Greatest Britons

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In 2002, the BBC conducted a poll to find out whom the British public considered the greatest British people in history. You can read the Wikipedia article about it here and see the full list of the top 100, in order, here.

On Friday 18th May 2012, the QuizQuizQuiz Friday Quiz asked for people to name any 5 of the top 10. (If you want to be on the mailing list for the Friday Quiz, sign up here). We’ve taken a look at the results from our quiz, and compared them to the BBC survey. At the bottom of this post I’ve pasted the results, showing those who were mentioned more than once in the responses on the Friday Quiz.

Bearing in mind that we weren’t asking people to list their 5 Greatest Britons, we were asking them to try and remember any 5 of the top 10 from the BBC poll, here are a few observations:

  • Stephen Fry came 17th in our list, but was unranked back in 2002.
  • The Queen came 7th in our list, but only 24th in 2002.
  • Sir Christopher Wren came 24th in our list, but was unranked in the BBC poll (which is pretty extraordinary, considering some of the people who were in the top 100 on the BBC list like Tony Blair and Robbie Williams).
  • Scooby-Doo, Albert Einstein and Christopher Columbus were on our list, but not on the BBC list, but none of them are/were British so that seems reasonable – I imagine they would all have been in the list otherwise.

Here is the list from our Friday Quiz:

QQQ Rank Name BBC Poll
1 Winston Churchill 1
2 Isambard Kingdom Brunel 2
3 William Shakespeare 5
4 Isaac Newton 6
5 Charles Darwin 4
6 Princess Diana 3
7 The Queen 24
8 Lord Nelson 9
8 Margaret Thatcher 16
10 Queen Victoria 18
11 Charles Dickens 41
12 Elizabeth I 7
12 David Beckham 33
14 John Lennon 8
15 Oliver Cromwell 10
15 Richard Branson 85
17 Stephen Fry unranked
17 Florence Nightingale 52
17 Alexander Graham Bell 57
17 Henry VIII 40
21 George Stephenson 65
21 Stephen Hawking 25
21 Bobby Moore 69
24 The Unknown Warrior 76
24 Steven Redgrave 36
24 Walter Raleigh 93
24 Francis Drake 49
24 Alexander Fleming 20
24 Jane Austen 70
24 David Attenborough 63
24 Christopher Wren unranked
24 Albert Einstein not British
33 Robbie Williams 77
33 Neville Chamberlain unranked
33 Tom Jones unranked
33 Scooby Do not British
33 Richard Hammond unranked
33 Christopher Columbus not British
33 Alan Turing 21
33 Francis Crick unranked
33 Boudica 35
33 Bob Geldof 75
33 John Logie Baird 44
33 John Peel 43
33 Robert Baden Powell 13
33 Del Boy unranked
33 WG Grace unranked
33 JK Rowling 83

Putting together a quiz night (Part 2)

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Rather belatedly, I’m going to follow up the post from March 30th on putting together a quiz night. Apologies for the delay – a long gap in time between blog entries is a sure sign that the question-writing side of things is extremely busy. So a rare free hour presents itself, and it’s time to see if I can remember what I was talking about.

A recap: so far, I’d covered ‘How long should it be? How many rounds? How big should these rounds be? ‘. Next up on my list of topics – How hard should it be? What subjects to include?

How hard should a round be?

On this subject, I’m happy to be pretty firm in my opinion. Not too hard is the answer. Hard quizzes are for hardcore quizzers, not for inclusive events. Anyone can come up with a set of questions which most people don’t know the answer to. Where’s the skill or fun in that?

As an example, I ran a quiz recently which generally went very well, but I ran one round out of 12 where the top score was 8 and the bottom score 5.

I consider that round a failure on my part (a relatively rare one, I hope!) – certainly not on anyone else’s.That was the only round where I felt the level of engagement dipped slightly, as there was a sequence of 2 or 3 questions which few of the teams got right. In general, I am aiming for something  pretty specific, which is a range on any given round from 60% to 100%. If any team does not know more than half the answers, that is a shame. Some Quizmasters might prefer to avoid teams getting full marks on their rounds, but I don’t mind it all. You certainly don’t want more than a small number of teams getting full marks, but it’s actually pretty rare that anyone does, and if it happens I think I’ve done my job well, not badly.

People like to know stuff. They don’t want to feel stupid. Simple as that. And the thing is, if one team has one really bad round, that can be really insidious for the overall atmosphere.

