As I have recounted a number of times before, I have - in my time - been quite an enthusiastic quizzer. I first encountered the pub quiz phenomenon during my teacher training year up in Durham, and played quite often with some of my fellow students at a number of pubs around the town and at my 'local' out in the wilds, The Loves (scene of one of my most salutary experiences in the sport). During my first teaching job, I became a questionmaster/question-writer for our inter-house version of University Challenge. Then, drifting back to Oxford for a few years, I found myself reunited with some university buddies who had never managed to leave the lotus-eating city - JimBob ("The Nags"), The British Cowboy, The Bookseller - and played with them (and, usually, also with Roger The Dodger, the most nerdily formidable quizzer I have ever encountered, a man who used to read things like Whitaker's Almanac and Burke's Peerage for fun in his spare time!) in a number of weekly competitions. In fact, at one point we were playing four times a week: Mondays in the Oxford Union Jazz Cellar, Tuesdays in the big Sam Smith's pub next door to the Union (which is now long defunct and whose name I forget), Wednesdays in the Lamb and Flag on St. Giles (where the convention was that the winning team would act as quizmasters for the following week; rather frustratingly, this meant that we hardly ever got to play against our closest rivals amongst the regular teams there, since we were always setting the questions for each other's victories in alternate weeks), and Thursdays in the Oxfordshire quiz league (in which the standard was, not surprisingly, extremely rarefied - although with The Dodger on our side, we did briefly manage to get promoted to the 1st Division, and had a couple of decent runs in the knockout cup competition), playing for my favourite pub of the time - one of the best pubs ever - The Black Swan.
When I first moved to Beijing, I played a number of times in the quiz at the John Bull Pub (which, alas, ceased to exist three or four years ago) with my two disreputable teaching colleagues/drinking buddies, Big Frank and The Chairman ('The Three Amigos'), in which we fairly regularly used to manage to place 1st or 2nd, despite having a team about a third the size of everyone else's - and despite The Chairman being almost completely useless. We got disenchanted with that because of the absence of a cap on the team size; a raucous assembly of Australians, often nearly twenty-strong, began to beat us rather too regularly. After that, I had a bit of a lull in my quizzing. It's only in the past year or so that I have - a mere handful of times - been tempted to revisit my old vice.
Anyway, one of the key components of a good night's quiz is a good team name - unique, memorable, amusing, but perhaps based on references so obscure and personal that only the team members will really get it. Over the years, I must have played under dozens, perhaps hundreds of different quiz names (in the early '90s, the Oxford Union used to run occasional 12-hour Quiz Marathons for charity, and in those we'd usually adopt a different quiz name each hour - but on a related theme, so as not to confuse the poor quizmaster too much; I remember one time The Bookseller and I named ourselves after a succession of Abba lyrics; their classic grammar-mangle in Fernando has to be my favourite: "Since many years I haven't seen a rifle in your hand"). These are a few of the ones I remember most fondly.
The Three Represents
[The name The Three Amigos usually used to play under: it's a Chinese political slogan, the key contribution to the evolution of Communist Party doctrine from Jiang Zemin.]
Free The Grampus 8!
[Grampus 8 was an oddly named Japanese football club which became briefly famous in the UK in the early '90s when national hero Gary Lineker - one of the England team's most prolific strikers ever - chose to join them for the twilight of his career. Many quizzers of the time could not help but be tickled by the reminiscence of famous campaigns on behalf of groups of people unjustly imprisoned - in the UK, the most notorious were two IRA terrorism cases, 'The Guildford Four' and 'The Birmingham Six'.]
Pistol Pete's Karisma Klub
[For reasons I can't now recall, the British press were somewhat hostile to Pete Sampras at the outset of his career - suggesting that he had no personality, was boring to watch, and that the 'Pistol Pete' nickname deriving from his metronomically consistent big serve was the most interesting thing about him. Of course, within a year or two he would be a national hero - probably the greatest Wimbledon champion ever. My quiz buddies and I were ahead of the curve: we decided to mock the negative coverage and take the young phenomenon to our hearts.]
Touch The Monolith
The President's Brain Is Missing
[The title of a series of skits about poor old Ronald Reagan in the classic latex-rubber puppet satirical show Spitting Image.]
12 Square Monkeys
[Terry Gilliam's sci-fi puzzle Twelve Monkeys furnished an irresistibly appropriate name for a group of quizzers assembled from Beijing's smallest bar - 12 Square Metres.]
The Nattily Attired Gentlemen Of Colour
[Yes, there is a story behind this one too - but I don't think I dare tell it in a public forum. Well, maybe later - in the comments... ]
The Rain Dogs
[A favourite name during those Oxford Union quizzing days. It is, of course, taken from the title of a great Tom Waits album.]
Norfolk & Clew
[A provincial estate agents' firm? Or a self-disparaging pun?]
The Crafty Homosexual Gangsters
[Charles Moore, an affected and rather unworldly journalist who used to edit the amusingly reactionary UK magazine The Spectator, wrote a long and disparaging review in that magazine of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, in which he labelled Steve Buscemi's 'Mr Pink' character "a crafty homosexual gangster". I thought that was hilarious, and still regularly advocate it as a quiz team name today - even though nobody ever gets the reference. I assume Moore was taking rather too literally mob boss Joe Cabot's throwaway jibe that he has allocated the uncool codename to Buscemi "because you're a fag". There is no suggestion that this is meant in earnest, and no hint anywhere else in the script that this character is gay. I like 'crafty', though: 'Mr Pink' is much the most astute of the hapless gang of robbers.]
Any personal favourites you'd like to share?
5 comments:
You missed how Free The Grampus 8! modified its name for multiple seasons after the turnip screwed up qualification...
For a while we were Free the Grampus 8, But Lock Up Graham Taylor.
Ah, yes indeed,
Cowboy. I guess that's a memory so traumatic that I have wilfully blocked it out. (The '94 qualification fiasco, that is, not the quizzing.)
The Nattily Attired Gentlemen Of Colour was an answer The Bookseller and I put forward as an at least plausibly descriptive, if not in fact correct, name for ANY Motown-era backing group - after we'd blanked vexingly on the name of Smokey Robinson's band (The Miracles, of course - I remembered it as soon as the the round was closed!) during one of those Oxford Union charity quiz marathons MC'ed by The British Cowboy.
Well, we didn't initially put it quite like that. The Bookseller suggested (purely to tease The Cowboy's notoriously stuffy PC-ness; this is not the kind of language I would use or condone in any other circumstance) that we write down Four Niggers In Sharp Suits. The Cowboy popped a blood vessel and threatened to disqualify us!!
Thereafter, we taunted him further by trying to find elegant - less offensive - variations of this to use as our team name in subsequent rounds. 'Nattily Attired' was the pick of the crop.
Ah, and that pub next to the Union was the Three Goats' Heads... wasn't it?
The name was probably the most memorable thing about it; and I haven't even found that to be worth remembering!
Playing in an ad hoc quiz team with some American chaps a few months back, I discovered that one of them lived in the Shuangjing district, and was pursuing a project to grow and distribute organic produce here. I quipped that China was better known for organ-farming than organic farming, and so we became...
The Shuangjing Organ Farmers.
That's a pretty good one.
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