I’ve been thinking about the fact that different people at different places want different things from quizzes. That’s obvious, really, but it’s definitely worth every quiz master remembering that fact. What I want from a quiz that I am hosting (from a personal perspective) can coincide loosely with what the event organiser wants. Event organisers, […]
I ran a quiz recently in a London night club, which isn’t a particularly weird place to run a corporate quiz. Quite often clients arrange for their quizzes to be in rooms in clubs – sometimes this is ideal, as we can just plug into a perfectly set up DJing booth. On this occasion, there […]
A quiz night can just be (and often is) 10/20/30/40/50 fairly random general questions asked in succession. That can make for a great quiz. There doesn’t have to be some overarching concept, there don’t have to be different rounds. Very often, if a quiz is split into rounds, it’ll be, say, 6 rounds of 10 […]
People love my job. For the eight years I’ve been a professional quiz question writer and quiz master, when I tell people what I do for a living, I can only think of one occasion when it was meant by mild disinterest … “Oh, right … and moving on …” and on all the other […]
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how, as a professional quiz question writer, I have to adapt to writing for vastly different levels. I gave examples of setting I did for everything from buzzer quiz questions for school children right up to writing for that most thinky-puzzly-quizzy of TV quizzes, ‘Only Connect’. […]
This week, as most weeks, I was doing some question writing. I tend to have a few concurrent projects to work on, whether writing general stock for our hosted corporate quizzes or specifically for one special event, writing for a game we’ve been hired to provide questions for, or for a TV show. Down the […]
Every now and then we are asked, usually by events companies on behalf of their clients, if it will be possible to see the questions we are going to ask at their quiz night in advance. It seems to be a perfectly reasonable request (as long as we don’t find out that whoever has seen […]
Another entry in this ongoing series, where I highlight recurrent, apparently reasonable enough, requests from clients which we prefer not to include in our corporate quizzes and charity quizzes. So far, I’ve mentioned Exaggerated Theming Penalty or Bonus Points Buying Clues Now, it’s time to discuss (and eventually dismiss)… Running Scores Firstly, we’ll admit there […]
A new series of the classic quizzer’s quiz show, ’15 to 1′, has been and gone. How did they do? A constant feature of my last few years at school and my university years, Channel 4’s magic hour from 4 to 5 was the perfect time for the all-round quizzing brain. ‘Countdown’ for the problem-solving, […]
I’m an avid viewer of ‘University Challenge’ but there’s something that always bothers me about it. It’s obviously a difficult quiz show with subject matters which reflect academia – that’s fine. It’s what the contestants are there for and it’s what the viewers watch it for. But what bothers me is that, in the early […]