast? We think it might be “12 Angry Men” – luckily Stu arrives just before the end of the round and tells us it’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. We’ve got full marks and a three point lead. Surely we’re going to win. But it’s all downhill from there. By the end of the second round we’re only in joint first. The third round sees Ivan get a cricket question wrong, and us stumble into fourth. We’re not far off the money and our table is a scene of grim concentration during round four. It does no good – we continue the Slump and finish fifth. It’s a disastrous start to 2010.

Our team is split into factions tonight. It’s me and Oli v. Stu, Pete and Ivan – they are setting the quiz, and Oli and I are hoping to put in a decent performance. It doesn’t look like we will at first. Ivan’s round is pretty tough, and it includes a question about Rome. Who or what are the biancocelesti? We haven’t got a clue and I’m having flashbacks to a time when Ivan set a whole round about Rome in which two teams scored no points at all, and we almost got lynched. The biancocelesti are Lazio football club, as it turns out. We manage to score three points, and decide not to lynch Ivan, for now. The beer round questions are completely beyond us, but we still end up arguing fiercely about the tie-break. It’s a list of food items, and Pete wants to know how much more the list would cost in Waitrose than in Sainsburys. Oli and I pointlessly manage to come closest to the right answer, but we didn’t get any of the questions right, which is unfortunately a prerequisite. We buy our own drinks. Stu’s questions make a few references to places he’s just [...]

I’m late to the quiz this evening, as so often. Luckily Ivan and Oli arrive in time to cover round one and most of round two, and they get us into a respectable position. The beer round involves paintings. Back in the day we used to win the beer round with impressive regularity, but inexplicably we lost the knack and we haven’t won it for about two years. We have almost given up trying to win, though we still never buy drinks until we know we’ve lost it. Tonight it doesn’t look good – we’ve got to identify the artist of a selection of 10 paintings, in which only the eyes are shown. My sole contribution is recognising the Mona Lisa. But Oli and Ivan between them know almost everything else. We get nine out of ten, and it’s down to the tiebreak. If you took 100 pounds to the post office, changed it into US dollars, then changed it back, all at the most favourable rate on offer, how much would you have? I travel a lot so I should probably have an idea. But on the other hand I’m extremely financially careless and I get all the foreign [...]

Perhaps tonight I am not on the best form for quizzing. I went clubbing last night, got home at 9am, then had to give a two hour lecture at 6pm. By the time I arrive at the pub, extremely late, to meet Ivan, I’m so exhausted I can hardly remember my own name, let alone any interesting trivia. Keith and Anne are setting the quiz. I like their quizzes because they always contain a question or two about Formula One. Tonight, though, my hopes are dashed. At least I think they are. Maybe I just fell asleep for a moment when they ask the question. What I do notice, though, is that in round four, a lot of the answers seem remarkably familiar. We are asked what Bill Clinton’s middle name is. It’s Jefferson, and wasn’t there a question earlier about Thomas Jefferson? My addled brain seems to recall that there was. We eventually conclude that all the answers are things that appeared earlier in the quiz. This genius idea for a round means that although we finish a poor fifth out of ten, we go home happy. I expect that next time I set the quiz, some derivative variant [...]

Throughout most of this year our team has consisted of only two or three of us. Normally if there’s two of us, humiliation results. With three, we almost inevitably finish fourth. If there are four of us, we can compete for the money. But for a while now we’ve been wondering what has happened to Pete. Since we set the quiz in July he’s gone underground and no-one’s heard a word from him. Tonight he surprises us all by putting in an appearance. I am late. I miss the first round entirely, but this seems to have done the team no harm as we’re in third. In the second round, all the answers are types of alcohol, and my only contribution is to suggest that a description of a village in Somerset must surely be of Butcombe. It is, we’ve got full marks and we’re in the lead. The third round answers are all pubs in Highgate. Many regulars don’t live in Highgate and thus don’t go to any Highgate pubs except the Prince of Wales. I used to be one of them but now I’m a local. Unfortunately I’m a local who walks around with his eyes shut – [...]

It’s late September, the time of year when I start complaining about my nice relaxing university being full of bloody students. I have to teach some of them, on Tuesday evenings, and for the next three months I’m going to be arriving at the pub even later than usual. By the time I get there this evening, round one is almost over. Ivan’s been working away on his own. The other astronomers are now turning into regulars here, and one of my rival teams only has three people on it. Ivan and I decide to join them. We pool all the answers we’ve got so far, and we end up in fourth place after round one. My negligible contribution to the answers so far doesn’t stop me flicking Vs at the other UCL team across the pub who are a few places behind us. There are an unusual number of popular culture questions tonight. There’s a question about Dan Brown’s most recent book, something about Wallace and Gromit’s latest film, and a great question about the TV program that used to get higher viewing figures than the population of the country in which it was made. It has to be [...]

I arrive very late this evening but I’m just in time to tell the team which African country Ali Bongo is the president of. Sadly I tell them the wrong answer as I unaccountably confuse Gabon with Equatorial Guinea. Luckily I do manage to correctly say that the Netherlands is the country immediately east of London City airport. The team is me, Stu, Ivan for the first time in ages, and Annoying Dave whose regular team have gone AWOL. Annoying Dave’s snowball ticket is drawn outrageously often, which is why he’s annoying, but strangely, people sitting close to Dave often find their number being drawn as well. We’re hoping for this phenomenon to be observed this evening. The quiz is a ‘challenging’ one. There is a cricket question, which makes Ivan very happy, but geography and science questions are not figuring much. My favourite question asks who was known for a while in 1992 as Steve Romana. David and I both know that it’s the guy who fraudulently appeared on 15 to 1 twice by going on in a disguise. But what’s his real name? Eventually David says “Trevor”, and I realise his surname was “Montague”. Top teamwork – right [...]

Oli and I are the team for most of the first round tonight. We’re doing OK but we have no idea which tube station might have been inspired by the Moscow Metro. Luckily, Stu turns up seconds before the end of the round to tell us it’s Gants Hill. With this inspired bit of obscure knowledge, we get off to a decent start, hovering around the money positions. A question in round two starts “Laurent Cassegrain”, and immediately I start writing down “telescopes”. There is another team in the pub that is also looking happy at this point; they are also astronomers, friends of mine from UCL, but for them, this will be a rare moment of happiness during this quiz. We maintain a decent position; they hover worryingly close to bottom spot. The beer round is a disaster. We have no idea about the answers and write down OJ Simpson for several. The tie-break asks how many people from Chapel Street in Altincham volunteered to serve in the First World War. We put 160, and the answer is 161, but it does us no good. One of the questions in round three should suit those of us with science [...]

This is the 18th time we’ve set a Prince of Wales quiz, but tonight we’ve made a drastic change to the arrangements. Instead of the usual mix of questions from all of us, It’s just me and Oli setting it, and Stu and Ivan are here to compete. Next time out, they’ll set it, and Oli and I will compete. I’m kind of hoping Stu and Ivan don’t win because if they do it will surely reek of a fix. I set the first and last rounds; Oli does the middle two and the beer round. Oli’s questions are definitely harder than mine; one team who had felt pretty confident after the first round say that they “feel raped” after the second. Even with 15 teams in the house and only two of us to mark the answers, we manage not to over-run as horrifically as we normally do, and it’s on to the Snowball. As always these days, there is more than £1000 in the pot. As Chris starts cranking up the tension, I’m suddenly accosted by someone nerdy-looking. Apparently he didn’t even take part in the quiz but has some bizarre objection to one of my questions. I [...]

The team is Stu, Oli and me. This is the first time in weeks that there have been more than two of us, so we may yet escape ignominy. We start well with a question about a hill in Nepal that was recently renamed after someone. Stu reckons it’s Joanna Lumley, which is an answer too good to be wrong. But then we have a question about a war poet who died in 1967. Stu suggests Siegfried Sassoon but for some reason I’m sure he died in the war. He didn’t. I blame Oli for failing to arbitrate properly in the dispute. Paul McCartney has sold 100 million records as a solo artist and as a member of a band. Who’s the only other person to have done this? We guess that it might be John Lennon, but we’ve failed to take into account that it’s the Ian Woan Memorial Team that’s setting the quiz tonight. Several teams at the Prince of Wales have an answer they always like to get into the quiz when they set it; Oli always asks a question about San Marino, for no apparent reason. Evil Patrick normally gets in Casablanca. The Woans, inexplicably, always [...]

Me and Stu make the trek up to Highgate for the quiz tonight. There are a staggering number of teams in the house tonight, and we do very badly. In the end, we finish about 15th out of 17, just ahead of a team of jokers who weren’t taking it seriously and a team who gave up before the end. There’s always the snowball to hope vainly for. I’ve taken to buying two tickets instead of one these days, which makes me twice as angry when my number doesn’t come up. The £1000 question is, who was the first Prime Minister of Nigeria after it gained independence? I wish my number had been drawn because I’m the only person in the pub who knows it’s Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. And then to compound my woes, someone wins £250 on the third question.

