Don’t ask us this question

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Please don’t ask us for a male QuizMaster. Or a female one. Or a fat one. Or an old one. Or a gay one. Or a non-[enter name of religion here] one. etc. etc.

We’ve written about this before.

We have, perhaps half a dozen times in the last 10+ years that we’ve been running quizzes, been asked “Please can we request a male QuizMaster – we don’t think a female quiz host would be suitable for our event because of [xyz]?”

The problem is, as soon as the question is asked, we are put in a horrible position.

We have to politely and forcefully explain that this isn’t appropriate.

And we have to politely and forcefully explain that this isn’t how we work. All our QuizMasters are highly trained professionals, and their attributes other than how good they are at being a QuizMaster are irrelevant – we allocate our QuizMasters to quizzes according to a blend of, amongst other things, experience vs event complexity, client relationships with QuizMasters, subject matter compatibility and individual availability.

It’s our job to make sure our events are superb, and we hope our clients will trust us to get this right – and we do: our client approval and rebooking rate is as close to perfect as we think is achievable in this kind of industry.

Back to the main topic: once we have been asked for a male QuizMaster, it is difficult for us. We could just say “Sorry, with that question we cannot do business with you.” Maybe we should. But we are a small business, and we generally need to be able to ride difficult situations if we can. So, if we then persuade you to retract the request, do we then send you a male QM anyway? Or a female one to prove you wrong?

Or what if your fears about having a female QM are because you are worried your group can’t be trusted to behave and will cross a line of banter into unacceptability and potential misogyny or harassment? If the group is so awful/sexist then we shouldn’t really be sending anyone. But let’s say we do. Then what will happen? More than likely everything will be great, our QM (male or female) will entertain and control the participants really well. But just possibly something bad might happen. Our staff might complain (and we’d always encourage them to speak up if anything at a quiz made them feel uncomfortable, or worse) and get you and everyone in trouble (rightly so). And then where does that put us as an employer having sent female staff (perhaps not just the QM but also one or more female quiz assistants) into a situation which we could have anticipated would be inappropriate (or worse)?

So, please don’t ask. There are many reasons why we operate as we do (i.e. sending the best person to be the host of each quiz). Luckily the reasons explained in this blog post are only a very small part of why we operate this way – the main reasons are to be efficient and excellent in everything we do.

All QuizQuizQuiz QuizMasters are created equal, as long as they are brilliant at their job – and that job includes being able to adapt to vastly different audiences and rabble rousing/crowd control situations in an appropriate way to ensure the event is awesome.

So please don’t ask.

What are people trying to achieve at a quiz?

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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, depending on the event, may want a variety of things like team building, networking,  employees feeling good about their employer, the publicising of a brand, a particular message to get across – all these generally boil down to it being a good, fun event where people get on, enjoy themselves and people will say afterwards that it was a good event.

That last bit’s what I want too, basically, for different but linked reasons. I want it be a good, fair, lively, competitive quiz, for it to be smoothly and well run; I want it to stand out from other quizzes they’ve ever had, I want people to think the questions were memorable, the rounds were innovative; I want there to be no mishaps and controversies. Above all, I want people to be entertained.

At the back of my mind, I know that’s because I want the client to think well of QuizQuizQuiz, to book us again, to think we’re a safe pair of our hands and to think we live up to what we promise.  By and large, I forget about that once the quiz is underwasy and the momentum of the event takes over: I want the quiz to be fun and competitive because of a mixture of professional pride and taking pleasure in other people’s enjoyment.

These are all good solid motivations. I’m a professional working for a business and I’m trying to do my job well, which is to entertain and provide an enjoyable evening.

But sometimes a quiz master might forget that the motivation of nearly everyone else there is different from that. Many participants may not really care about there being a positive atmosphere and thinking  that it’s a nicely put together quiz, that it’s all being run smoothly and with clear direction A few might notice that kind of thing and it’s great if they do, but basically, most people want to win the quiz and feel that they, personally and their team, have had a good time. Purely and simply.

They’re not thinking about any kind of bigger picture. Of course having a few drinks and a laugh is an important part of it for many people, but, above all, the really important thing is that they want to  get as many right as they can in order to win.

Whereas, obviously, I, as the Quiz Master, don’t care at all who wins. I’d rather one team didn’t win by a huge margin but, otherwise, I’m a bit removed from people’s fierce competitiveness.

