Tuesday, 19th August, 2003 – Twat. Toffs. The Euro. Gerbils.

So, it was last night that Mars Attacks! took the reins of the Three Pigeons Monday Night Quiz. While agreeing to set the quiz seemed a bad idea initially, I eventually warmed to it, and enjoyed putting together my film round. Sat, trembling, on the toilet at 19:00 last night, releasing a succession of high-pitched, strangulated anxiety-farts, I realised that I had been right first time, and it was a bad idea.

As I have previously mentioned, Scott, the regular quizmaster, is a dazzlingly charismatic, PT Barnum-esque character, who commands the room effortlessly, accepting no back-chat, and moving the quiz along with efficiency and authority. The prospect of having to step into his shoes (his metaphorical shoes) was daunting.

In the end it went as smoothly as I could have wished. We didn’t badly misjudge the intelligence levels of the teams, so there were no ludicrously high or low scores, and I did not stumble and bumble over my 10 questions, causing the quizees to break into a menacing slow handclap, that began to swell into a nightmarish wall of sound that threatened to crush me as I crumpled to the floor and repeatedly wet myself. Which was a bonus.

However, as predicted, the weasel-faced Chris-Finch-from-The-Office-alike stuck his stupid, mulleted oar in on more than one occasion. The questions that he disputed were as follows:

Q: Where did the Great Fire of London start?
A: Pudding Lane.

To which Finchy screeched “Hold on! We put ‘in a bakery’! It started in a bakery – you didn’t specify that it was ‘which road’. No! No! Hold on, you should have specified! Etc etc etc”

Q: Which city did Joan of Arc deliver from the English in (I can’t remember the year)?
A: Orleans

Finchy: “We put ‘Lyon’. ‘Cos that’s what it is now! Come on! Come on! You’ve gotta accept that! Etc etc etc”, repeat until brutally stabbed to death with knitting needles.

Now, I don’t begrudge Finchy and co the right to debate the answers to our questions, even when they are as extravagantly wrong as in the last instance. It is the awesomely inappropriate, finger-jabbing intensity of his protestations that I cannot stick. Every week, he will pick up on some perceived inaccuracy and react to it as if it were a personal insult. Like if someone had called him a wizened, bitter, brain-dead nincompoop, for example. Moreover, each week his protestations are rendered doubly pointless by the fact that his team ALWAYS COME LAST.

Well, always except for one week, when a new – and surely never to be repeated – low-water mark of stupidity was set by two wet-lipped, bouffanted, Portillo-faced, extravagantly brainless toffs named (I am presuming) Hugo and Olly. They managed to card a single-figure score in a quiz of 50 questions, and on the rare occasion that they did get a question right, would bellow the answer at each other in charmless celebration. In fact, even when they didn’t know the answer, they would broadcast their forehead-slappingly dumb stabs in the dark across the room at top volume, in voices that dripped with massive privilege and breath-taking ignorance.

I am pleased to report that the Mars Attacks! record score of 42 is still unbeaten, though the Giraffes – our wily nemeses from the week of our first win – are back in form, and moonwalked to victory. We will be back next week to face them down.

Finally, if the prospect of some unelected, cheese-eating, Brussels-based Eurocrat barging into your home armed with a spirit-level, before aggressively straightening your bananas, confiscating your Great British Bangers, and smashing your ‘Diana: Princess of Hearts’ commemorative plates into a thousand pieces, isn’t enough to sour you against the Euro, how about this bombshell from Joan Collins, currently ‘writing’ a column in the Daily Mail:

"Before the euro, a pair of moccasins in St Tropez cost the equivalent of £25; now these same shoes are more than £35.”

Chilling, eh?

And in other news Giant Gerbils Infest China