I went to pub quiz in Highgate last week that wasn’t the Prince of Wales. One of the other teams at this heretical quiz had an amusing name, which we steal shamelessly. Fortunately they aren’t here and we get away with this blatant thievery. The quiz starts off with a nice easy one. What’s the Catalan word for pan? I know that, I’ve been to Catalunya – it’s paella, and we’re off to a good start. There are many “Blue Mosques” in the world, but where’s the one that’s also known as Sultanahmet? I’ve been there as well – it’s Istanbul. We may only be half way through round one, but already I feel that we’re in contention for a long-awaited win. Round two, question one. Who was arrested in 1994 for the murder of Ronald Goldman? Whenever we don’t have a clue about an answer, we put OJ Simpson, no matter how inappropriate. In this case, OJ is actually the answer, and we can legitimately write him down for once. After two rounds, we’re in a competitive-looking fifth place. Can we make it into the money? Oli knows that Roddy Doyle wrote the Barrytown Trilogy, and I know that [...]

Normal order is resumed tonight, as I arrive much later than everyone else. Stu looks a bit under the weather and it turns out he’s joined in the pandemic fun that’s sweeping the world and had swine flu. He reckons the infectious phase is over. The quiz seems pretty tough tonight. Keith and Anne are setting it, and I always rely on their penchant for the odd Formula One question but tonight they’ve gone all Linnean and half the questions seem to be about the names of phyla and genera of various plants and animals. Accordingly, we struggle, and it’s not until round three that we finally get the F1 question. I almost don’t get it – the question asks who recently replicated the achievements of Walter Wolf’s team in 1978 of winning at the first attempt, but I mishear it as ‘Walter Wolfstein’. I realise in time that it’s Brawn GP, who will no doubt be hoping that their emulation of Wolf doesn’t extend as far as following up a winning debut season with a season of mediocrity, a season of inadequacy and then bankruptcy. We’re firmly entrenched in the mid-table. The last round includes a question asking which [...]

Tonight, once more, the responsibility of ensuring that the trivia-obsessed denizens of Highgate have a fun Tuesday evening is ours. The quiz goes OK, perhaps a little bit on the hard side or perhaps the quizzers are saving up their knowledge in case they get called up for the snowball. I certainly am. I’m distraught, then, when my ticket doesn’t come up and the winning question is about Formula One. Who made the first British car to win the British Grand Prix? I know it. Does the ticket-holder? Yes, he does, and my ever-growing Snowball enemies list gains another entry. Here’s our questions – answers on request. Round One (Stu) Round Two (Oli) Beer round (me) Which long time European dictator’s name derived from the Serbo-Croat for “you – that”, in reference to his style of issuing orders? Who is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having performed the most stunts of any living actor? Outtakes, including horrible injuries, are shown as the credits roll in all his films. Who turned down the 1972 Oscar for Best Actor, sending native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony to explain his reasons? Which former Arsenal and Liverpool footballer, now [...]

It’s almost dark when I arrive at the pub half way through round one. This disturbs me; I’ve just arrived back in the UK after three weeks in Greenland and Iceland and I’ve got used to 24 hour daylight. There was a question about Greenland in the quiz the week before I left, and we got it wrong. Will there be more tonight? I doubt it. Me and Stu form the team this week. As is customary when there are just two of us, we struggle. The only bit we do at all well on is an excellent bonus round in which we have to name songs whose titles are verbs, given the artist and the year. Tragically enough, two of them are by Take That, and we get the both. But it’s still not enough to get us anywhere near the money. And there aren’t any Greenland questions either.

For something like the third time in a row, I am at the pub first. I’m not used to this and it freaks me out. Stu rolls up at about ten past nine and the quiz gets under way shortly afterwards. It’s an Evil Patrick quiz tonight, but despite that we start off in fine form, lying a surprise second after round one, though we slip back to fourth in round two. Oli and I came close to winning the beer round two weeks ago. We come even closer tonight. A question about a Czech author starts us off. There may be Czech authors who are not Milan Kundera but I don’t know who they would be. We anticipate ‘Milan’ being the key to the connection and so it proves. A question about an actress – Sienna Miller. First recipient of some award or other in 1907 – Florence Nightingale. And then a fantastically lucky guess – the name of a flag on a ship is requested, and out of total ignorance we write down ‘Genoa’, which turns out to be the right answer. So, the tie-break. How many individuals won gold medals for Great Britain at the Olympics? I [...]

Oli and I make a last-minute decision to turn up tonight. It’s actually later than last-minute – I get there half way through round one, and Oli makes it just before round two. Probably as a result, we find ourselves mired in the mid-table. The only bright spot is the beer round. Once upon a time we won quite a few beer rounds, but it must have been a fluke, like monkeys producing Shakespeare, because it’s now been years since we last triumphed. This time, we twig early on that all the answers begin with A and end with Z. An island discovered in 1775 by Juan Manuel de Ayala – that would be Alcatraz. And Fred Astaire’s actual surname was Austerlitz. A ship which ran aground in the Channel in 1978 causes us some trouble, but somehow Oli drags the name Amoco Cadiz from the depths of his memory. We get all five answers, and all we need to do now is say how many times Joe Kinnear swore at the press in his infamous diatribe. I say 45; Oli says 63, so our answer is 54. The actual answer is 52. Surely we’ve won! But no! A team [...]

We’ve been coming to the Prince of Wales for almost five years now, and in all that time I think I’ve been the first to arrive no more than once. I still owe Oli dinner for losing a misguided bet that I could arrive by 8.30pm if I wanted to. Tonight, the tables are turned, and Oli and Stu are both catastrophically late. I do round one more or less by myself, but it’s nice and easy. I’ve watched “24 hour party people“, and I know that the 1976 gig that virtually everyone who ever did anything in Manchester all claimed to be at was headlined by the Sex Pistols. Oli and Stu turn up just in time to tell me which countries turned the G6 into the G7 and then G8, and we manage to drop just one point to find ourselves in the lead. You’d think that by tripling the brainpower between rounds one and two, we’d start running away with it. Sadly it doesn’t work that way. Asked which former Leicestershire County Cricket Club player said of being bowled out for a very low score in a match against Germany, “I always score one against the Germans”, [...]

We like our team name tonight. It’s great. Now that is scientific fact – there’s no real evidence for it – but it is scientific fact. Unfortunately no-one else in the pub tonight is a fan of Brass Eye, it seems, and no-one else finds it particularly amusing. It’s St. Patrick’s day outside the pub, and Evil Patrick’s day inside. Sometimes we win his quizzes; sometimes we leave the pub humiliated and ashamed. Tonight starts off quite promisingly, with a spectacular guess about a highly obscure cricket question. For those of us who are not Ivan, all cricket questions are highly obscure, and a question asking for the silver medallist at the 1900 Olympics is as baffling as any. Ivan is not here, so we guess France, and we turn out to be right. After the first couple of rounds we’re in a solid-ish fourth place, only a few points away from big money. But then it goes horribly wrong. Poetry and classics are really not my thing at all, and they’re not Oli’s, Stu’s or Eldrik’s either, but they are definitely Patrick’s, and they feature heavily. We score a woeful two points in round three, hurtling down the order [...]

We’re back in the hotseat for our first quiz of 2009. The number of people who come to the pub each week varies according to factors that no man understands, and this week it’s absolutely rammed. We mark furiously between rounds and somehow manage to avoid over-running as much as we usually do. Here’s our questions: Round One (Pete) Which celebrity was convicted in December 2008 of falsely imprisoning a Norwegian male prostitute? The Who’s Valentines day 1970 concert at Leeds University, recorded for the ‘Live at Leeds’ Album, featured a complete live performance of which of their studio albums? Which incumbent Head of State is the first democratically elected woman to succeed another democratically elected woman as head of a modern Western country? Who did she replace? Which film of 1996 chronicles the 1974 boxing match between Ali and Foreman in Zaire (DR Congo), and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature that year? Which British rock band of the 1970s was fronted by Paul Rodgers and had hits with ‘All Right Now’ and ‘My Brother Jake’? “It is not a service station, neither is it a political society, nor is it a meeting place for political societies. With [...]

Pub quizzers are a tragic bunch really – everyone who goes to the Prince of Wales has been gripped by the finale of this year’s university challenge and almost every team name tonight somehow relates to it. We are the same. We’re always upset to see Corpus Christi winning, but on the other hand, Manchester being overtaken in the last few minutes is a good result in our book. Tonight’s quiz is what is known in the parlance as a ‘challenging’ one. We mostly guess the answers, relying on certain inalienable rules of quizzing: the only cricketer who existed before 1920 was WG Grace, and in the 19th century, there were but two politicians, and they were Gladstone and Disraeli. One question we should obviously get right is about astronomy. Which planet is 30 astronomical units away from the Sun? An astronomical unit is only 150 million kilometres, and I look at things billions of times further away. I think it’s Neptune but Oli thinks it’s Uranus. I try to work it out by independently rediscovering Bode’s Law on the back of the answer sheet, and eventually decide it’s Uranus. I confused these two once before, and I’ve confused them [...]

