Quiz Tour: #2 The Alwyne Castle, N1

After limbering up with our 3^rd place finish at the Lord Palmerston we ventured down Highbury way to try out the quiz at The Alwyne Castle. We were reasonably familiar with the pub having been drinking there on a few occasions. An interesting selection of beer (don’t think I’ve seen Sierra Nevada on tap before) and the food is fine although it doesn’t go much beyond the ubiquitous sausage & mash/burger/fish & chips.

As for the quiz itself, if you wanted your pub to have a quiz night but wanted to make the absolute minimum of effort it would look something like the Alwyne’s. The questions and quiz sheets were bought off the internet. The prizes were just the cash entry fees. The quizmaster felt like a member of the bar staff who had been asked to read out the questions for the night.

For all that, it wasn’t actually that bad, just lacking in a bit of character. There were a couple of interesting rounds. We particularly enjoyed the ‘Wipeout’ round, get all 10 questions right and get 5 bonus points, get a single question wrong and you get no points. Having said that there were also 5 questions on Miss World. I mean, really? This is North London in the 21^st century? Surely they should be asking us to name the top 5 best-selling authors of feminist literature or something?

On to the scores...

Quiz Master: 2
Question Quality: 4
Competition: 6
Refreshments: 8
Pace: 4
Format: 7
Prizes: 2
Ambience: 6

The High Point:
A toss-up between working out the name of the Scottie Dog in the Fred Basset cartoons just from the last letter of his name being a ‘K’¹ or figuring out the connection between John Grisham, Sir Francis Drake, Louisiana and Julia Roberts² (although if any of us had seen the state flag of Louisiana this wouldn’t have felt like such an accomplishment).


The Low Point:
None of us being able to recall the name of the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.<sup>3


What we learnt:
Las Vegas has been a city for 100 years. Who’d have thought it?


1 - Jock
2 - Pelican
3 - Bernard Hogan-Howe</sup>

Quiz Tour: #1 The Lord Palmerston, NW5

When Nick the Innkeeper vacated The Darmouth Arms a year or so ago he also left The Conquiztadores bereft of the best pub quiz any of them had ever attended. Untested for many months the team have now re-grouped but is there a pub quiz in North London to match the one they miss so much?

In an effort to find out The Conquizatadores are now on tour. First up was The Lord Palmerston, a very nice pub that's now doing a lot of things we liked about The Dartmouth - film nights, decent breakfasts, good beer. And a Wednesday night pub quiz.

This is how we scored it (out of 10):

Quiz Master	7
Question Quality	5
Competition	6
Refreshments	8
Pace	5
Format	5
Prizes	2
Ambience	7

Other Comments: The quiz also featured a physical challenge (we had to make a model of our favourite food from tin foil). This novel feature didn't square well with some team members' desire for an intellectually rigorous evening of general knowledge questions. We would also have appreciated an announcement of the scores at half-time.

What Did We Learn?

Cutty Sark is Old Scots for short skirt.

This is Kurt Cobain >>

And we really should have known who sings this song >>