If you’re not careful, it can take you aback. A participant might act in a fiercely competitive way, for example marching up to me while I’m speaking and demanding I repeat a question I’ve already repeated twice because they were in the loo, and a quiz master might think “does this person not realise that this is a small delay which adversely affects the excellent momentum this quiz has built up and the altogether delightful atmosphere?” Well, of course they don’t, or if they do realise, they don’t really care. They want to win and they’re going to fight for it.

That’s what many people can be like when they take part in quizzes, anyway. Even for me, though I have a professional hat I can put on, and I can think “aah, that was a good question, this is a very efficient quiz master, this room has a good atmosphere etc …” I still will put that all aside in my effort to win the quiz.

So, it’s an obvious thing for every quiz master to remember. On a good night, where everyone is in perfect harmony, it can seem like every participant is collaborating with you with the same agenda to have a fine all-round quiz evening. But above all most people are just trying to win the quiz.

Weird Places to Run Quizzes

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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 was one little problem: the “separate” room we were in had swing doors through to the main dancefloor with nothing in between – I fought a battle with the cheesy hits coming from the adjoining room all night – I think I won the battle, but ended the evening a little hoarse and a little deafer than I was before.

It got me thinking about the stranger/less ideal places I’ve run quiz nights.  It’s one of the main differences between what we and most quiz masters do: we travel around and set up ad hoc to run quizzes in many, many different venues. We always get it to work, but sometimes it’s easier than others.

There isn’t, as such, an ideal venue. What we’re looking for, roughly, is a room where everyone can see us/the screen(s) (so columns, nooks and crannies and L-shapes are usually a bit of a no-no), where either portable/in-built speakers can be placed where they don’t deafen participants or give feedback, where there’s enough space for everyone, where there’s at least enough light to read and write, where there’s atmosphere rather than sterility and, above all else really, a distinct space where there isn’t noise from somewhere else seeping in and likewise where we don’t have to worry about disturbing other people who aren’t taking part in the quiz. Different kinds of rooms can suit different events, and, like I say, we can make it work even when it’s not perfect.

Generallym, our clients choose the venue and we help them in advance as much as we can – it’s very rare that we say a venue they’ve chosen is really impossible, but we do sometimes advise a repeat client that a venue they used one year really shouldn’t be used for a quiz again.

It usually works very well. There’ve been some tough ones though. Open courtyards in the rain, while 100s of office workers looked on from the outside, bemused. Sections of restaurants separated from the rest of the venue by no more than a bench. Nightclubs where the light could not be raised above a dim twilight. Riverboats with very small indoor sections. Private member clubs without chairs or tables. Downstairs rooms at curry houses where I had to set up on a fridge. Tiny alcoves where our helpers had to sit on the floor, under the table. Such a severe lack of space that our helper had to sit on the other side of a closed door. Space museums with teams in separate exhibition rooms. Leith Dockers Club at 10pm on a Sunday after karaoke night (that was probably my all time favourite). Those are just the ones I can remember. Often, though, a room which ought to be fine has some surprising problem, but rarely anything which can’t be solved out of the QuizMaster’s bag of tricks (both literally and figuratively): vast lengths of cable, an ingeniously positioned speaker or two, huge amounts of duct tape, auxiliary cables, standing in exactly the right spot and speaking at exactly the right volume. It’s all part of the fun, I suppose.

 

 

 

Two rooms of Norwegians

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One of our most experienced QuizMasters, Brewis, faced an interesting challenge earlier this month: run a 45 minutes quiz for 50 people, all from Norway (+ 1 from Sweden), on an away weekend in the Cotswolds. Brewis picks up the story:

“As I was preparing the quiz for this very specific audience, I realised that some of the things that I rely on when there are a lot of non-native British people in the room simply didn’t apply. Normally, there are a good number of British people mixed around, so it becomes fair to expect answers to be submitted in English: but when nobody is a native English speaker that doesn’t seem quite fair. So I had to check the Norwegian names of all the countries, films, TV shows, chemical elements, etc. that were answers throughout the quiz so I could be sure of marking fairly.

For example, on one of the questions the answer was “Knight” as in the chess piece – but 3 teams wrote down “Springer”, the Norwegian word for “Knight” in chess. We also have a question about chemical elements whose name begins with the letter S in English…but Zinc in Norwegian is Sink, whereas Sodium in Norwegian is Natrium. So I allowed them both – but I was well prepared.

