It’s not about winning*

REPORT

It’s not about winning*

On the remote fringes of civilised society there exists an obscure cult whose members practise the long-obsolete skill of Knowing Stuff Without Googling It. Like getting giblets out of a chicken or changing a spark plug, this is a skill which no person living in 2022 actually needs, and yet they persist.

Thus it was that on 16th February this year, 18 teams of up to four friendless nerds coalesced like fluff in a washing machine filter to compete for the frankly not-very-coveted title of Shropshire LawSoc Quiz Champions Spring 2022.

The atmosphere was febrile. Quizmaster Scoob made a joke about Stevie Wonder which had half the room studying their cuticles and the other half snickering like Beavis and Butthead. Lawyers unused to multitasking (or indeed tasking) began to lose their shit as they tried to fill in the picture round while answering questions on Culture And Literature. Decades-long friendships splintered like sparrow bones in the jaws of a feral cat over the awarding or withholding of a half point for the forename of an Olympic figure skater.

Here is a selection of the questions which our valiant TriviaNauts had to grapple with:

What was the Roman name for the city of Chester? H

ow many human players are on each side in a game of polo?

Grenadine comes from which fruit?

Who won the Costa 2021 book of the year?

In Greek Mythology, who was the first woman on Earth?

I know what you’re thinking: What kind of mutant would store stuff like that in their actual brain? But store it they did, to the extent that at half time 6 teams were neck and neck. This brought into sharp relief the $64,000 question of all quiz tournaments: When shall we play our Joker?

For the uninitiated, a Joker doubles your score on a given round. Play it on the 90s sitcoms round where you only scored three and you have one foot in the grave; play it on the 80s gameshows round where you scored fifteen, and you are going for gold. It’s a gamble. The winners need to deploy a combination of utterly inconsequential factretention; strategic cunning; and an ability to write legibly under pressure.

At the end of the Spring Quiz 2022 the team which emerged victorious from the seething crucible of trivia was the Lanyon Bowdler threesome pictured here at their moment of triumph. They left not only with a swagger in their step, a fun-sized trophy and the beginnings of a tension headache just behind their eyes, but also with a bottle of champagne each.

But on a night such as this there isn’t just one winner. The raffle saw people with no intellectual abilities at all going home with fabulous prizes donated by Tanners, Shrewsbury Town Football Club, Rad beer, PCB solicitors, Flavells wealth management, Caffe Mondi, Cote Brasserie, Lanyon Bowdler and others. As a result, £250 was raised for Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service.

The event has been hailed as the best quiz to be held on a Wednesday in February, and everyone who attended will, I’m sure, join me in thanking the President for her brilliant organisation and Torquemadalike way with a question. Let’s do it again soon.

*actually, it’s all about winning. ■