Please bear with me for one moment while I show off. I was part of the Telegraph team that won the English Pen quiz on Wednesday night.
I wouldn’t normally mention it, but this is the most hotly contested literary quiz in London, and fiercely fought over – in the name of an exceptionally good cause – by teams from the broadsheet papers, publishers and various clever bookish types.
We have been trying to win it for a number of years – not that we are at all competitive – and had resigned ourselves to the status of perpetual bridesmaids, particularly after an incident last year when, almost too bitter to relate, we were beaten in a controversial tie-break by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary (playing for The Times).
I wasn’t in the room to witness that, since for the first time for years I had managed to double-book myself on quiz night. And, truth be told, the Telegraph team has changed a bit over the years as people have left, or had children, or, God forbid, lives that do not involve spending three hours wracking their brains for some obscure nugget of information. But the nucleus has remained the same, and like most of the people who crowded into the RIBA building on Portland Place the other night, we are all obsessive quizzers, taking part in school, work and pub contests individually and together.
This love of a tussle in the wrestling ring of trivial knowledge is something approaching a national obsession. How else to explain not only the popularity of live quizzes, but also their success on tea-time TV? I have friends who time their evening around Pointless and Eggheads, with a Monday round of University Challenge thrown in.
It’s a way of walking our wits, of checking that not everything we know has vanished into the ether of everyday life, which has a way of scrambling the brain. It also, let’s be honest, lets us show off our brain power. Every time I watch University Challenge (to a chorus of disapproval from the kids), I think of Barry Levinson’s film Diner and Kevin Bacon’s portrait of the loser who sits on his sofa shouting out every single answer to every quiz question as a means of telling himself that he is smart and worthy.
But a team contest offers a different pleasure – and a rather more uplifting conclusion. The parks of Britain at weekends are full of people playing team sport; but not all of us can join in. You need to be pretty good and fairly determined to carry on playing football or rugby for fun into your thirties. Cricket offers more options – indeed, two of my teammates are keen local cricketers – but not if you are the person who could never see a ball whistling through the air towards you.
So quizzing is a way of allowing the inept and the unsporty a chance to experience what the athletic have always enjoyed as of right: the sheer joy of being a cog in a beautifully functioning machine.
Our win was a true team effort. Everyone had a part to play. True, James Walton knew without hesitation the name of the biggest restaurant chain in the world, but it was Christopher Howse who identified a chemical formulation of gunpowder, and Philip Johnston who could recognise insect types.
Led by our captain Richard Preston, we combined to name 20 authors, backing up each other’s hunches. I knew a play, Sameer Rahim came up with the right Greek hero, Martin Chilton insisted one painter rather than another was destroyed by a damning review. Robert Colvile was firm on Doctor Who, Mark Monahan on the name of an album and Mick Brown on a phone number.
As each player effortlessly passed the ball, I knew the exhilaration of playing in a Premier League squad. The prize was only a bottle of champagne, a trophy and the glory. But it felt like the Cup Final.