It’s an evening of near misses tonight. We used to frequently win the beer round, but it’s been years since we last claimed the 15 pounds. Tonight we almost do it, correctly answering five questions, but slipping up on the tiebreak. Demoralised by this, we finish fourth in the quiz, the legendary “just outside the money”. Demoralised by that, when my number is drawn in the snowball for only the fourth time in almost five years, I don’t know the answer. The question was which author killed his wife by ill-advisedly trying to shoot an apple off her head. When we bought the snowball tickets, I bought Stu’s because I owed him a pound. I decided which of the two tickets I had bought I was going to give him, and so it could just as easily have been Stu going up for the chance to win £500. And naturally, while I have no clue about the answer, Stu is one of the few people in the pub who does actually know it. If I was him, I’d probably never speak to me again. Luckily Stu is more magnanimous than I am.

Tonight’s quiz setters are Keith and Anne, and their quizzes normally include at least one question about motor racing, which I like, and one which is some kind of pun, which I don’t so much because I’m rubbish at getting them. Example: what kind of alcohol can a child buy if ice is added to it? Liquorice. Groan…. Tonight’s, though, has neither. Though we struggle in the first round, Pete and I start to pull ourselves together in the second round, and get better from there. By the start of the fourth we’re only just outside the money. Normally this is the point at which we fall apart, but somehow tonight we manage to score almost full marks on the final round. We haul ourselves into third for our first cash of 2009. Last week I was in Tenerife, and of course that would be the week that an obscenely easy question comes up in the snowball. I find out that Marcus was the lucky owner of the winning ticket, getting the question “What was unusual about the birth of Virginia Dare in 1587?” This is about the first snowball question I’ve known the answer to since about 2006. Still, [...]

Our quiz setters tonight prudishly neuter our team name, After the first round we think they may have just misread our handwriting, so we write very carefully on the round two answer sheet. They still render it as ‘twit’. We suspect they are also prudishly neutering our scores, because once again we find ourselves mired in the mid-table. This is despite some impressive knowledge of dogs from Eldrik, who comes along once in a while. He knows a lot about biking, tennis and Sweden (and amazingly, one time he came along the very week there was an entire round about Sweden, allowing us to take a handsome victory), but tonight the question is what are Kerry Blue, Fox, Boston and Rat all types of. Kerry Blue? No way is that a type of dog. But Eldrik insists, and he turns out to be right.

During 2008 we went to the Prince of Wales 24 times, and took six victories. We finished second twice, didn’t finish third at all but finished fourth four times. Clearly this must mean that every time we’re in third before the last round we crack under the pressure. 2009 starts with an evening of fearsome cold. Temperatures in Highgate are well below freezing, my glasses steam up the moment I walk in the pub and I stumble around blindly until I bump into Pete. Chris is setting the quiz, and inexplicably wants us to think of a team name before round one even begins. Normally we spent most of round one ignoring the questions and concentrating on the team name instead but tonight we have to submit something lame. Does this free our minds and allow us to score highly? It does not. The quiz tonight is all about things that happened last year, but we must not have been concentrating and our scores are modest. Who published his bank account details to prove that no-one would be able to do anything with them, only to have 500 pounds stolen the next day? We remember that it was Jeremy Clarkson, [...]

It’s been weeks since we last competed, but finally there are enough of us around to form a sensible team and we return to the Prince of Wales. It’s packed, and we are forced to stand next to one of the roaring fires. Heatstroke threatens, but luckily Chris knows how to turn it off. Evil Patrick is setting the quiz. When this happens, there is a small chance that we’ll do well (we won one of his quizzes, once), but a much larger chance that we’ll do horrifically badly (we dropped from joint first to seventh in the space of one round in another of his quizzes). Luckily, the first round is quite easy. Helped by knowing all eight Tottenham managers from the last twelve years, and also perhaps our team name, we score full marks and we’re in the lead. Round two is a little bit more difficult, but we only drop a couple of points, and not only do we not lose the lead, we actually stretch it a bit. The cash machine outside the pub is offering every conceivable financial option except for withdrawing money. We’re all down to pennies and we’re very thirsty, so we concentrate [...]

After a long break we’re back in the hotseat tonight. Each of the groups who set the Prince of Wales quiz regularly bring something unique and recognisable to it, and one of the things we feel that we do well is to give the evening a slight sense of shambolic disorganisation. We excel this evening, over-running by twenty minutes and then finding out that two teams managed to claim the beer round prize. No idea who the fraudsters were but we’ll be watching carefully next time. Here’s some of our questions: Round One (me) Who said in a recent interview that one of the things he hates most is people who misspell his name? “It’s real simple”, he said. “Just look at the albums. There’s a space in there” Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz, from Seville, have been performing Andalusian folk songs together since the 1960s. They briefly became world famous in 1996. Who are they, and for what did they become Since records began, the total number of murders in England and Wales has only ever been above 1000 in a year once, in 2003. What caused this? In April this year (2008), a man was charged with [...]

Ivan’s here this week, for the first time in ages. He has not lost his ability to answer uncannily obscure cricket questions, but neither has he lost his tendency to say the answers to questions just a little bit too loudly. Lionel Richie, Oasis, the Jam and Lisa Stansfield all released songs called what? I say “All Around The World”, quietly. Ivan says “Hello”, much more loudly, attracting the attention of several nearby teams. He then says “Hola! Guten Tag!” even more loudly, in a not altogether successful attempt to divert attention away from us. Stu and Ivan seem very certain about “Hello”, but the answer is All Around The World. They both then accuse me of not even having suggested All Around The World. The beer round used to be our forte, but we never win it these days. This week’s tie break question asks us how many items does the world’s largest collection of airline sick bags contain. We had this question once before, and I know the answer is somewhere around 5500. We average our guesses as usual, but I tell the others that their guesses have to be close to 5500. We end up just 80 [...]

I used to arrive at the Prince of Wales half way through the first round, but these days I’m getting less punctual and I usually arrive just after it’s finished. This week I miss a question asking for the second to sixth largest countries in the world, which is a shame, because I know Brazil is one of them and my team mates don’t. Pete, Stu and Oli are here, and we have a random extra team member this week. A girl called Jude is with the others when I arrive, and I assume she’s friends with one of them. Turns out she just randomly decided to join the team. She contributes a pound to enter but, it has to be said, very few answers. Patrick is setting the quiz tonight. Normally this means we’re in for an evening of poetry and classics, but tonight for some reason there are loads of astronomy questions. Astronauts come from the US, cosmonauts come from Russia, but who comes from China? I did once know the actual mandarin word for astronaut, but I’ve forgotten it, so I have to just write down taikonaut. Then we’re asked which is the only planet with a [...]

I’m early this week – the first round is not even over when I leap off the bus and into the pub at 9.20pm. I’m just in time to tell the team which Ealing comedy which took its name from a Tennyson poem. And I also tell them the answer to a question asking which capital city has tourist sights to the north east of it known as the Golden Ring. I tell them with absolute certainty that it’s Reykjavík. I’ve been there after all. But to my horror it’s actually Moscow. I’ve been there as well, and now I realise that the sights to the north east of Reykjavík are called the Golden Circle, not the Golden Ring. Well anyway, I’m a traveller, not a tourist. Bloody day trippers. The beer round answers are all connected, but what the connection is is not apparent. One of the answers is Cherie, though, from which we guess that the answers are all prime ministerial spouses. We get them all right, and so it’s down to the tie breaker. How many escalators are there in New York? Or did they say elevators? Maybe because of this uncertainty, my guess is way too [...]

Stu’s team name is very prescient – I’ve just bought Music Is My Sanctuary by Gary Bartz, and it’s fantastic. But it turns out he hasn’t guessed that I’ve been buying 1970s funk records, he’s just noting the fact that I’m even less punctual than normal this evening. Working at a university was bound to end up with me doing some teaching eventually, and I’ve been roped into doing a lecture course that happens on Tuesday evenings. For the next term I’m going to be exceeding even my own high standards of outrageous lateness. I’ve missed round one, but luckily round two starts with a science question. What are the five elements with only four letters in their names? This is my chance to redeem myself, but before I can even reach for the pen, Stu’s taken the wind out of my sails and written down iron, gold, neon and zinc. Luckily he pauses, and I manage to think of lead before he does. The beer round is an embarrassment. We struggle to a lame score, only to find that the answers are all squares in Bloomsbury. We both went to university in Bloomsbury. I work there even now. I’ve [...]

The team is just Stu and I tonight. The only time I’ve done well in a team of two here at the Prince of Wales was when Oli and I cheated, so I fear a challenging evening. Things start badly in the first round when we are asked whether it’s crickets, grasshoppers or both that have ears in their knees. Neither of us really know, but Stu’s guess turns out to be the wrong one, so of course I slate him for his abysmal knowledge of insect-type things. Things get better though. From some grotesque examples of fawning journalism about them, we identify Paul Gascoigne and David Beckham, and Stu knows that Tom Fanducci, Fred Dietrich, Frank DiGiorgio and Chico Gonzalez have been among the many partners of ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan. Then we have a round in which all the answers begin with Z, though it takes us until about half way through to realise this. Even when I know the connection, I still struggle to work out who is the only person to have won olympic golds in the 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon. Emil Zatopek, I think, and then I wonder “but is it really?”. Of course it [...]

My friend Quinn is here tonight. I met her in Albania, she’s from Australia, and she makes me realise what a horribly anglocentric thing a pub quiz can be. There are endless questions about cricket, counties and television programmes that no-one from beyond these shores would ever care about. That said, I am pretty shocked that she’s never heard of Doctor Who. Stu and I explain it in detail, but if you haven’t had the cultural experience of hiding behind the sofa in terror of the Daleks, you’ll probably never understand it. One of the few questions that is not arcanely specific to the British Isles is, happily enough, about Australia. What are pokies? Some kind of dangerous spider would be my guess, but luckily Quinn can tell us it’s slot machines. Sadly it doesn’t get us into the money, and we finish fourth. We’re making a horrible habit of this at the moment.

Our team name tonight is Stu’s idea. We like it a lot but feel that Stu should have the honour of writing it out on our team sheet. By the end of the night he’s just writing “Greetings!” and the quiz setters have long since stopped reading it all out anyway. We are six this evening. Besides me and Stu, Ivan is back in town after sojourns in Coventry and Rome, and Oli, his girlfriend Sarah and her sister Alice are here as well. Alice is a physicist, so if there’s a science round we’ll be sorted. I arrive late as always, but just in time to answer a question asking which 1970s film prominently featured Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It’s Close encounters of the third kind and we are in third place. There are a lot of questions about the Olympics this week. I used to live next door to Britain’s Greatest Olympian Steve Redgrave, years ago, but there aren’t any questions about him unfortunately. We think for a long while about which two British medallists this year have almost the same surname, and we’re about to put Thomson and Thompson for a Tintin-inspired guess, but then Alice says [...]

After last week’s horrific placing we’re hoping for better this week. Things look good for the first two rounds, but then we collapse spectacularly, scoring just five points in total over rounds two and three. Once again, all our hopes are pinned on the snowball. There is 600 pounds in the pot. The owner of the first ticket drawn crumbles under the fearsome pressure and goes home with nothing. The owner of the second ticket is Marcus, and he gets a question about a recently deceased saxophonist who recorded on over 700 albums, with artists as diverse as Steely Dan, Charlie Mingus, Aerosmith and Frank Zappa. With barely a second’s hesitation he says it’s Michael Brecker and he’s right. No wonder his team is in the top three almost every week without fail. Marcus gets £250 for that, which means there’s still £400 or so in the pot for me to dream about winning next week. It’s going to be a question about astronomy. I’m sure of it.

Tonight the team is me, Oli and my friend Eldrik, who knows lots about tennis and mountain bikes. In all the time I’ve been coming to the Prince of Wales I think there have been two questions about tennis, and none about mountain bikes, but never mind. We start off by correctly guessing that Bernard Matthews is the person who was called in by Krushchev in 1964 to modernise the Soviet poultry industry, after a brief moment of confusion when I mistakenly suggest Bernard Manning. Our main struggle in the first round, though, is to think of a team name. Eventually we come up with a suitably tasteless reference to a recent event, and it gets a good laugh when it’s read out. Sadly our score gets a bigger laugh, because for what we think might be the first time ever, we are in last place. Luckily round two looks a bit more promising. What’s the hottest planet? Oli leans across and says ‘Venus’, a bit unnecessarily seeing as I’m an astronomer. We also manage to recall from somewhere in the depths of our current affairs recollections that a man called Andreas Grassl became well known as the mysterious Piano [...]

I’ve been off travelling around the Balkans for the last few weeks, so I’m hoping for questions like “What is the newest country in the world?”, “What is the second-newest country in the world?”, and “Is Podgorica the most boring capital city in the world?”, the answers to which are of course Kosovo, Montenegro and very much so. But there is not a lot of geography in tonight’s quiz, and by turning up even later than is my habit, not only do I give Oli the opportunity to name the team but I miss the question asking which country has the highest lowest point. Round one is over by the time I arrive, and although Oli has got us into a very respectable fourth position, I can still berate him for not knowing that the country is Lesotho. And nor does he know that the band whose members included Johnny, CJ, Dee Dee and Joey was the Ramones. So surely, now, with double the manpower, we will storm into the lead in round three. Sad to say, this does not turn out to be the case. As the evening goes on we slump spectacularly down the order, and the quiz [...]

Ivan is back in London after a few months away in Scottish parts, and Pete, Oli and Stu are around as well. I am around, but forever delayed, and I turn up half way through round one. My main contribution is to guess that the answer to a question involving divorce is Wallis Simpson, and to my own anti-royalist disgust I’m right. In round two we have to name the country which contains five of the ten highest waterfalls in Europe. I say Norway, while Oli and Stu say Switzerland. I am not totally sure it’s Norway, but despite occasional evidence to the contrary I always feel supremely confident on geography questions, and bristle at the suggestion that I might be wrong. I am holding the pen, and so I write down Norway. When the answers are read out, I’m bracing myself for serious abuse if it’s Switzerland, but fortunately it is the land of fjords. We are thirsty and it’s the beer round, so we are concentrating hard. It is to no avail, as we do not remotely spot the connection between the answers, which relate to British female olympic gold medallists. The tie-break question asks for the distance [...]

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 [...]

Tonight we return to the hotseat for the second time in 2008. Here’s the questions I set: Round One Between which two islands would you find the Denmark Strait? Between which two seas would you pass through the Kattegat and the Skaggerak? Which European capital cities contain the following metro stations: a) Stortinget, Gronland and Holmenkollen; b) Minska, Pecherska and Dnipro; c) Garibaldi, Rome and Stalingrad? In which European cities would you find the following airports: a) John Paul II; b) Nikola Tesla; c) Galileo Galilei What connects the River Avon, East Timor, South Australia and Torpenhow Hill in Cumbria? Great Britain is the third most populated island in the world. Which two islands sustain larger populations? The top five countries in the world are Canada, Norway, Indonesia, Russia and the Philippines, if you rank them by what criterion? The longest non-stop scheduled flight in the world covers a distance of 10,314 miles with a flying time of 18h40m. Which two cities are connected by this route? Three part question about Australia. By what names do non-aboriginals recognise the following things: a) Kata Tjuta b) Yirdaki c) Purnululu . What’s the only island in the world which has two national [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Having finished 2007 in ignominy, Oli, Stu and I are looking for a better start to 2008. My punctuality has slightly improved and I’m there by five past nine, but for some reason the quizmasters got the thing under way at bang on 9. I redeem myself by knowing that Amity Bay was the scene of Jaws, and the benefits of having an astronomer on the team are clear when we are asked what royal position Martin Rees is the current holder of. I’m so pleased at knowing it that I say it loudly enough for the team next to us to hear. But fortunately, when the scores are read out, they are last and we are first. Round two contains the first of a series of questions about the royal family. We are far from royalists but we still manage to work out that the queen’s most recent grandchild is eighth in line to the throne. We don’t know what title the child has been given but even so we’ve managed to hang on to first place. It’s my round, but hold in, it’s the beer round. We have enough faith in ourselves to hold off buying drinks. I [...]

It’s the last quiz of 2008, and only Oli and I have made it up here for Patrick’s Christmas special. If the quiz is anything like the normal Patrick fare of poetry and classics we could be in for a grim evening. Oli says he’ll leave before the beer round if we don’t look like having a chance of some money. And the first round seems like a disaster. Many quizzes have themed round, and sometimes the quizmaster doesn’t tell you what the connection is. That’s fine, we can handle those. But this time in each round there are three separate connections going on, and although we manage to work out that some of the answers seem to be Monopoly properties and some seem to be numbers, we only get four questions right. Luckily, it seems that everyone else is having trouble as well, and we’re in a shock second place. Things get better in the second round. This time we are definitely looking for the three pink monopoly properties, and the numbers four, five and six. We work out that Pall Mall is the street named ultimately for a ball game, but we can’t remember the other two pink [...]