I was intending to do some Mystery Voice questions, but it occurred to me that many of the English voices are ones that Norwegians may never have heard, because of dubbing or the like. After all how many British people know what e.g. Angela Merkel sounds like when speaking German? She’d always be shown with a translated voice-over on British TV.

But much excitement was had when there was a tie-breaker at the end, and I summoned one person from each of the two teams in equal first place to identify a famous song from a film that I played in rewind…I have to admit that the reason I chose it was to show off that I knew the Norwegian name for the song…Alas neither player got the answer (despite almost everyone else at the quiz not involved in the tie-break seeming to know): it was ‘Superoptikjempefantafenomenalistisk’ or, in English, ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’. Onto the second tie-break, which was children’s TV themes, and this time they got it very quickly, identifying ‘Brannmann Sam’ (which I played in Norwegian: that’s ‘Fireman Sam’ in English). And the whole audience was singing along, in Norwegian.”

Brewis was also very proud of his handling of a logistic difficulty:

“As it happens the teams were spread out across two rooms, so although the speaker system fed both rooms, I didn’t want to spend too much time back and forth between the two during the quiz for fear of slowing things down too much – after all the allocated time for the quiz was very short at just 45 minutes. But I wanted to make sure that both rooms saw me, and I saw them, for a proper introduction at the beginning. So I turned the speaker off in Room 2 while doing the introduction in Room 1, then headed over to Room 2 having muted the speakers in Room 1 so they got their own introduction. I created a sense of competition between the two rooms, and then headed back to my base station and re-connected the sound to both rooms and got on with the quiz.”

I’ll leave you with this:

Killing the atmosphere

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We’ve written before about different methods for marking answer sheets. Our method at QuizQuizQuiz quiz nights is always to mark them ourselves. The Quiz Master or assistant will do all the marking: compared to other methods, it’s quicker, more accurate, and crucially (for the purpose of comparison in this blog post) helps with the atmosphere of the quiz.

One of the reasons why we like to mark is that it helps us create more suspense, and from there more excitement, at the answers.  As we wrote in a previous blog post: “Many of our questions require teams to think very carefully about answers – and are designed to make them feel clever when they come up with the correct answer. Often they will not be 100% sure that they have the correct answer until we announce it. Now, if they are marking another team’s paper then they may see that this other team put the same answer as them. They will be much more sure they are right with this confirmation, and when the correct answer is read out they will cheer much less if at all. Multiply this to every team, and a guaranteed spontaneous cheer from the entire room could disappear completely.”

I went to an excellent quiz the other night at a local pub – but it was suffering from a lack of teams over the summer (we were one of only 5 or 6 teams playing compared to the usual 12-16 that they said they normally have). To make matter worse the QuizMaster did things in a rather unusual way. She took the answer sheets in to mark herself (which we approve of!), but then she handed them back out complete with ticks and crosses BEFORE reading out the answers. This meant that the only source of suspense for us was waiting to hear what the correct answers were for the ones we had got wrong. There was no sense of suspense or excitement on the several (for it was a well written quiz) questions where we were making carefully deduced guesses but weren’t sure if we had plumped for the right answer. Of course we knew we had (or hadn’t) before the answers were read out, so it wasn’t very interesting at that point.

Maybe I am being harsh, but these things do matter!

 

Common Quiz Night Complications Part 5: Questions in Advance

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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 the questions in advance has then participated in the quiz – this does happen…!) but we strongly suggest that this process is not only unnecessary but very counterproductive for the quality of the quiz.

Why is it unnecessary? Clients may well want to make sure the questions are not inappropriate or rude, are well-judged for their staff, make sure the difficulty level is right, may even have their own suggestions about what will make a good question. Occasionally, for a certain type of event, a collaboration between ourselves and our client works well – if there is a very specific aim (e.g. a brand launch) or a very particular theme. But this is rare indeed.

