CO:London host Phil Stanton reports back from the inaugural Rather Hard Quiz, which took place the day after CO:Brum

As if playing Countdown all day the previous day (and the evening before that too, in some cases) wasn’t enough, on Sunday morning six of us brave/mad souls descended on The Wellington to take part in MSR’s inaugural Rather Hard Quiz. As a fan of rather hard things, I thought I’d give it a go, plus it’s always good to support something new and see how it goes.

While it would have been nice to have a few more competitors, the low number meant we could also be quite relaxed about stuff and have a laugh with each other as well as attempting some quizzing.

MSR was our quizmaster for the day … imagine if Jeremy Paxman and Victoria Coren-Mitchell had a love-child, pumped it full of caffeine and sugar and then dragged it through a hedge backwards, and you’ll get an idea of what that was like. In a fun way though :P

He was ably assisted by our resident BPG, the Button-Pushing Geordie, Beachy. We were randomly put into 2 teams of 3, with Mark Murray, Adam Dexter and I taking on TCap, Sabrina Wade and George Baker. We started as we meant to go on, by choosing the team names of “The Runners Up” and “The Losing Team” respectively, to repeatedly confuse MSR when keeping track of who was winning.

Round 1 was an Only Connect style connections round, where we tried to guess the connection with as few clues as possible, and each team had a chance to show off the strengths of each of their team members.

That was followed with a University Challenge style round of starter questions on the buzzer, followed by 3 bonus questions for the team if you got the starter right. TCap and Dex in particular showed off an impressively broad range of knowledge, and the round ended with The Runners Up taking a sizeable lead, making the Losing Team actually being the losing team at that stage.

A fast-paced Missing Vowels round in the style of Only Connect followed, with everyone racing to be the first to the buzzer, and TCap’s lightning-fast finger helped The Losing Team close the score gap.

Our final team round was called My Learned Friend (based on the Learned League), where teams had to write down their answers to ten questions. The fun part came when each team had to then decide, in advance, how many points (from 1 to 10) each of the questions would be worth to their opponents should they have got that question right (one question would be for 1 point, one for 2, etc., up to 10.) That meant trying to deduce the other team’s potential strengths and weaknesses, and we also discovered that Mark has a distinctively sneaky side to him, when he identified the strategic part of the game and the potential benefits of bluffing.

That brought the teams stage to a close, with The Losing Team turning out to be the winning team, just pipping The Runners Up into becoming the runners up, with a score of 168 to 165.

And so it was time for the Grand Final, with the 3 members of The Losing Team going from working together to becoming rivals for the top prize. (Although, given that the actual prizes were all the same, they were basically playing for pride and the title!)

I think it’s fair to say that George’s hangover did him no favours, and despite valiant efforts (and the occasional wild guess) from him and Sabrina, they couldn’t stop TCap’s decisive romp to victory, proving his ability to beat all comers when it comes to Rather Hard things.

This was a really fun event, which MSR clearly put a lot of time and effort into preparing, so if he does it again, I’d highly recommend it.

NT LN XTT M!