The Big Quiz

I've always been a fan of a good quiz.  I think I've watched most of them on TV at some time: Blockbusters, Bullseye, Telly Addicts, Going For Gold, The Krypton Factor, Fifteen to One, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Pointless, Mastermind, Eggheads, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, QI, HIGNFY -  the list goes on.

My current favourites are on BBC2 on Monday night - University Challenge and Only Connect.

With Uni Challenge though I just sit and marvel at the knowledge of some people, and celebrate if I get a couple of questions right.  The other week they had some Maths formulae with exclamation marks in them - I didn't even know you could have those in sums!

I like the lateral thinking needed for Only Connect, and my best round is the missing vowels one for some reason.

My friends asked me to join their team for a local charity quiz - I agreed but I did warn them of serious gaps in my knowledge as I'm hopeless at History and Sport.

This didn't put them off though, and off we went and joined 22 other teams to put our brains through their paces.

Unsurprisingly, I was good at trivia - I knew on which street the Neighbours characters live, and who The Simpsons' next door neighbour is (Ramsay Street and Ned Flanders respectively).

As predicted, the Sports round let us down, but other than that we did better than we thought.  So much better in fact that we ended up in a tie for second place which required a nail-biting tie-breaker.

Not just one question either - it took five questions to separate us and the next team.  Our second place was secured after answering 'under which name was Erik Weisz better known?', and we were awarded a bottle of wine each after my friend correctly answered Houdini.

The winners were the WI - they've won for the last three years apparently.  I'm thinking if our team starts revising Sport now we might do even better next year!