By and large, it’s unnecessary because we know what we’re doing. We spend all our working (and waking hours) striving to make quiz questions and quiz rounds work perfectly. We can find out enough about the event and the questions required in an initial consultation to make sure we get the questions right. We don’t include inappropriate material and we’re very good at judging difficulty. If we do agree to clients seeing questions in advance, we do our best to stipulate that we’ll accept comment on the subject matter and feel of the quiz, but not really on the difficulty of specific questions. A client may flag up certain questions as “too hard” or “too easy”. What that means,usually, is simply that they do or don’t know the answer themselves (and rarely is it a balanced judgement based on writing and asking tens of thousands of questions for different audiences). Furthermore, our quizzes are structured so as to include some questions which are relative “gimmes”, some which are extremely tricky, and some which may appear difficult but are in fact relatively easy (and vice-versa). We don’t want everything to be at same level. It’s not untrue to say that 99% of the feedback we’ve had to act on about questions being too easy or too hard has been unhelpful to the quality of the quiz.

We hope that when people pay to book us, they accept what we offer. We have skills and expertise and a process, and hopefully they can trust us that it works.

That’s where it can get to being counterproductive for people to want to see quiz questions in advance. In general, we don’t prepare a quiz weeks in advance. In fact, the content of the quiz is never set in stone. The skill of all our QuizMasters is to be able to adapt the questions and rounds as the quiz is happening. I might have mapped out roughly what I’m going to ask beforehand but, for whatever reason, that might need to change on the night: teams might be later turning up, the demographic information we were given before the quiz might not match the participants, teams might need a little more time to discuss their answers – the ability to change the quiz as it is happening is one of the very most important things that make our quizzes, we think, a cut above the rest.

I’ve often felt, if running a quiz where we’d sent our client the questions beforehand and everything was set in stone for the night “I wish I could change this a bit”.

We often compare our work to that of a stand-up comedian or an after-dinner speaker or a DJ: the jokes, anecdotes or tracks don’t necessarily work out of context, and we wouldn’t expect them to send their routine, speech or tracklist in advance…this is also why we are often reluctant to send “sample questions”: if you were booking a comedian you’d judge his/her performance as a whole rather than on the basis of a few one-liners out of context of the whole set. A good comedian, speaker or DJ adapts on the night to the audience, as does a top quality quiz master.

We’re far from awkward: we want to make sure we talk with our clients beforehand in order to deliver the very best quiz we can, but we do hope that means we are trusted to get our questions right without needing to go through them in advance.

Common Quiz Night Complications: Part 4

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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 isn’t a right and wrong  with this one. Plenty of good quizzes have running scores being read out, or indeed displayed on a flipchart, screen or laser display board.

You might well say “It’s like suggesting there shouldn’t be a Premier League table throughout the season. That would be rubbish”. Well, that would be impossible, for starters (unless Sepp Blatter announces even more sinister top-down proposals than he has managed to yet), but would it really be rubbish? Think how many dull games between mid-table teams with nothing to play for there used to be at the end of  the season, how much that lack of inspiration can still, even now when financial incentives have been brought in so that every position is worth fighting for to some extent, adversely affect the end of a season.

Here’s another sporting example. Occasionally, in Championship Boxing, someone’s had the bright idea of having the judges’ tallies being announced to the crowd (and hence to the fighters) at the end of the 4th and 8th round. But they found that the disheartened boxer who discovered he was miles behind on the scores would just give up, knowing that without a spectacular knockout there was no hope for him. Now, opponents of boxing might suggest that’s a good thing, that a boxer getting soundly beaten might be spared further punishment, but the point is that something introduced with the intention of providing the crowd with greater excitement actually had the opposite effect.

It’s not even necessarily the teams at the bottom who might lose interest. There’s glory in being rubbish and acting up to it. It’s those teams who might have gone into the quiz thinking they had a decent chance, but if they’re gradually dropping a few points per round, they’re falling behind. If it’s just the odd point here and there, they might well think they’re in with a chance right to the end, even though in truth, they’re about 10 behind. If they know it, disappointment and ennui might become evident, it’s only natural. No one wanted to be Spurs throughout the 90s (even, really, up to now), did they, with their endless mid-table boredom, and trust me, I was a Spurs fan, almost wishing we could have the occasional relegation scrap to liven things up.

We appreciate that people think that reading out running scores might keep things lively and exciting, foster and nourish rivalries, but, really, it can have the opposite effect. Here are a few other reasons …
1. It adds excitement to the final round, which in our quizzes has a format carefully designed to include an element of jeopardy. Teams gamble a little bit on what answers to write, and that gamble is more fun if they don’t know exactly what they’re aiming for. E.g. if the top team knows going into the last round they are leading by 6, they know they can play it very safe on  the last round – if they don’t know exactly, they have to take a bit more of a gamble, and, if they blow it spectacularly in the last round by getting lots wrong, well; that just adds to the fun.

