A Wednesday at Temper & Brown — notes from behind the laptop

It’s 6:50pm on a Wednesday in February. Cold, wet, miserable. I arrive to set up for quiz, check in with the bar, and only one team is booked in. The bar is empty.

I say hi to Roifield, the owner, and we agree to just see what happens. Go ahead anyway, even if there are only three teams. We both know two other bars locally have their monthly quiz on tonight, and Villa are at home. We also both know that consistency matters — once you start cancelling, it becomes a slippery slope.

By 7:10, it’s all set up. I flip the switch and the music moves from the cool reggae vibes into my silly camp mixes to get people in a good mood. Three tables have turned up and they haven’t booked. I get them set up with the SpeedQuizzing app, because they’re new, and run through what happens.

7:20 and it’s suddenly bedlam. The booked table of six have arrived, and four more teams of regulars have turned up too. The Instagram promotion and the WhatsApp group must have worked.

We start a bit late — people are still getting drinks and ordering food — and we open with the first round: general ignorance. With new teams in, I make it a little easier and allow two answers for the first round so they get used to the software.

All flowing well. We have a team join halfway through round one. Why not — they’d left the other quiz nearby because it was dead.

I’d planned a sports round for round two. After five questions and not a single correct answer from any team, it was time to switch it up. Thankfully I’ve got hundreds of rounds to call on, so I went with a quick picture round. Thank goodness for preparation, and for being able to pivot quickly. Last thing you need is people switching off. It’s a skill most quiz hosts have but not one all of them use — reading the room and flipping a round when you need to, especially if you’ve got new teams in and you want them back next week.

Then the specialist round. I’d gone with science for nine-year-olds. Everyone’s laughing about how much they’ve forgotten since school (nothing to do with that third glass of wine, I’m sure) or being utterly convinced that magnesium is a liquid at room temperature.

Now it’s into the scary part. The final two rounds: music, and the dreaded evil round. Scores are close enough that any team could win in theory. Those are the best nights — for me and the players both.

It’s a Krys’s-mad-brain-firings music round tonight. Inspired on the weekend by walking around the Jewellery Quarter and randomly seeing a large group outside the Rock and Roll Brewery in band T-shirts, and a hen group stood outside The Rolling Mill in band-inspired sashes. I know my brain is weird — but I pulled together a round in my head there and then, and voilà, music round for the week, built on Monday.

I knew there were a few proper tunes in the list, so I was hopeful most would know the tracks. Didn’t expect full volume singing from the snug, carrying on the tracks after I’d paused them, though. I think I picked that round right.

Final round, still close. Five teams could realistically win. By question 16 I’ve got three teams tied on points, and the team in the lead just five points ahead. Best get a tie-break ready, just in case.

Thankfully didn’t need it. The team in fourth place on question 17 ended up winning — the top three teams got combinations of the last questions wrong, and fourth place sailed (just) to victory by getting them all right.

All in all, by 10pm we’d finished. Winning team took home a £40 bar tab. Second got a bottle of prosecco. Third got the very expensive prize of a pack of Tim Tams.

So: one booking became ten teams, 38 players, 111 questions, and an amazing night for the bar. A night that could have been very, very quiet otherwise.

That’s why I don’t cancel on the cold wet Wednesdays. You can’t see the room that would have turned up if you’d stayed open. You can only see the one that did.

The mad host and a couple of our fantastic teams.