And the answer is . . . hold the line please

A friend was telling me that he had been to a pub quiz the other night where the winners of a jackpot had been disqualified for using mobile phones which is good news. Most pub quizzes these days are like a Nokia convention.

The mobile phone has become the scourge of pub quizzes. We used to have a team who enjoyed taking part and but as the level of cheating increased it became a dubious pleasure. I must be honest, once we saw a roomful of screens light up below table level on a particularly difficult question, we did delve into the recesses of the mobile internet ourselves at times. Once it became obvious you were competing with whoever had the fastest connection to Google the fun and indeed the competition had gone out of it.

When teams started holding mobiles up to speakers in music rounds to find song, artists and chart position from specialist sites and actual knowledge became a worthless commodity then it was time to move on.

One of the final straws was when several teams managed full marks in one round including a question which involved knowing W B Yeats first names were William Butler. When it came to the tie break with a member of each of the winning teams having to go up to answer a question it was a different story. With their intimate knowledge of the poet, and no phone, two had him as a contemporary of Shakespeare, one had him outliving Larkin and Betjeman by more than a decade and we won by being a couple of years out.

I cannot see how phones can be banned nor can I see any hope of honesty winning out in pub quizzes so I, the people in my team and quite a few other I know, no longer bother.