2. Time. Our quizzes run to a well orchestrated flow. We build momentum and like to keep it going. Reading out running scores at the end of each round will slow the quiz down. This is only exacerbated if, as we’re sometimes asked, we put scores up on screen. In this case, the amount of time for scores to be added up and typed up will severely slow the quiz down. The only way to do this even remotely quickly is by inputting the scores directly into an excel sheet with a formula and then switching the signal to that laptop displaying the scores (as the quizmaster’s laptop will be in constant use and everything would come to a grinding halt if he had to stop using his laptop for a considerable time while scofes are inputted).

There would be cost of significant time and/or an extra, expensive piece of equipment.

3. The marking. We pride ourselves on the speed and quality of our marking, the way it blends seamlessly into the running order of the quiz. Running scores would make life a lot harder for the markers and prevent them doing their job as best they could.

Mistakes can be made, in both marking and adding up. In marking, it can take a fair bit of work to decipher some teams’ messy scribblings and getting all the sheets, correctly marked, to the quizmaster in time to read them out. Our markers are very good at it, but part of the process involves double-checking, throughout the quiz, that we totted each sheet, each round up right, so that we can be sure we’ve got it spot on by the end. Running scores puts pressure  on the marking to be perfect every step of the way, but any minor mistake, which we’d pick up during ongoing checks, would be highlighted by instantly giving out running scores.

What we do, always, is give out the scores for each round immediately the round is finished (though sometimes just a handful of the top scores in a larger quiz, for the sake of  time and momentum, though we’ll do our best to make sure all the team names, funny or not, are read out at some point).

Alert and sharp teams may well have a very decent idea of how they’re doing and who their rivals are – that’s fine. Likewise, sometimes individuals come up to us and ask us how they’re doing. We’re happy to give a vague idea – indeed I often announce how many points are separating teams etc. but anything more precise is to be avoided.

Really, tension and suspense is at the heart of it. It’s a similar case to when people hand in their answer sheet and say “Ooh, number 7 was a tester. What was the answer?” and we say “We’ll let you know when we read it out” and they say “But we’ve handed it it now, what’s the harm?” and the harm is that, once they know the answer, that will probably spread through the room, and so, by the time I read out the answer, which teams have been quarrelling over, rather than the roar of joy/shriek of despair which will greet it if teams are kept from knowing, there’ll be a damp pfft if everybody already knows. Might as well just hand people a sheet at the start, take it in, mark it and hand it back without a word.

Likewise, if teams know their scores all the way through, the tension will gradually be drained from the evening. Who knows, some teams might go home, start throwing paper planes, start cheating.

I said there wasn’t a right and wrong answer, but I’ve written this post as if there is! There are, I’m sure, positives to giving out running scores, but they don’t work for our format of quiz – and so we don’t do running scores: generally when people hire us they do so because they want us, with our thousands of quizzes worth of experience, to do what we know works best for our quizzes,

Culture Clash

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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 rounds, the once-a-show music question might be either something to do with classical music or pop music, but when it comes to the later rounds it is always, without fail unless anyone can contradict me on this, on classical music. As if they’re throwing the stupid ones a bone early on, but when it gets serious, getting on with the proper stuff. I’d much rather there was no popular music at all than that it’s quite clearly treated as something “beneath”.

I fear this is reflected in Paxman’s own attitude whenever something from the “low-culture” world enters the realm. The superciliousness which he is – often unjustly – famed for enters his voice. “How ridiculous of you to know that!” he seems to say (sometimes he doesn’t seem to say it, he just says it …). “How ridiculous that anyone bothers to know that.” The danger, for him, is that this blanket approach to the low arts can make him look a bit silly – I remember a question about Canadian singers where he took the same “what nonsense!” approach to a team identifying songs by Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain and Joni Mitchell. It doesn’t take a degree in pop music and a slavish devotion to the greatness of late 60s/early 70s singer-songwriters to know that there are vastly different degrees of “nonsense” within that question. He ended up just looking a little ignorant.

Perhaps it reflects his own tastes and cultural perspective, perhaps it’s the show’s party line. It’s a highbrow show for highbrow people, fine. That’s its USP. But, both in my professional life and my personal life,  I find the persistence of that cultural divide pretty insidious.

