In the midst of Lockdown 3.0 and what always seems to be the longest month of the year, Liveryman Dr Claire White recalls the night of 21st January when 18 teams of Liverymen, friends and family came together for Butchers' Hall ‘Pub-less’ quiz – expertly hosted by the professionals at QuizQuizQuiz.
Undeterred by the vow of temperance taken by many on the Zoom meeting and with no trace of latent quiz fatigue from previous Lockdowns, everyone enthusiastically launched into the event, with some rather aptly named team names competing for the title (a.k.a. The Alcobolics & The Crazy Meat Gang) with a healthy amount of pre-game banter.
In the brave new world of virtual events there was the inevitable technical hitches one might expect with a larger group and the added complexity of switching between the meeting and the web-based answer sheet. Nevertheless, our extremely genial quizmaster David McGaughey calmly resolved all difficulties.
As David is the quiz company's main question writer, and has written for TV Shows including Only Connect and The Code, this was never going to be an evening that didn't get those brain cells working. So, with some degree of trepidation the quiz began.
The event continued in the familiar style with multiple rounds, testing the teams on everything from geography and artist self-portraits to vintage TV theme-tunes and obscure patron saints. The obvious difficulties of conferring with team-members in a virtual setting was overcome by the masterly use of breakout rooms; where the groups were able complete the response sheet (visible to all) without fear of being overheard.
The obvious difficulties of conferring with team-members in a virtual setting was overcome by the masterly use of breakout rooms.
The virtual medium made the picture and audio questions a breeze since they could be reviewed freely until submission, with the added benefit that the electronic responses were scored automatically. True to form, the quizmaster awarded discretional points to those who could forecast their round score or return their responses the most swiftly - but many were undone in the final round with the fateful deduction of points for wrong answers!
In the end it was a very close-run thing between the top ten teams, with only six points between them. Second and third place had to be decided by a tie-breaker question, but a clear winner emerged in team ProfessorQuizWhitty – led by The Renter Assistant Margaret Boanas - and were crowned the WCB Eggheads!
As celebrations began our wonderful quizmaster quietly departed, leaving us to reflect on another fantastic Butchers virtual fellowship event and why exactly we couldn’t remember that TV theme tune when it mattered.