A further note – however easy I try to make a quiz, no team has ever got close to getting 100% (I’m not sure there’s even been over 95% and over 90% is fairly rare) overall on any quiz I’ve ever run. It just doesn’t happen. The desire to test and to throw in a few testing questions comes naturally, so telling yourself to remember to keep it easy will only balance that out in a positive way.

What subjects to include?

I’ll answer this in two ways and here, I’m much more aware that personal preference is key, rather than having a definitive answer. The two ways will be ‘what subjects to include in the quiz as a whole’ and ‘what subjects to include within each round’. Up to a point, the answers to both questions is clearly ‘whatever you like’ and ‘as wide a range as possible’. Simple as that, up to a point.

Another important point about what to include as a whole is you have to consider your demographic. For QuizQuizQuiz, running events, this can mean we’ve had specific instruction on what to include (which we might run with or perhaps adapt a little), or we tailor what we’re asking according to the age/nationalities of the players. I could write pages about this (and indeed, I have, in our treasured and exclusive QuizMaster Guide), but suffice to say, some quizzes are more suited to questions about 80s British TV than others. I’ve already written a long blog about whether to include sport, and many of the points made there apply across the board.

Of course, for a standard pub quiz, you may be less aware of your demographic or, indeed, there may be a more ‘standard’ demographic (ie people who like to go to the pub and people who quite like quizzes) so you have to worry less, but hopefully, some of these points are still relevant.

The issue of whether to include Entertainment and Music is less rare than the issue of whether to include Sport, but still there are times when those are best avoided. [I probably include TV/Film/Music to a fairly large extent in about 95% of the quizzes i run, however].

Beyond that, we’re careful about being too specific, and more often try to make each round a mixture. A Food and Drink round, a Fashion round, even a Geography round, all run the danger of becoming boring in themselves if they are not subjects people are interested in. If people don’t know what the next question is going to be about, all the better. So more than half our round formats do not have a specific subject or give anything away about the subject matter in the title. That’s the way we prefer it. If your questions are good enough of course, you can have a truly great quiz which includes say, a TV Round, a Sport Round, a History Round, a Science Round, a Current Affairs Round and a special guest Fly Fishing round.

So, i’ve pretty much answered the second question, which was ‘what subjects to include within each round’. Mostly, our rounds are a mixture, flitting between subjects. Even when they’re not and we do do a sport round, say, or an Entertainment round, mix it up, don’t have too much football, have TV and Film evenly spread, American TV, British TV, don’t have too many questions where the answer is a number, or too many questions where the answer is a name. All pretty obvious stuff, but the cardinal sin for a quiz is to be boring and entirely predictable, I think.

Do you attend a difficult quiz, and do you disagree with me on how much fun they are? And how is your quiz structured? Are there regular rounds? A wide range? What’s the best quiz round format/title you’ve come up with, or come across?

University Challenge is so hard

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When I tell people I am a professional quiz master, and that I set quiz questions for iPhone quiz games, TV shows etc. I am often asked if we write the questions for ‘University Challenge’ (we don’t), such is the high profile of the show in the UK.

‘University Challenge’ style questions are very hard to write well. They should, ideally, unambiguously point towards the correct answer from the start, gradually giving more and more clues and getting easier as the question progresses, and should flow reasonably naturally to make them easy for players (and viewers) to understand when they hear them read out quickly.

But people who watch ‘University Challenge’ often feel that they are stupid for only getting  2 or 3 starter questions before the contestants. However, this is actually almost exactly par for the course.

Let’s say there are about 25 starter questions in a show. Assume all the players on the show have an even spread of knowledge, and answer all the starter questions evenly. That’s 3 starter questions per person. If you’re sat at home getting 2 or 3 then you are bang on the mark for what is expected. Once you are getting more than 2 or 3 starters before the contestants then you are a cult UC star (Trimble/Guttenplan/Fitzpatrick etc.) in the making.

Of course the often overlooked fact here is that bonus questions are where it can be won or lost. It is quite conceivable for a team to get only about one-third of their bonus questions correct whereas the other team might get two-thirds of theirs correct. The team that has a deeper knowledge for winning points on bonus questions in this example can afford to answer significantly fewer starter questions while still managing to win. (In this example the better team on bonuses could answer 10 starters and have 200 points whereas the better team on starters but worse on bonuses could answer 13 starters and only have 195 points. Fine margins – but the importance of the bonuses is easily forgotten).