Oli has managed to get to the pub long before I turn up, which is no surprise but he seems angrier than usual this week. Stu turns up quite some time after even me, and I join Oli in slating his slack attitude to punctuality. Oli names our team in homage to Hugo Chávez moving Venezuela into a new time zone half an hour later than the previous one, and we get under way. The most memorable question of the night is one which asks what words like wizard, bevy, hovels and vole have in common, and which US president’s surname also shares this property. We struggle to think of anything likely, and it looks like we’re going to struggle in vain. But while Stu and I work on the rest of the round, Oli goes into a kind of trance, writing down alphabets and scribbling furiously in his notepad. Just after question ten is read out, he emerges from his trance to tell us he has the answer. If A=1, B=2 etc, then the sum of the first and last letters and all the other letter pairs working inwards is 27. The only problem then is to work out [...]

Just three days after our last outing, we’re back at the Prince of Wales for a one-off charity quiz. It’s strange being in the PoW on something other than a Tuesday night, and the quiz is also a little bit different to the strictly-followed PoW format of two rounds, then a beer round, then two more rounds and then the snowball. We have eight rounds this evening, and we also have a joker which we can play to double our score on any round if we feel really confident. The first round sees dissent breaking out. A question about the author of The Log from the Sea of Cortez splits me and Stu, with me being as sure that it’s Hemingway as Stu is that it’s Steinbeck. I am holding the pen so I write down Hemingway. Then, just as we’re about to hand in the paper, I have a crisis of confidence and tell Stu he can change it if he wants. He declines the opportunity. The answer is Steinbeck. I blame Stu for not changing the answer. The second round is science and technology. I’m an astronomer and Oli has a degree in science studies (which is of [...]

To everyone’s astonishment I arrive first this evening. I bag a spot by the fireplace and give evils to two people sat at a nearby table, hoping they’ll be leaving before the quiz. But it turns out they are two friends of Pete’s so all is well. We start reasonably well, especially when the first question asks which country had identical twins for its president and prime minister until October this year. We asked almost the same question more than a year ago so we know it’s Poland, and at the end of the first round we’re in third. The second round is good – we can name all four Shakespeare plays in which ghosts appear, and we only drop points on the final questions, when we can only name three of the five tube stations named after pubs. Going into the beer round, we’re sharing the lead with three other teams. To earn a free round at the bar this week, we have to identify the golfer from the menu they chose for the US Masters Champion’s Dinner. Oli is disgusted – he thinks we have no chance and wants us to hand in an empty answer sheet. But [...]

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 question 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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I am writing this entry weeks and weeks after the quiz. Can I still maintain the use of the present tense to give readers the sense that all the action is happening right now? Probably not. I can’t remember anything about the quiz – I think I’ve given up remembering stuff about evenings at the Prince of Wales because I normally write it down. I think we finished third, though. Or maybe we won. I’m pretty sure none of us won the snowball though.

I arrive late again, and Stu has already taken care of a team name, which commemorates the recent thirtieth anniversary of Elvis’s unfortunate demise and gets an impressive reception when it’s read out. There are a ridiculous 19 teams in the house tonight, and during round one we’re standing by the fireplace, which we agree is never good for the concentration. Luckily, Stu has already had words with two women who have a table but who are not quizzing, and as round two begins, glances are exchanged and we dive across the entire width of the pub to claim the table before any of the other hoverers. There are a plethora of excellent questions this week, and despite being a team of only two, we’re on fairly blazing form. We don’t actually know many answers but we’re managing to work them out. A bird which comes in Atlantic, Tufted and Horned, and which is the only bird whose beak moults? Puffin, I suggest. What did Clement Wragge start naming in the 1890s? Stu works out that it’s hurricanes. After two rounds, we’re a very respectable three points off the lead. The beer round looks like being a disaster. There are [...]

The team this week consists of me, Stu and Oli, and although I arrive catastrophically late, Stu and Oli have got round one pretty much covered, and all I need to do is help think of a team name. Stu’s suggestions are all quite amusing, but tasteless to the extent that we’d probably have to leave the pub when the names were read out. Luckily we come up with something inoffensive, vaguely amusing, and slightly topical. It gets a slight laugh when it’s read out, but it doesn’t help us much as far as scores go – we start the evening in the mid-table. Sadly things don’t get any better. It’s a good quiz but somehow we’re stretching out the gap between us and the money by many points each round. The beer round is a disaster as we completely fail to spot the connection between the answers, and then during rounds three and four I am distracted by the team next to us. The snowball prize, as you may have gathered, is now so big that it’s driving quizzers to the edge of sense and honesty, and it’s turning me into a deeply suspicious curtain-twitcher. A maximum of five [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ivan is back from Paris, I am back from the Canary Islands and for possibly the first time ever, all five of us who formed the University Challenge team are here. Ivan has brought his girlfriend along, and Pete’s dad is here as well, so in fact we are one over the team size limit. After last week’s dubious ethics I feel we should be getting back on the straight and narrow, but my teammates overrule me. Oli says he felt surprisingly guilt-free after last time, and seems to have discovered an unsporting side to himself that he never knew he had. So we try to look like six people, and worry about what to do if we win any money later. Among the first round questions is one asking how you would know if a dog has been eating bones. Ivan says he’s an expert on dog shit after nine months in Paris, and correctly says that the shit will be white. But so long away from home shores has wrecked Ivan’s once-encyclopaedic knowledge of cricket and he fails to identify WG Grace as the cricketer who scored 224 not out for England, then left the match before it [...]

We have hit the big time this week. I had expected that the ‘feature’ that last week’s photographer spoke of would be a tiny box on page 80, but actually it was a double page spread, mentioned on the front page, with a startlingly large photo of me used to illustrate it. It’s a lesson learned – never again will I bunk off work the day I set a pub quiz. I find it oddly disturbing being surrounded by pictures of myself on my commute home from work and I hope I won’t unexpectedly appear on the front page of London rags too often. Only Oli and I can make it this week, and normally if only two of us are there it’s an evening of humiliation and despair. Round one lulls us into a false sense of security, though, as we find within ourselves knowledge such as the word both Sean Connery and Johnny Depp have tattooed on themselves (Forever – Scotland and Wino(na) respectively), and the European capital built on 14 islands connected by 55 bridges. As I reminisce about my travels to Stockholm the scores are read out and we are surprised to find ourselves in fourth [...]

The pub is having one of its Black Hole of Calcutta weeks this week, and there is barely even enough space for me, Pete and Oli to stand by the bar. Marcus accuses me of papering the house but there’s only three people I know here. I think the huge turnout must be because of the spiralling popularity of this blog. Or something. There is a photographer here tonight taking pictures for a feature in a London newspaper. This is a good thing because we like appearing in the press, but also a bad thing because I didn’t go to work today and I may now be rumbled spectacularly. With 16 teams, we have a frenetic evening marking and adding. The quiz goes well but to my enormous disappointment the beer round has only one clear winner; I have spent a non-negligible amount of time devising what I think may be the best tie-break question ever, and my efforts have been in vain. Further disappointment comes at the end when my ticket is not drawn for the snowball. This is no longer as heartbreaking as it used to be – my hopes have been dashed so often that I’m hardened [...]

Evil Patrick is setting the quiz this week, and last time we were here for one of his we won it, so we feel confident. This feeling soon disappears. We don’t do so badly on the first round – Patrick asks who was associated with Approaching Menace until he died earlier this year, and we know it’s Magnus Magnusson, but we earn the disapproval of the quizmaster when we suggest that the great Icelander is still associated with the tune, even posthumously. “If there’s going to be any pedantry this evening, it will be coming from me”, he says, but despite the reprimand we find ourselves in third place. But things begin to slip, and the second round goes very badly. Oli is the only one of us who knows that Jose Mourinho’s dog is called Gullit, which is remarkable considering that Oli is extremely proud of his utter ignorance of football and everything to do with it. The only time his number has ever come up on the snowball, the question was which Dutch footballer is the only person to have won the Champion’s League with three different clubs – despite the hundreds of pounds at stake, and the [...]

The pub is heaving this week, and I want to call our team “Who the hell over-publicized this place anyway?”, seeing as Marcus, who over-publicized the place with a book about it, is setting the quiz. Stu over-rules me, saying it “won’t do us any favours”, and so we have a dig at the landlord instead.  With 17 teams in, Marcus becomes headmasterly in his efforts to control the proceedings.  “Will you all…. please…. shut…. UP!”, he shouts.  The rabble calms, and the quiz gets underway. Our first two rounds are marked by some astonishing guesses. What product’s logo features Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, being served tea by an Indian servant? Sir Hector was apparently a Victorian military legend, serving with the Gordon Highlanders in Afghanistan, Sudan and South Africa to widespread acclaim. This isn’t any sort of clue, but Oli has some vague recollection that Camp Coffee has someone in a kilt on the front of it, so we put that and it’s right. Rather poignantly, it turns out that Sir Hector shot himself in 1903 when facing a court-martial for homosexuality. We also manage to guess that the Mountain Chicken of Montserrat is actually a frog, and [...]