As a quiz master, it works both ways. First of all, to fend off any claims of hypocrisy, those who’ve ever been to a QuizQuizQuiz quiz might know we often include a round called Culture Clash where, yes, we differentiate between “High” and “Low” Culture. We say there’s something for everyone,  a bit about books, art, and a bit about film and TV. I’d like to claim that’s a bold subversion and a lesson in breaking down the walls of elitism but, nah, it’s just a good round format where we try not to exclude anyone, where there’s an opportunity for a good range of questions.

If we do that round, we make it fair. We make it suit the crowd. It might be weighted more one way or another depending on who it’s for, but, either way, it’s generally about well-known books, well-known artists, well-known TV  shows, well-known films – interesting facts and quirky questions within that.

So it can be frustrating when the eyes roll when I say “Now a question about classical music” or, likewise, “Which TV show …”. I’ve mentioned before, there’s nothing which’ll make a quiz master grit their teeth so much as the phrases “I wasn’t even born then” or “I don’t know anything about celebrities/pop music/TV”.

The thing is anything can be good and anything can, likewise, be worth knowing. Culturally speaking, if I live up to that credo, it means saying that the possibility of there being a good song by Westlife exists or the possibility of a good film by Michael Bay or a good TV show featuring Amanda Holden. It is possible, it might even already be real … might not … People might describe this as a form of (pop) cultural relativism.

Likewise, it follows that within each topic is something worth knowing. Our job as question writers is to find the thing worth knowing, or at least worth thinking about, within the topic, but the responsibility of the quizzer, as I see it, is to at least not dismiss the subject out of hand before it’s begun. I’ve seen people scorn questions about everything from sport to celebrity to politics to history to theology to pop music to TV to geography (really, I have! I mean, how do you think geography is beneath you?), and it bugs me.

Trivia’s a funny word, isn’t it? I disapprove of its use when applied to quizzes. Sometimes I tell people I write and run quizzes. “Like, trivia?” they say “No, not trivia, quizzes”. The word trivia is more persistent in America than the UK when applied to quizzes, to the business of knowing stuff in a competitive format.

But the word “trivial” is right there in both countries – that which is trifling, inessential. My “high-culture” background tells me that it’s from the Latin for where three roads meet, i.e that which is appropriate to the street corner, tittle-tattle. But whether is on high culture, low culture, celebrities, Ancient Greek architecture, sport or fashion, I think you’re missing a trick if you treat all or any of it as “trivia”, as vulgar and irrelevant to higher concerns. One day something that you learn  at a quiz may just save your life … or at least save you in an awkward social situation.

 

 

 

Confex

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In March, for the first time, we decided to exhibit at a trade show, specifically Confex at London Olympia, a two-day event for people in the conferences and events industry.

There were stalls belonging to everything from hotels to singers to events companies to ice cream stands to Austin Powers impersonators. There were a lot of extremely impressive stands and big screens and people with clipboards and there was plenty of free coffee.

Since QuizQuizQuiz began, over 10 years ago, we’ve run quizzes at all sorts of events – fundraisers, after work bashes, client events, school competitions, nothing too big or too small. We’ve run plenty of quizzes at conferences too. Usually, these take place at nice hotels outside London, they often take place over dinner, they’re pretty fancy, there are usually various people buzzing around, organising. We’ve gained loads of experience in how to adjust and adapt our quizzes to make them work perfectly for that kind of event.

Sometimes they’re just a way to relax and unwind at the end of a long day, sometimes they’re integral to the team building aspect of the week.

Either way, we’ve been looking to increase the number of Conference quizzes we do, because we do them well, because we suspected it was a relatively untapped market, and because they’re fairly lucrative.

Our suspicions that it was a relatively untapped market were pretty well confirmed at Confex. We spoke to a lot of people who had never considered holding a quiz night at a conference. We were hopefully able to persuade them that it was a workable idea and to explain to them how it would work.

Various members of the QuizQuizQuiz came down and some of us were more natural salesmen and women than others! Rather than try to pretend we were something we’re not, we emphasized the fun element of what we do. We engaged people with picture rounds and quiz questions and gave away a lot of jelly beans. We ran a few ad hoc buzzer rounds and generally tried to give people something enjoyable as they wandered round what occasionally could have been quite a dry event.

