Quiz Night

I love quizzes. To be fair, you wouldn't want me on your pub quiz team because I know next to nothing about the staple diet of those - popular music, soap operas, celebrities. Although there's always a bit of sport where I might be able to contribute. 

But Monday night is Quiz Night on BBC2. Mastermind at 7:30 followed by Only Connect and finally University Challenge.

When I was a teacher at Chetham's School, as Head of Sixth Form I organised a team to compete in the Manchester Schools' Challenge. I got my good friend who was the physics teacher to build the electronics required to enable the buzzers and we had a lot of fun. I don't think we won anything (musicians don't know much about normal life) and one of the teaching staff, a dour Scottish Presbyterian, denounced us as "prostituting our knowledge", which I found difficult to answer because (a) I was shocked and (b) I didn't know what that meant.

At home when the kids got older, University Challenge was a regular watch (it's been going for over 60 years, only one year less than Coronation Street) and involved a cushion.

Anyway, back to tonight's quizzes. Mastermind is my least favourite because half of the questions are unanswerable except in very specific circumstances, i.e. you actually need to know something about the specialist subjects chosen. Here are those from the most recent three episodes:

• Stage plays of Sir Tom Stoppard
• The music of Led Zeppelin
• Penguins
• The Empire State Building 
• The Glorious Revolution
• The career of Novak Djokovic 
• Caravaggio
• Premier League Darts
• Inside No. 9
• Grace Hopper

See what I mean? Esoteric doesn't come close. The contestants also answer a general knowledge round, which starts with a very easy question and gets progressively harder. Which is OK for me as I'll get a few. Of course for the contestants it's much more difficult because there is clock pressure.

Then there's Only Connect, probably the most difficult quiz show around. You have to work out the link between four apparently unrelated clues (or sometimes three and you have to guess what's coming next). Pure inductive reasoning, of the type used for solving cryptic crossword clues. They're often deliberately misleading. Try this:

• 14
• 39
• 50
• 55

The connecting wall round gives you 16 words and you have to group them correctly in four groups of four. Example:

• maroon, volume, horse, desert
• count, vanilla, strand, weight
• dump, chocolate, age, standard
• measure, matter, plain, normal

It's fiendishly difficult (contestants are on the clock too) but fascinates me. Answers tomorrow!

Finally, University Challenge is basically a pub quiz for nerds. I guess that's me. 

I'm the archetypal couch potato.