I am in a blissed-out jetlagged haze this week, having just got back from China, and presumably because I’m still thinking in a time zone seven hours ahead of here, I make a startling break with precedent and arrive before everyone else. The quiz is being set by a first-timer tonight, and it’s certainly challenging. But some are finding it more challenging than others, and at the end of the first round we have 16 points, another team has got 15, and everyone else is in single figures. A couple of teams have scored nothing at all – we almost got lynched once when something similar happened in one of our quizzes, but everyone obviously feels that these questions were hard but not unfair and the quizmaster survives to read another round. Following our habit that now seems unshakeable, our form is hit in round two by the Slump. We are not obsessed enough with football to know that West Ham were the last non-top division team to win the FA Cup, and even though we know that Man U v. Newcastle in 1999 was the last FA cup final between two non-London clubs, we still drop into second. Our [...]

We are undone this week by a picture round. It’s just a bonus fun thing, really, in addition to the normal four rounds and a beer round. But when we look at it we’re completely stumped. Not a single one of the 15 or so faces on the page look at all familiar. One, Stu and I both contend, looks a bit like Charlotte Church, but Oli stirs up dissent and paranoia. Confused by the picture round, we flounder in the main quiz and by the end of round two we’ve long since abandoned any hope of money. After failing to win the beer round, we have to hand in the picture round. We have mostly put down random names and have no clue about the connection that Dave the quizmaster claims exists between the answers. When the answers are read out we’ve got three, and somehow everyone else in the pub has done far, far better. I hear people tittering when our score is read out. Between round three and four, as we slip yet further down the rankings, Dave passes by on his way to the bar. “Was it you guys who only got three on the picture [...]

All change at the PoW this week.  The quiz master is sat at the bar, not at the quizmasters table; he wants us to think of team names before we start the quiz; he says teams will be marking each other’s questions instead of him frantically doing it between rounds; and the entire theme of the entire quiz is music.  Pete and I are unsettled by all this and fear that it heralds a ‘challenging’ evening. 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 am more late than normal tonight, so Stu and Oli have to choose a team name and answer all of round one without me.  To my chagrin, the team name gets loud approval when it is read out – there is almost a round of applause – and we’re in joint second place.  And worse, it all goes downhill from there.  We drop to seventh after the second round, and we’re closer to last place than we are to first. We’re struggling to scrape together drink money because the cashpoint outside the pub is broken, so we hope for our usual form in the beer round.  The first question is who baked the cake that appears on the cover of Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”.  I hear myself say “Delia Smith” but I’ve got no idea why I said it, the thought just appeared completely uninvited into my mind.  The others look at me as if I’m mad but it turns out to be right.  We get four questions out of five, and from the tie break question we learn that Wanker appears at 55,000 in the list of surnames in the US in order of popularity, but another [...]

After a month off from quizzing we return to the Prince of Wales feeling like we are going to win.  The normal practice is for me to to turn up half an hour later than agreed and the others to curse me, but this time we all turn up at more or less the same time but somehow manage not to see each other.  I’m sitting in one corner of the pub cursing Stu and Oli, and they are in another corner of the pub cursing me.  Shortly before the quiz starts irate text messages are exchanged and we work out the situation.  Despite this poor preparation we start well.  After round one we are in joint first place.  Round two sees us slip into second despite our correct guess that someone once sued Uri Geller for uncoiling her contraceptive coil through the medium of television. The beer round is always our friend, though, and this week we’re given a list of dead comedians and asked to say whether they died in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties.  Oli doesn’t have a sense of humour so he leaves this round entirely to me and Stu.  We agree on most of [...]

It’s our turn to set it again this week. My friends who had what is known as a ‘challenging’ time last time have given this one a miss, but the pub is no less busy than normal. Most of it goes very smoothly, although my beer round in which teams have to identify what kinds of webs spiders spin when they’re on various drugs (something mankind knows thanks to a bizarre experiment carried out in 1995) is less successful than I’d hoped. No team gets more than two right, and most fail to identify the web spun by the clean spider. Rancour erupts on the final round. Two teams query their marks, and it turns out both failed to hear part of a question and so didn’t give the answer to it. Luckily the team to my left vouches that I definitely said ‘what poet ”and what work”’, but the teams are not too happy. They are tied for second place but having failed to bully me into giving them extra marks they will have to answer a tie-breaker to see who gets bumped into third. For the first tie-break, both teams put exactly the same number, so we require [...]

We’ve spent the last few weeks being busy with other things but feeling that having ended 2006 on a high, we’ll be invincible when we return to Highgate.  Ivan’s gone back to France but the rest of us are all here, and when there are four of us we usually find ourselves contending for the cash.  In round one, after a bit of a struggle, we work out that Scaramanga was the only Bond villain to have been played by a relative of Ian Fleming’s, and we find ourselves in second place.  Round two sees us slip into third place; even with two Scots on the team we don’t know enough about snooker to name the four Scottish world champions.  Ally McCoist is not one of them, apparently. The beer round is not our friend today.  We don’t get the connection between the answers at all, even once we’ve got three of the five answers, and Stu is reduced to hysterical laughter by my suggestion for one of the answers, saying it’s as preposterously wrong as Ally McCoist was.  We buy our own drinks before round three gets underway. In the third round a question asks in a roundabout sort [...]

It’s the last quiz of the year.  Ivan is back from Paris, and has been looking forward to nothing so much as a good quiz.  He says living abroad is making him feel more English than ever, which is strange because he’s half-Spanish and half-Croat.  Judging by the evening, living abroad is actually making him quite a lot louder and slightly more bitter than usual.  Pete turns up unexpectedly, looking a bit traumatised after a journey from Luton.  Stu and I have just come up from central London and we’re not traumatised at all. Evil Patrick is setting the quiz this week, which ought to mean he won’t win the snowball.  We agree before the quiz starts that we’ve got a good feeling about it, but by the end of round one this feeling has entirely evaporated.  We only know three answers, and we have a horrible feeling that the answer to a question about an actor might be OJ Simpson.  But we have gathered that this round’s answers have some kind of biblical theme that we don’t quite understand, so we write down ‘John’, ‘Luke’ and ‘Isaiah’ in various boxes and hope for the best.  We are astonished, when [...]

The pub is absolutely rammed this week. With about 70 people crammed in and the fire roaring it feels like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and I feel sure people will start fainting before too long. It’s probably because of the book, even though it specifically requests that readers do not come to the pub because it’s too small. Regulars grumble as they gasp for air and we are all hoping that at least some people will flee in terror when they realise they’ve accidentally come here on a quiz night. Our team stakes out its square foot of territory in front of the bar. We do pretty well on the first round, although we fail to guess what Radio 4 listeners chose as the best invention ever in 2004. We spend ages trying to think what sort of an invention ageing middle-class fuddy-duddies would think was particular fine, and we come very close to writing down ‘bicycle’. For some reason we put something else, and of course the right answer was bicycle. We do know, though, that the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation sued Youtube.com, and we find ourselves in a promising fourth position. OJ Simpson is back [...]

It’s our turn in the hotseat again. I’ve persuaded some of my friends from college to come along and give it a go, and have promised them that it’s not so much that the questions are hard here as that the regulars are some of the die-hardest pub quizzers there are. I am not sure they agree with me as they find themselves propping up the bottom of the league at the end of round 1. A question about which three countries have non-rectangular flags causes a surprising amount of anger and bitterness in the crowd. Some people disagree with our assertion that squares are not rectangles. One team becomes bizarrely convinced that we didn’t give them a mark for getting Nepal (the other two are Switzerland and the Vatican City) that they spend the rest of the quiz writing increasingly abusive messages to us on their answer sheets. In our beer round, which is about naming films from their French titles, one team is so proud of knowing that ‘Le Samouraï’ is ‘The Samurai’ that they write their answer in Kanji script as well as English. Pete is not impressed and calls them ‘wankers’ when he reads out the [...]

After a few weeks away from the quiz, me and Stu and Oli are back and ready to take it by storm. We feel good after round 1, in a comfortable fifth place from which a strike at the lead seems eminently possible. We know which seas you can find Trabzon, Archangelsk, Qingdao and Eilat are found on*, and we also know how to pronounce ‘Qingdao’ (Q being pronounced ‘ch’ in pinyin-transliterated Chinese) which the quizmaster doesn’t. Round two seems less promising though, and we fear the usual late-evening slump in form has already started. We pin all our hopes for the evening on the beer round. It’s about naming cities from their parliamentary constituencies, and we have shamelessly brazen political geek Oli to give us all the answers. Everyone in the pub knows that Edgbaston, Erdington and Ladywood are in Birmingham, most people know that Attercliffe, Heely and Hallam are in Sheffield, a few people know that Riverside, Garston and West Derby are all in Liverpool, but only Oli knows that the city with constituencies called Central, East, North, Northeast, Northwest, South and Southwest is Glasgow. We are the only team to get all five right, which is great [...]

