The First Project SEARCH Quiz Night

OK people, time for me to talk, for once, about a quiz experience of my own. This was my first setting of a quiz, and my first question master experience. First, though, a word on the cause it was in aid of.

As regular readers of my UC write-ups will know, I began an internship at Aberdeen University back in September. It's called Project SEARCH, and it is run by local charity Inspire in conjunction with North East Scotland College. It originated in the States back in 1996, and came to Britain shortly afterwards, with the Aberdeen course beginning in September 2013. I am amongst only the second batch of Aberdeen Uni interns.

Of course, because we are a stand-alone course run by a charity with the aid of a college, funding is sparse, and therefore we have to come up with funding ways of our own. We ran a semi-successful bake sale before Christmas, and I also suggested a quiz night, drawing on my own experience of partaking in quiz nights and the experience of pub quizzers online.

My idea was accepted, and we planned the quiz night for Friday. The original idea was we'd do seven specialist rounds, and we'd all contribute questions. But the other interns were unable to come up with many questions of their own, so I took on main contributions. I also emailed our friend Dave Clark for setting advice. I won't quote exactly what he said, but he basically advised not to make the questions too hard.

So, therefore, most of the questions I ended up using were taken from Millionaire and Fifteen-to-One, with a handful from UC and a handful of originals we'd thought up ourselves. In the end, we did two specialist rounds (sport and film/tv), an audio round, a picture round people could work on in their own time and three general knowledge rounds.

Here is a selection of the questions that made it into the final quiz, and the back-stories behind some of them:

Theoretically, what is the minimum number of strokes with which a tennis player can win a set?
Now, this is a famous question from Millionaire; ironically, the episode in question was shown on Challenge late last week! Basically, contestant Tony Kennedy answered 24, was judged right, and went on to win £125,000 as a result. However, viewers later pointed out he was wrong; it was actually 12, due to the chance that your opponent will double fault all their serves. Mr Kennedy was allowed to keep his winnings due to the producers deciding it was their fault, not his. I put this in to see how many people made the same mistake; all but one team did!

With which sport do you associate the names Mickey Duff, Kellie Maloney and Terry Lawless?
Now this is a Fifteen-to-One question; the answer is boxing. To make it a bit more challenging, one of the supervisors suggested I change one of the names to that of the promoter who changed gender to confuse people. I think it worked with a handful of the teams.

In November 1996, the Simpsons aired on UK terrestrial TV for the first time; which channel did it air on?
Now, this is a question I am quite pleased with. Most people know the Simpsons has been on Channel 4 for many years, a handful more will remember it was on BBC2 before that, but how many would remember it was on BBC1 for three months first? Well, one team got it right, with most others saying BBC2 or Channel 4.

The music round was the only round I did not contribute to, with two other interns deciding the tracks and finding them on iTunes. They also played a sneaky trick by using nine pop songs, but finishing with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony!

Who is the most recent British PM to enter office without winning a general election and leave without losing one?
This is a question suggested by a listener for the Beat the Brains segment of Brain of Britain that just stuck in my mind as an odd fact. It's Harold McMillan; think a few managed to work it out.

Putting the English preposition 'in' into the French word for 'an inn' gives the name of which fruit, eaten as a vegetable?
Now, this is a question from UC, which stuck in my mind, and I managed to sneak into another quiz night a few years ago. It's 'aubergine', and a handful of teams managed to work it out.

In palaeontology, a taxon that, as the result of a misidentification, appears to vanish from the fossil record and then reappear, is known informally by the name of which singer, in reference to the number of impersonators he has spawned?
This is another UC question and, if you regular read my reviews, you will know it was my favourite question of the last series. Why? Because it sounds out sounding so complicated, but when it swerves late on, you suddenly can take an educated guess. Most teams said 'Elvis', which is correct!

If it take five robots five minutes to make five machines, how long will it take one hundred robots to make one hundred machines?
Another UC question, with a sneaky catch; I tried this on a colleague before the quiz last week, and he got it wrong. It is, as our friend Hugh 'HughTube' Bennett will tell you, it's five minutes.

If a Japanese isha (doctor) asks you to stick out your shita, what does he mean?
Now, I'm amazed my supervisors let me get this into the final draft! It's a famous blooper from the US show Jeopardy!, where one contestant, a Norwegian, gives the obvious wrong answer, allowing his opponent to get the right answer of 'tongue'. Mercifully, only one team made that mistake, and most got it right. Dave Clark did advise me to sneak a bit of cheekiness into the quiz, and that pretty much qualifies.

So those are some of the more notable quizzer questions from Friday night. There were a few more that I put in, mostly from Millionaire; I did notice with Millionaire questions, that wrong answers people gave were occasionally wrong alternatives given to the question on the show itself.

So, basically, I acted as question master for the night, and we had thirteen teams of four/five partaking. Most of them were relatives of interns, but we had a handful of others, including one from Inspire, and two from the Boys Brigade, of which one of the interns is a member.

The Inspire team won the night, with 56.5 points out of 70. Well done to them!

So, that was my first experience as a quiz night question setter and reader. It was a good night; no team disgraced themselves terribly, and all had a good night. My supervisors say they may need to ask me to come back and do another next year!

I'll be back tomorrow with my usual UC write-up.