Time will tell how much new business we brought in. We’re already seeing positive results. We happen to think that a quiz night, especially a QuizQuizQuiz quiz night, works wonders in almost every context, and sometimes it’s worth making the effort to explain that to people who might not have considered it before.

The First Quiz Night

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It’s eight years, almost to the day, since the first QuizQuizQuiz quiz night I helped at. I’d just been told that I’d got the job as the company’s first full time employee (who was not also a founder). Though I’d been interviewed by all the founders, my more important application process was undoubtedly the months I’d been attending the Fox pub quiz in Putney, run by Jack Waley-Cohen, at which I had an ideal opportunity to display my aptitude for the quiz game.

I recall the first quiz night at which I was a quiz assistant: I was helping company director and founder David Brewis in a swish bar near Aldgate, and I took delight in being able to comfortably mark the 13 teams in the short time it took him to read out the answers to each round.

Shortly afterwards, I helped at another event in the grimy upstairs room of a city pub (at QQQ, you get used to working in all kinds of venues) and then I was deemed ready to run my first quiz.

I was not computer illiterate, not quite, but certainly computer ill-adjusted. Though I’d had a bit of time to practice with the technology that we use at our quizzes, it would, sensibly, be a while before I was set free to run a quiz in its entirety – setting up the equipment, playing the music, the video etc.

So I had two helpers for my first quiz – founder-director, Lesley-Anne Brewis, and one of the early investors, James Brilliant (yes, that is his actual name). I was naturally a little nervous, and my nerves weren’t helped by arriving  at the Leadenhall Market (I think it was Leadenhall, it was definitely one of the Markets) nice and early to find that not only was our client not there yet, but the venue wasn’t open, and showed no signs of being so.

After a good few minutes standing outside, everyone necessary (bar staff, quiz helpers and quiz participants) turned up, and we set up, and got ready to go.

I’m not going to pretend it was perfect! I remember just before starting I got it into my head that I would conduct the quiz sitting down, and only Lesley’s frantic whispering to remind me of the first rule of QuizMaster club raised me to my feet.  I also remember, about an hour in, realising that I hadn’t plugged my laptop in and it was rapidly running out of gas. Neither of those are mistakes I have made in the ensuing 8 years.

I don’t remember much else of that night, except that they enjoyed it and clapped at the end, and I was pleased with myself, but still not sure.

By the second one, at a North London school, I was getting into my stride. I had banter, jokes, a bit more fluency, and I knew after that one that I could definitely be good at this.

As is our policy at QuizQuizQuiz, we don’t throw quiz masters in at the deep end. The full process of question selection and multimedia management came gradually over the next few weeks.

The first quiz I was let loose on as a full multimedia extravaganza with no “handholder” was a blazingly hot May day in a hot room at a media company near Euston. It was all a bit random and off-the-cuff, I think I set a speaker up on a pool table and ended up having to start about an hour late because of all sorts of other activities going on.

I think I was too nervous to ask for a glass of water and I did the whole thing, sweating like the whole room, on adrenaline. It went exceptionally well. I got to the allotted finish time and asked if they fancied another round – they shouted their approval. I ended up running three extra rounds and, though it was still early evening the atmosphere was one of drunken delight.

That’s when I realised how much fun it was to be a quiz master, when you and everyone in attendance is of the same mind to have a jolly good time.

At QuizQuizQuiz, we give a guarantee of professionalism and quality. We stand up, we plug our laptops in, and we do all sorts of rather more sophisticated things as we strive to give our absolute best to ensure everyone has a good time. Of course the participating teams play a massive part in that two. That same Euston company taught me that. I was invited back to run the quiz for them a year later, and really looked forward to it.

As I waited for the start of the quiz with that same crowd the next year my host told me “Bit of a strange atmosphere here today, sorry, there’s been a few redundancies …” Aah, ok. Did that affect the atmosphere of the quiz? Yes, of course. Where there’d been delighted shouting the year before, this year there was more restraint and, dare I say it, strain.

I remember raising my game as best I could – I’d improved a lot as a quiz master in the year gone by, and by the end, that atmosphere was great.

Since then, I’ve run 100s of quizzes for different groups in different venues, with different vibes and different purposes. I’ve asked 1000s of questions, I’ve written 10s of 1000s of questions, I’ve even worked out how to use a computer … a bit. This is still my job because I love doing it, as we all do. So, I look back on those first quiz nights, nerves and mistakes and all, with great fondness.