I suppose we are doomed from the start tonight.  We name our team because we are under the impression that Barcelona have beaten Chelsea 2-1 in the Champions’ League.  Unfortunately we haven’t realised that the Bastards scored a late equaliser, and we look ridiculous.  Suffice to say we do not trouble the money this evening.

Despite the Telegraph’s publicity, the pub is not too much busier than usual. Maybe it’s because Highgate is more of a muesli-eating Guardian-reading sort of place. Or maybe it’s because the article exhorted readers not to come because the pub is too small even to fit the regulars in. Maybe next week will be busier because now the pub is featured in The Independent as well. We’re not too upset that it’s not so busy – we’d been expecting frantic times marking 30 quiz sheets between rounds. We enjoy setting the quiz, the teams seem to enjoy answering our questions and now you can see if you like them as well: Questions Round One It’s a round about astronomy because I am an astronomer. Who said ‘Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite’ while head of the US National Space Council? What connects a 1994 single released by the Inspiral Carpets, a brand of car made by General Motors and a gaming console manufactured by Sega? What piece of music was written by Colin Matthews and released to critical acclaim in 2000, but became redundant on 24 August 2006? Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, [...]

Ivan emigrated to France two weeks ago, but to everyone’s surprise he’s back. He’s off again on Thursday though. I am late, and the first round is almost over by the time I get there, but Ivan seems to be on form. I hardly contribute anything to our answers but we’re in a healthy upper mid-table position. Problems arise during the second round when we’re asked to name the five US states which have shores on the Gulf of Mexico. Florida, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, that’s easy, but what’s the fifth. Mississippi, says Ivan. For some reason I decide that I’m sure it’s not a state, because Missouri is definitely a state and surely there’s not two states named after rivers. Why do I think this? I’ve no idea, but I’m wrong and Ivan is bitter. We fail to win the beer round. The average theory for the tiebreaker definitely needs more than 2 people to be present. The quiz goes on and after the third round it’s looking like we might still have a tiny chance of a little bit of cash, but round four is not so good – Ivan fails to get a cricket question, and that’s something [...]

I’m shattered. I’ve spent the last five days in Spain enthusiastically adopting the ridiculous Spanish habit of not eating until 11pm, going out for drinks after that and then thinking about possibly going to club at around 5am, although they won’t get really busy until nearer 6am. But Ivan’s emigrating to France shortly, to spend nine months studying mediaeval history in Paris, so I stagger up Highgate Hill to arrive just in time for the quiz. Ivan has come prepared. At the slightest hint of a dispute arising, he unfolds a poster of the planets which came free in the Guardian, and which shows Neptune looking slightly blue-ish. Despite lingering bitterness and resentment from last week we are doing pretty well after the first two rounds. Questions like ‘What country is entirely surrounded by South Africa’ are music to our ears (it’s Lesotho), but it’s not all plain sailing. Australian landlords normally specifically ban the use of Durex for what purpose? Fuck, we think, but it’s not that. Apparently it’s for sticking up posters, because durex is what those crazy people down under call sellotape. As always we think we can do well on the beer round. The answer to [...]

Tonight it’s a story of bitterness and recrimination. We have a team of five – as well as the usual Pete, Ivan and me, my friend John is here because we’re going to Santiago de Compostela in the morning, and Pete’s girlfriend is here as well. Presumably she’s the reason Pete arrived only a little bit late but showing clear signs of extreme hurrying. Among the questions in round one is this: what else is in the set of objects that contains Ceres and 2003 UB313? As I may have mentioned before I’m an astronomer, and I know the answer is Pluto. John did a degree in space science and he knows it’s Pluto. Ivan’s doing a PhD in mediaeval history so no-one asks whether he knows what the answer is, but it’s so obvious that he probably knows it’s Pluto as well. Pete, though, becomes bizarrely convinced that the answer is Charon, Pluto’s moon. He doesn’t elaborate on why – he just writes it down and then scowls angrily at us. John and I protest but to no avail. When the answer comes back Pete is duly castigated. “OK”, he mutters, “but dogs can look up”. The second round [...]

Getting there on time was a disaster last time, so I decide to arrive after the first round had already been completed. Luckily Pete and Ivan were there on time and we’re off to a respectable start. My most useful contribution in round two is knowing what was unusual about the Tyrell P34 formula one car (it had 6 wheels). I also know what was unusual about the Brabham BT46 (it had a massive great fan on the back) but the quizmaster didn’t ask that. In place of the usual beer round, tonight’s quiz is sponsored by Transport for London and at stake is a massive £130 of Oyster Card credit. I haven’t had any income for several weeks and if we win I’ll be able to go to work tomorrow without borrowing money. The first question involves identifying tube lines from their seat covers and I feel absolutely certain that I recognise the Bakerloo Line, even though I seldom travel on it. I am wrong. Luckily neither Ivan or Pete knew the right answer. We finish with 11 out of 13 – good but not good enough because another team got 12. The shits. Round three involves giving 10 [...]

My lesson learned from two weeks ago, I arrive on time. Ivan turns up as the first round is being re-capped. It’s not too bad a start and we think we might do alright this week, but things soon unravel. The luck goes utterly against us, and we’re both on pretty poor form as well. Ivan insists that OJ Simpson was offered the lead in Ghost before Patrick Swayze. I suggest equally outrageous answers, occasionally claiming I ‘have a feeling’ they might be right. The beer round is normally our forte but tonight it is the nadir of a terrible evening as we score nul points, and give an answer for the tiebreaker that’s a factor of 50 wrong. We finish a long way down the field. The only positive thing is that no-one wins the snowball.

It’s only me and Ivan around this week.  As we are both habitually late, we miss almost all of the first round and have to answer all the questions as the quizmasters recap them.  Our score is modest.  Subsequent rounds see us scoring well, and if we’d been on time we might have been in with a chance of some cash, but as it is we finish outside the money.  We both agree that if we’d been on time we would have won by miles.

It’s our turn in the hotseat again. The main problem we face is that the Prince of Wales’ always unreliable microphone gives out entirely after the first round, and no amount of pulling the wire around can get it to make noises again. We are forced to shout the questions. Unaccustomed to the exertion, we are not sure we’ll make it to the end and still be able to speak, but then we have the bright idea of asking if we can borrow a microphone from the Angel, down the road. They have their quiz on Wednesdays. Happily, they lend it to us, and we are back to a non-shouty quiz. The landlord assures us he’ll buy a new microphone before next Tuesday. The questions I set are here: Round one Marcus Bentley’s Geordie tones have become horribly familiar every summer since 2000, if you watch what programme? We aim for 5 a day, Danes 6, the French aim for 10 and the Japanese an enormous 17. An old proverb has it that just one will do. What? Fernando de la Rúa, Ramón Puerta, Adolfo Rodríguez, Eduardo Camaño and Eduardo Duhalde all held what position between 21 December 2001 and [...]

Pete has qualified as a doctor.  So now we have two doctors on the team, one medical and one proper doctor.  Does it help us to win?  No it does not.

Ivan has some lame excuse for not turning up this week, something about preparing for a talk which could make or break his PhD. In his place, though, we’ve got Stu, the fifth man on our University Challenge team, who is over from Ireland trying to get jobs as a filthy bloodsucking lawyer. And Pete’s Dad is along as well, looking to prove that we can only win when he’s on the team. A burst water main in the Tottenham area is my better-than-normal excuse for being late, and I arrive right at the end of the first round. “Do you know any darts commentators?” demands Pete’s Dad. I confessed my ignorance. “Then you can go back home”. I settle down for the usual – a pleasant evening in good company, with undertones of pure aggression. Also present in the pub this evening are a University Challenge quarter-finalist from a few years ago, and someone from ”Eggheads”. If we hadn’t been to the final of UC, we might have been concerned. After round one, we’re 6 points off the lead, or, to put it another way, 3 points off last place. I suppose my arrival must have provided the morale [...]

With a team named in homage to Trinidad and Tobago’s Jason Scotland (he plays for St. Johnstone) and with the world cup just days away, what could go wrong? Every single answer in this week’s quiz is related to a world cup country, but unfortunately I arrive badly late, missing all of the first round, and therefore the question whose answer was Ecuador. I am always pretty confident on my South America knowledge, and get a couple of related questions, but fail to get Buenos Aires from a translation of its original name, or Argentina as a country named after something it exported. Derision is duly heaped upon me by my team mates. The Argentina answer costs us the beer round, which is a terrible shame as our ‘average technique’ would yet again have won us the tie-break. But in the main quiz we are doing well – second after the first round, we get top marks on the second round and do well on the third round as well. It all comes down to the final round, and our hearts sink as the quiz setter announces it will be a music round, with him playing the keyboard. We had [...]

