Quiz Tour: #6 The Island Queen, N1

The Island Queen is a nice little pub tucked away round the back streets of Angel. Turns out it was an old haunt of one of the Conquiztadores and we were regaled with tales of the pub’s less salubrious past (back when this was all fields). These days there are fewer mannequins hanging from the ceiling but to make up for that loss they serve some interesting beers and cook up a fine burger.

It was a popular quiz with about 20 teams (lots of them obviously regulars) giving the pub a friendly, buzzy atmosphere. The quiz itself was outsourced to a company who you seem to be able to hire to run a quiz in your pub, which seems like cheating a little, although the quiz itself was pretty good. We were a bit low on numbers but luckily we found a replacement Canadian and a moustachioed Milanesi to make a guest appearance. The quizmaster was late, which we thought showed character, and he did a pretty good job throughout. The quiz was pretty basic, no themed rounds, no jokers, no audio round, just 40 questions, 10 of them making up a picture round but the questions were quite challenging and covered an interesting mix of topics.

A solid performance was put in by all and if a couple of guesses had gone our way we would have been walking home winners. As it was we won a bottle of wine for our comfortable second place finish and I am sure The Island Queen will warrant another visit in the future if we ever reach a point of drawing up a shortlist of potential homes.

The Scores:
Quiz Master: 7
Question Quality: 8
Competition: 7
Refreshments: 8
Pace: 9
Format: 4
Prizes: 2
Ambience: 7


The High Point:
There were some good answers all round but the high point had to be our resident archaeologist knowing that the first human invention to break the sound barrier was the bullwhip. Hang on, maybe that is not so surprising after all…




The Low Point:
A long discussion about which country has the lowest life expectancy in which we mentioned the correct answer, Swaziland, many times but didn’t go for it. Or possibly the longer discussion about whether the picture below was the SS Great Eastern or the SS Great Western and finally picking the wrong one.




What We Learnt:
We learnt that our sartorial knowledge is more high street than high fashion when we failed to recognise the Pierre Cardin logo. Carhartt, Quiksilver and Rip Curl all featured in our discussions but in our defence there are certain similarities as demonstrated below.