I have always had a penchant for quizes and quiz shows. I suspect that it started early in my life, perhaps at seven or eight years old. My primary school teachers were in the habit of 'testing' pupils with questions to which they were, quite frankly, not expected to know the answer. In one sense, it allowed the teacher to regale us all with his, or her, profound knowledge of the world and its history but also, I think, to allow those children who were a bit more intelligent or perhaps were more interested in the world outside of the confines of 'kiss-chase' and 'doctors and nurses' in the school playground, to'shine' perhaps once a week without drawing them into accusations of 'smarty-pants' or 'know-it-all' amongst their peers. Children can be so cruel sometimes! Now that I come to think of it, I always wondered what my peers said behind my back because I did not have to attend any classes in my final year (10-11); I merely painted pictures in the library or, if they were large, in the corridor, outside of the classrom, kneeling on the floor.
While I would not necessarily agree now with the 'spirit of competition' which such teaching methods engender in some pupils, me for one, it did have one very big advantage; you got presented with a card from the Headmaster himself, a man who was only seen at 'Assemply' reading from the Bible or the performance of the Nativity Play or some other production, and handwritten and stamped with stars to show how bright you were! One star for knowing when the school was built, it was engraved on the outside of the building above a entrance*, to five stars for knowing about Stephen and Mathilde** and the resulting 'civil war'; an event that has precluded the name of Stephen being given to any potential heir to the throne ever since.
Although I never consciously 'trained' my memory to store a multitude of trivial facts, I am sure that there was an unconscious motivation to read encyclopedias! Sad to say, the cards are still sequestered, yellowing now, in a box on top of the wardrobe along with my first birthday card from my parents at age one! I am currently fighting a very strong desire to haul the box down and see what else is in it that I have forgotten. Perhaps tomorrow.
I have often been told to discard them but they are living history; in some very insignificant way they say what it was like to be a small child growing up in the early sixties***. You want to know what a ticket to the Festspiele in Salzburg looked like in 1973, ask me; a Munich tram ticket from 1972, I'm your man; I only wish that I had hung onto my 1966 'World Cup Willie' T-shirt with its attending visions of a tiny and fragile niece being thrown high into the air every time England scored; today neither my ageing mother nor I can remember if she actually ever hit the ceiling. If she did not, she must merely be considered very lucky.
My first memory is of sitting around the TV watching 'What's my line' and 'Animal, Vegetable or Mineral', although I was far too young to participate but my baptism came with 'Ask the Family'. Dueling pairs of staunchly, middle-class families; he a bank manager, she a 'homemaker' or working as a teacher and the two nuclear children, one of each usually, who were dressed as though the nineteen sixties had passed by them completely and incipient revolution was not just around the cormer. The questions were predomintly 'general knowledge', the questions solely for the children were attentuated, a vingared sponge to their youth and immaturity. The host, and quizmaster, Robert Robinson, became increasingly supercilious as each annual series went by; a look of utter contempt and disbelief on his face if the family failed to answer or provided an incorrect answer. Ye Gods, I could hear him say in my mind; you don't know the capital of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso)****
From there, I developed a taste for an opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge to no-one but myself as I progressed to ;Mastermind' and 'University Challenge', although the latter is a genuine team game; you really need someone who is doing drgree level physics or biology. 'Millionaire' is generally too easy because it is multiple choice and few contestants ever got past the £250,00 question when it all gets a bit more arcane and esoteric. Most of the rest is prime time fodder so the questions have to be relatively easy to cater for all tastes and too often adopt the 'we asked 100 people a question, guess the most popular, or least popular, answer' approach and which does rely more on guesswork that actually knowing the answers.
Pub quizes are fun at first but everyone now uses the same handful of '1,001 questions to ask at pub quizes' so it's less a question of what you know but, as Sellar and Yeatman pointed out, 'how much you can remember'. It all seems a little like 'cramming' for an exam and I didn't ever do that, even whan I was young and it was probably important to do so!
I do have a soft spot for 'Only connect', although I find Victoria Coren to be about as as annoying as Dermot Murnaghan as a host. You have sixteen words. phrases or names (of people, places, instruments of torture, it matters not) and you have to find four separate connections between four groups of four words. As an exercise in lateral thinking, it gives the, in my case old, brain cells a work-out, there is a at least one 'red herring' in each collection of sixteen, and it does tax your general knowledge if you are to make out the four diffeerent connection and come up with a reason for the connection (which gets you additional points). The game can be played online HERE.
The subject was prompted by a couple of 'tests' that I have done in the last couple of days . One was a vocabulary test of about 420 words (based on a pre-reform paper of GRE I think, match the definition to the word), on which I scored a respectable 99%, although IF I had managed to read ALL of the questions with similar care, it probably would have been 100%. The second was a couple of old papers that I found for the GRE, the Graduate Record Examination, which apparently forms part of the entrance examinations for a number of US universities. It tests basic writing skill, comprenhension and, alarmingly 'high school' maths. It is difficult to assess writing skill in that context all by yourself, although I did not come out too badly but the maths! I think I need to open that text book of algebra that I bought a while ago, as a prelude to an anticipated foray into calculus (which needless to say still awaits my pleasure) because I found it hard to understand the questions let alone provide the answers!
I am using the same excuse that I use for everything else; I'm getting old; too many brain cells have fallen by the wayside outside pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants, not to mention off licences and supermarkets and the odd taverna, bar de tapas or Bierkeller.******
* About 1890 or thereabouts
** Stephen, grandson of Williame, Duc de Normandie (better known as William the Conker*****), is definitely the 'forgotten' King of England
*** In the same way, don't you wish that we had an extant shopping list from Shakespeare?
**** Ouagadougou, if you are at all interested, which you are not of course. even remotely.
***** A Conker is a Horse Chestnut. The game of 'conkers' was a agreeable pastime when I was a child. Played by two players with conkers suspended on a string, the object of the game was to break your opponents conker into pieces. The game was originally played with snail shells.
****** I was reading some research the other week which purported to explode the 'urban myth' that 10,000 brain cells die with every unit of alcohol consumed; it's all poppycock apparently, not a shred of evidence. However, I am taking no chances; my brain transplant is scheduled for the Wimbledon fortnight. I'm getting Lindsay Lohan's because she doesn't use it any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment