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Questions pour un Irlandais

February 13, 2012 in Quiz Show

Still miss Going for Gold?  Well, move to France where its spinoff show, Questions pour un champion, still airs – as it has done since November 1988.

I’m currently in France (on holiday – thankfully not as an attendee at this match) and I happened upon an episode of it last night on French TV.  I was struck by the format, which is identical to Going for Gold, and the all-action host – who is nothing like Henry Kelly!

I intended just putting up any old clip for you to check out but I found something even better.  It’s an episode form last March and features an Irish man – Sean Dingle from Dublin.  Have a watch and see how he got on.

Wedding (Singer) answers

January 7, 2011 in Quizzes

So here we go, the answers to yesterday’s 1980s themed questions, as asked at my friend’s wedding.

Obviously, how well (or otherwise) you did in these will give away your age!

In our case, I’m pleased to report that we didn’t let the good name of MacGyver down. We scored 19/20, which was good enough for us to be declared joint-winners with the law-abiding citizens of the Hill Street Blues table. Both tables received a free bottle of Prosecco to celebrate their tremendous knowledge. :-)

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Wedding (Singer) quiz

January 6, 2011 in Quizzes

Last Friday, New Year’s Eve, I was an attendee at the wedding of my good friend Niall and his lovely wife Catherine.

A really nice touch, well if you’re me anyway, was the holding of a quiz for the first hour or so of the wedding banquet. :-)

As we took our seats in the dining room, we noticed the Lewis Carroll-esque box you see here. Upon opening this we discovered 20 cards, each containing a trivia question. As the theme of the banquet was 1980s TV (I was sitting at the MacGyver table, for instance) most of the questions related to this.

However, the quiz also featured four questions about the bride and groom. These were a clever addition, in my opinion, as they were obviously google-proof.  That said, our table actually did well on these questions, even managing to correctly guess how many stitches Catherine had to receive after a nasty fall, aged 5.

It was seven, just in case anyone ever asks…

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Fancy being on BBC Four?

November 2, 2009 in Quiz Show

bbc fourI received an email from Presentable Productions at the end of last week informing me that they are currently seeking contestants for the upcoming series of Only Connect on BBC Four.

Only Connect is a particularly hard quiz in which teams of three are presented with clues/facts and have to work out the connection between them. You can find some examples of these on its Wikipedia page.

If you’d like to take part, and you’ve got two willing mates, you have until midnight on November 10th to email contestants@presentable.co.uk

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Eurovision Tuesday answers

May 13, 2009 in Culture

Eurovision old logoFollowing the first semi-final of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, here are the answers to the Eurovision questions I posted yesterday.

Click more… to check them out.

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Eurovision Tuesday

May 12, 2009 in Culture

Lordi win the EurovisionThe 2009 Eurovision Song Contest takes place this Saturday evening in Moscow. Or rather the final does. The main event is preceded by two semi-finals, the first of which takes place tonight (Tuesday), with the second semi occuring on Thursday night.  After the semis, the field of 42 countries will have been whittled down to the 25 competitors who will take part in ‘the world’s biggest television programme’.

The first Eurovision took place in 1956 and, in the 53 years since, it’s become something of a cult. Nothing else combines culture, popularity and negative street cred as the ESC does. In its time, it’s managed to spawn a GrammyRecord of the year‘, a revolution and, perhaps most famously of all, ABBA.

Unsurprisingly, it’s also something of a quizzing gold mine, with venues, hosts, interval acts and gaffs all being viable themes for quiz rounds before one even gets to the acts and their songs.

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All hail Gail answers

February 25, 2009 in Quiz Show

Here are the answers to the questions from the final of 2009 University Challenge, as posted at the end of the All hail Gail post.

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All hail Gail

February 24, 2009 in Quiz Show

gail-trimbleThere is a theory that resurfaces from time to time that there is no better tool for the promotion of an event or sport than the individual brilliance of a superstar performer. News stories grow up around their rare (maybe even freakish) abilities and, through them, the general public are thus introduced to, or reminded of the existence of, the event.

Some off-the-top-of-my-head examples of this phenomenon would include: Tiger Woods in Golf, Torvill and Dean in Ice Skating and either/both Stephen Roche and Seán Kelly, who turned Cycling into one of Ireland’s most popular sports in the 1980s.

The effect was seen in action again this week as the build-up to the final of this year’s University Challenge seemed to focus entirely on Gail Trimble, captain of the Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Is she the cleverest contestant ever?” wondered Paul Gallagher in The Guardian as, en-route to the final, she had scored 825 of the team’s 1,235 points.  The writer also informed us that one of her opponents likened her style to “intellectual blitzkrieg”.  In the quarter-final, Corpus Christi were so dominant that they only allowed the University of Exeter 15 points – a new low-score record for the current series under Jeremy Paxman.

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