Tuesday 12th August, 2003 – Quiz Despair

No doubt the shockwaves have already reached you. Perhaps you were walking to work yesterday and wondered why the earth seemed so still; why are everyone’s curtains still drawn; why does a solitary tear roll down the cheek of the young child, standing on the street corner, clutching her teddy bear to her chest so very tightly.

Perhaps a close friend walked right past you, in a daze, and even when you took him by the shoulder and shook him hard, it took him a few seconds to even register your presence. Then he looked into your eyes and said, “You haven’t heard, have you?”

“Heard about what?” you would say, panic rising in your belly.

“About Mars Attacks!” he would say.

“What about Mars Attacks!” you would say, “Tell me goddammit!”

“They…. they…. lost” he would say, and his voice would falter and crack on the word ‘lost’, and you would grip each other tightly, afraid to let go.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, I can only apologise as I imagine that you are now slumped at your computer, sobbing uncontrollably and trying to assimilate the information. You may well be asking yourself ‘Do I want to live in a world where Mars Attacks! are no longer the Three Pigeons Monday Night Quiz champions?’ I say be strong. You can come through this.

To be honest, while losing did sting a little initially (especially given that the prize money was a wallet-busting £34 this week), it is not so bad. It would have been embarrassing to win 4 weeks in a row and, though I got caught up in the competitive fervour whilst it was on, part of me was relieved at the end. Especially given that – despite my initial reservations – Mars Attacks! have agreed to host the quiz next week. Oh yes.

I have been charged with responsibility for the film round, and am going to post it tomorrow for your fun. Thinking up questions was good. But there is more to hosting a quiz than just composing and reading out questions. Knowing that we were going to be doing it next week made me pay more attention to the role played by the quizmaster this week. He is actually a man of great charisma and authority. He manages to be cool and funny, whilst retaining control of proceedings. He also speaks in a very loud, clear voice.

I am neither charismatic or authoritative or cool. I can be funny, but only in private – in groups of more than 4, my sense of humour nosedives, and my variant on Tourette’s syndrome, that forces me to crack constant, very very obvious jokes, kicks in. For instance, if someone has 11 points by the end of the second round, I’ll know in my head that crying “Legs Eleven!” in a bingo-caller voice will be the stupidest possible thing to do. But there is an above-average chance that I will do so.

Keeping control of the crowd is even more worrying. In truth, the vast majority of the competitors are distinctly un-rowdy. They are very friendly, and the team who displaced us this week were four extremely pleasant boys who would cheerfully describe themselves as ‘computer geeks’. One of them was wearing a t-shirt with one of those 8 or 9-sided Dungeons and Dragons-style dice on the front (no offence Full English – D & D is cool).

But there is one team who cause a fuss every week. They are headed by a spindly, bird-faced man with an unfriendly moustache and a vintage, un-ironic mullet. Every week, he will find some reason to argue the toss about various questions, and does so in an aggressive, finger-pointing, Begbie-from-Trainspotting-like manner. Usually, his team give up halfway through the competition, with an appallingly low score, claiming that the questions are wrong, and the quizmaster should check his facts next week.

I really don’t fancy crossing swords with this boob, but no amount of checking of answers will be enough to prevent him from sticking his oar in somewhere down the line. Like a nervous substitute teacher, I will have to decide whether I am going to try to be the nice guy who just laughs off any conflict, or the psycho-man who reacts with inappropriate fury to even the slightest discord. I predict that I will start out as the former, and unexpectedly morph into the latter, to leave people questioning both my question-writing ability, and my sanity by the end of the evening.