How many starter questions do you typically get before the contestants when you watch ‘University Challenge’?

How many starter questions do you typically get before the contestants on 'University Challenge'?

 

 

 

To Mark or Not To Mark?

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At our quiz nights, the quizmaster and/or the quizmaster’s helper(s), does the marking. But I’ve been to many a pub quiz night in which the routine is for teams to swap papers and mark each others, and even quizzes when teams are trusted to mark their own quiz sheets.

In an earlier post about our crack squad of speedy and efficient quiz night assistants we wrote the following about teams swapping:

“It allows inconsistency, foul play, all kinds of grounds for querying, makes players work when they should be having fun, and is, simply, not as professional. It is also no quicker, if not indeed slower, than having one good marker doing all the sheets.” [and that one good marker could be the quiz master in many circumstances.]

In an exclusive extract from the QuizQuizQuiz QuizMaster guide (which is for internal use to help our professional Quiz Masters share ideas) this is what we say about marking:

“We do all the marking ourselves. Why? Because we’re better at it than other people. Swapping papers is just something we never have to do. Anything that involves other people takes away our professionalism increases the chances of bad feeling, and will not end up saving time, as every five seconds someone will want to know if they should give a point for x or y and if the spelling matters. To be fair, this is never really an issue. People usually take pleasure in seeing us mark quickly.

There is another slightly lateral, but arguably even more important, reason for us doing the marking. Many of our questions require teams to think very carefully about answers – and are designed to make them feel clever when they come up with the correct answer. Often they will not be 100% sure that they have the correct answer until we announce it. Now, if they are marking another team’s paper then they may see that this other team put the same answer as them. They will be much more sure they are right with this confirmation, and when the correct answer is read out they will cheer much less if at all. Multiply this to every team, and a guaranteed spontaneous cheer from the entire room could disappear completely.”

If you run a pub quiz night (or attend one), what is the form at your quiz night (and please tell us more in the comments!).

What is the form on marking at your quiz night:

Ask the Audience (by Derren Brown)

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We’re going to veer away from the world of the pub quiz night for this post (but will come back on topic next time). I noticed that ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ is taking applications for shows in the summer: details on their website. But that isn’t really what this post is about (well not entirely). If you do apply, and get on, here’s a little strategy that might help you out.

Imagine you are in the hotseat, you are doing well, but up comes a question that stumps you. You’ve still got lifelines left, but you don’t fancy using 50:50  because you don’t feel 50:50 will really help. Perhaps you are pretty sure that one of the four options is wrong, but you can’t really choose between the other three. You don’t think any of your Phone-a-Friends will know this either. And you still have your Ask the Audience lifeline left but you are pretty convinced that this audience won’t know the answer (either because you can just tell the question is genuinely hard, or because you have been unimpressed by this audience’s efforts to help out a previous contestant – or a bit of both).

I’ve seen occasions on the show when a contestant has said “I have a feeling about option C – I think I’ve read that somewhere” and then, lo and behold, 70% of the audience vote for that option – and turn out to be wrong.

So – you have a question that stumps you, minimal confidence in your audience to help you, but that crucial feeling (or even certainty) that one of the four options is definitely wrong.

Try this: announce confidently that you are pretty sure it is option A (where option A is the one you are sure is wrong). Come up with some spurious reasoning to make it sound convincing. Now is the time to Ask the Audience. Those in the audience who are like sheep will have been convinced by your reasoning and will vote for A to “help you have confidence to go for your answer” or because “I’m pretty sure that sounds familiar as well”. I reckon Derren Brown would agree that this is how many people in the audience would behave if you managed to do your manipulation effectively earlier on whilst thinking outloud.

So, in one fell swoop you manage to divert all the people in the audience who don’t know the answer onto the one option that you are convinced is wrong. Those who do actually know the answer (and you can be pretty sure that there will be some people in the audience who do actually know the answer) will of course choose the option that they think is correct, which, with luck, is not the one you are sure is wrong (and the one that the sheep in the audience have voted for).

To find the correct answer then just go for the highest Ask the Audience vote that isn’t the one you have diverted the sheep onto.

It could, of course, go horribly wrong, but could be one of the greatest moments in quiz show history if executed successfully. If you get onto the show, and try this, and win big, then remember where you got the idea from…

Do you have any cunning strategies of your own to help you navigate the ups and downs of big money quiz shows?