Quiz Tour: #5 The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms, N7

I’d heartily recommend the The Swimmer to anyone. It is a nice pub, with a good atmosphere, an interesting beer selection and an enjoyable jukebox. I’d probably go on to say that to experience the best the Swimmer has to offer that they possibly avoid visiting on a Tuesday night. Unless, of course, they are the sort of person who particularly enjoys 70’s Working-Mens-Club style light entertainment masquerading as a pub quiz.

I had high hopes for the quiz when we arrived. It was obviously popular (we had to fight for a table) there was a lively crowd and it looked pretty slick as the quizmaster was setting up speakers and a whiteboard with team names on it. Unfortunately, when it got started, it turned out to be less about the quiz and more about the quizmaster. All throughout the evening he cracked joke after unfunny joke. The quiz was constantly being interrupted with ‘wacky’ flapjack eating contests, chocolate rounds and sound effects. All this might have been forgivable if the quiz itself had been challenging or well designed but it was all a bit basic in both style and content. It says a lot that I had a better time losing badly at the Princess of Wales then winning at the Swimmer.

To be completely honest we didn’t actually win. We lost by half a point but only because we took the moral high crowd and didn’t mark the winning team down for their confusion between AC/DC and Amy Winehouse.




The Scores:
Quiz Master: 4
Question Quality: 4
Competition: 5
Refreshments: 7
Pace: 5
Format: 3
Prizes: 2
Ambience: 7

The High Point:
Quizmaster: Which invention of the industrial revolution…
JB: The Spinning Jenny.
Quizmaster: …is said to be named after the daughter of the inventor?

JB reignites the age-old debate as to whether being psychic constitutes cheating in standard pub quiz rules.


The Low Point:
When we each team was asked to call out their scores after the first round, the quizmaster decided that teams should precede their score with an appropriate adjective (e.g. a tremendous twelve). Having just got 14 out of 15 questions right and played our joker I thought an amusingly cocky call of “an Unbeatable Twenty-Eight” would be funny. The chorus of boos that greeted me proved this somewhat incorrect.


What We Learnt:
Annoyingly very little in the way of trivia although I think we learnt a lot about what we want from a pub quiz and sadly it is not on offer at the Swimmer…