Pete’s dad is not around this week. Sadly it seems he’s vital to a successful pub quiz as we struggle this time to match our blistering form of a couple of weeks ago. We are fourth more or less throughout, and in the end we miss out on the money by a scant point. It’s the worst possible place to finish, and there’s not even the consolation of being able to bitch at each other for insisting on wrong answers because no-one did that this week. It’s not all disaster though – we win the beer round. It’s always been our forte, especially since we developed the average method for the tiebreaker. Everyone simply writes down the number they want to guess, and the answer we give is the average. It’s amazing how often the technique succeeds. We get the connection between the five beer round answers (they were all mentioned in the ”Only Fools and Horses” theme tune), and the average technique sees off the opposition on the tiebreaker and sends us to the bar to enjoy 10 pounds worth of the finest drinks the Prince of Wales can offer.

We arrive at the pub at 8.30 and take our places at the quizmaster’s table, for tonight we are setting the questions, and in our hands is the task of making everyone’s Tuesday evening a fun one. “here for the quiz?” asks the barman, thinking he might have to move us on from the table. “We’re not here for the quiz”, we reply, “we are the quiz”. I love being the quizmaster. I feel omniscient and powerful as I read out my finely-honed questions. The task, of course, is not to set questions that no-one can get, and not to set questions that everyone can get, but somewhere in between. We once caused uproar in the pub when two teams scored no points at all on one of our rounds, but tonight we’ve got it about right. My personal favourite of the questions I set was a multiple choice one with two answers. If every team had picked randomly, half would have got it right, but in fact only one team got the right answer. Most of them would have got it right had they not tried to psychologise – they all thought it was a complicated double bluff. The [...]

It’s me, Ivan, Pete and Pete’s dad tonight. Pete and Ivan are both avoiding doing any work – Pete for his finals, Ivan for his PhD. I don’t have any work to avoid. Pete’s dad has done his work. Round one starts very promisingly. I know that George Bush Intercontinental Airport in in Houston because I passed through there on the way to Central America. Pete’s Dad knows that the Royal Engineers and Oxford University are former FA cup winners. Pete knows that the Belgrano survived Pearl Harbour before it was bought by the Argentine Navy, and Ivan knows a few things as well. Pete has a flashy pen to write the answers down but sadly he can’t spell. Despite this, when the scores come back we’re in joint 1st place. Round two is not bad as well – we’re managing not to talk ourselves out of correct answers like we usually do, and although we drop a few marks we’re still joint first. The beer round consists of five answers linked by a theme. We work out that all the answers are books from the Old Testament, but we only get four out of five, and so we’re forced [...]

Here are a few edited extracts from the shows: All the starters I got right Paxman getting impatient A series of unfortunate incidents Ivan’s starters Pete’s starters Oli’s starters The Comeback

End of the road The long story which began more than three years ago was finally coming to an end, and we’d made it right to the final hurdle. Would we trip, or was national glory really in our grasp? I could hardly believe we’d made it as far as we had and spent most of the few short hours after the semi-final just saying “Guys, we’re in the final! We’re in the bloody final!” to my team mates. They probably already knew this. For the final time we psyched ourselves up in our dressing room, got our faces powdered, and headed for the studio. We waited in the wings until we were announced, and then walked out to take up our positions. Out of all the people who had applied, and the 28 teams who had taken part in the televised stages, we were down to the best two. Our opponents in the final were Corpus Christi, Oxford. Bad start The first few questions went Corpus’ way, and they quickly pulled out a lead. We didn’t buzz in until after the first picture round, and when we did disaster struck. Asked when various events including Princess Diana’s Panorama interview [...]

Under pressure We stared disaster in the face in this round. Manchester had done quite well in previous rounds – in both the first and second rounds they were the only team to score more than us. But their performances were largely a one man effort, whereas ours had come as a result of team-wide ability. At this stage of the series, we expected a challenge, and we certainly got it. Manchester started strongly, reaching 50 points before we’d got off zero. But then Oli got us off the mark, giving the Stanford Prison Experiment as the inspiration for the 2002 German film, Das Experiment. We pulled back to within five points, before Manchester had another good run and led us by 110 points to 60 at the half way stage. Again the advantage shifted our way, and I brought us level by being the first person to work out that ‘grub’ was the word implied by the series of definitions Paxman was reading out. It was 115 points each. A close shave Manchester then got the next two starters right, we were losing by 170-125 and things looked bleak. “Four minutes to go”, said Paxman. Surely UCL couldn’t let [...]

Back to the Travel Inn There was an inordinately long three month break before the final weekend of filming, and autumn was becoming winter when we headed up to Manchester for our third and final visit to Granada studios. And this would be our last trip – the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final would all be filmed this weekend. The quarter-finals were filmed on the Friday evening, and if we lost we’d be on the train home in the morning. None of us wanted that. Our quarter-final was to be against Jesus College Cambridge, and history weighed heavily on our shoulders as we took to the stage. Of the four UCL teams that had previously been on University Challenge, two had made it to the second round and two to the quarter finals. Could we become the first UCL team to make it to the semi-finals? We could take some hope from the disturbingly detailed statistical analysis of Iain Weaver, which showed that over the first two rounds, only one team had answered more of their questions correctly than we had, and Ivan was the second-best contestant overall. Slipping up In contrast to our apparently serene progress through the first two [...]

To Manchester again Before Round Two, we carried on with our pub-based training routine, losing heavily in each of the three weeks we went. Losing at the Prince of Wales had worked very well before the Warwick game, and was fast becoming an important part of our preparations. Feeling confident, we headed up to Manchester for a second time. Journeys on non-smoking trains were always an ordeal for UCL Polancec, but this time I shared that ordeal when the terrifying announcement was made that no hot drinks were available. I got steadily more anxious as we headed north, and by the time we reached Manchester, my caffeine levels were dangerously low. Luckily we were not playing until the following morning. We stocked up excessively on carbohydrates with the complementary Travel Inn breakfast, and for a while I was worried I’d fall asleep during the game. Luckily, adrenaline picked me up a bit, and after the usual poncing about in make-up and getting our clothes approved, we headed in to the studio. To our slight consternation we were on the other side to where we had been in our previous game, giving us a whole different view of the studio, and [...]

Preparations We did not take our responsibility as representatives of our university lightly. Training, discipline, dedication, and total mental focus would be required. With that in mind, we bought a copy of ‘Time Out’ and looked up pub quizzes, and on finding that the Prince of Wales in Highgate was reckoned to host the hardest quiz in London, we headed up there for the evening. We finished second on our first outing – not bad, we thought – but successive weeks saw us humbled by people who were either phenomenally knowledgeable about absurdly arcane trivia, or cheats. We were sure it was the latter, and so come Friday 16th June, we headed up to Manchester, confidence un-dimmed, for our first round of filming. In typical fashion, I was half an hour late for meeting everyone at Euston station for the train to Manchester, but luckily our train was 45 minutes late so all was well. On arrival we headed straight for the studios, where we found out our opposition for the first round was Warwick. But before we could get down to business and play the game, we had to go through make-up to make sure we looked good for [...]

Ivan ‘Plank’ Polancec A fellow reject from the abortive 2002 effort, Ivan’s surname became his nickname via a confused spell-checker. Ivan’s specialist subjects were cricket and popes, on both of which his knowledge was supreme. But take away this man’s tobacco and Rizlas and it only takes about 20 minutes for him to collapse into a gibbering dribbling nicotine-deprived wreck of a human being. Pete ‘Captain Haddock’ Hinstridge Pete had a habit of turning up to selection rounds wearing a suit, which initially led me to mark him down as a bit of a ponce, although he claimed it was because he was working. Pete was the medical specialist, what with him studying medicine and all. By nefarious means, Pete ended up being the captain of the side. Me With a dress sense inspired substantially by Tom Baker as Doctor Who, I provided all the stripiness a well-balanced quiz side could need. Specialising in geography and astronomy questions, my knowledge of which was supreme – but take away my freshly-ground coffee from a Latin American communist farmer’s collective on a rain-soaked mountainside and it only takes about 20 minutes for me to collapse into a gibbering dribbling caffeine-deprived wreck of [...]

November 2001. I enter UCL’s selection process to pick the team for legendary quiz show University Challenge. Despite having been at the university for 5 years and always having been excessively sure of my phenomenal recall of pointless trivia, this is the first time I’ve got around to entering. Unfortunately, after I get through the first selection round, they tell me the second round will take place while I’ll be on holiday in Australia. Given the choice between a shot at TV fame and three weeks in the Australian summer, I head south. While in Australia, I spend an extremely memorable four days travelling along the Great Ocean Road. This will be crucial three years later. November 2002. Let’s have another go at this. This year, I manage to stay in the country through all the university selection rounds, and by the time the prospective contestants are whittled down to four, I am among them. Now to take on Granada, who give every team entering a quiz and an interview to see if they are a) clever enough and b) charismatic enough to look good on the show. Who knows whether we failed on a) or b), but either way, [...]