The perfect pub quiz

It's one thing to like quizzes. All of us just liked quizzes, once. We answered questions, or failed miserably to answer them, and thought no more about it. Quizzes were just what we did on a Tuesday night. Turn up at your local pub, argue about the answer to question 6, occasionally win a pitiful sum of money, spend it all (and slightly more) on the last round before closing time. If you are absurdly competitive, don't mind inhaling other people's cigarette smoke and are ambivalent about being sober, it makes for the perfect evening.

And then one day, answering questions isn't enough. You crave to ask them instead. Who is this man behind the microphone, showing off, asking ridiculous questions about Scottish Second Division football clubs, and getting free drinks from a grateful management? In my local, The Prince of Wales in Highgate, north London, the regulars have traditionally taken turns to set the quiz, and after two and a half years of dedicated attendance, I was finally asked if I wanted to have a go. Oh yes, I said. Let me at it. There wouldn't be any boring football questions in my quiz. There'd be lots of boring cricket questions instead. Eleven years on, I find to my astonishment that I have set 85 quizzes at the PoW, and this year have compiled and edited a book of all the regulars' best quizzes, which is being published just in time for the lucrative Christmas market. Quizzes have annexed a chunk of my life, and a rather more substantial chunk of my brain.

For once you have started writing quiz questions, even for fun... well, there's no real way back to normal life. Sometimes they come to me in the bath. Often it's while reading the newspaper. Occasionally it's somewhere genuinely inspiring: a walk though the woods, or along a deserted beach. They form in my mind without invitation, without prior warning. As a result I now appear to be hardwired to view the whole of creation as a vast profusion of potential quiz questions. (It's a bit like those sad tourists, very often Japanese, who cannot go anywhere without filming it on a video camera. Live life! we want to cry. Don't just record it on tape! Don't transform your every experience into something to ask drunk argumentative people on a Tuesday night!)

Of course, it's not only me. The book includes quizzes from 10 different writers or teams of writers - a surprisingly disparate group of people, as it happens, although obviously they are all bright and highly opinionated. (Quizmasters are rarely people with small, withered egos. You have to have a certain amount of self-confidence to brazen it out when it becomes clear to everyone, including you, that one of your answers is hopelessly wrong.) Some of the writers have set a lot of quizzes, some only a few, but we all expend much effort on them, to an extent that may sometimes conflict with our professional and personal lives. Can such-or-such a question be any better? In this a bad question, is there a decent question screaming to get out? Is there such a thing as a perfect question?

For this is the question. Is there a perfect question?

Which leads us swiftly on to the next question. Can I write it?

We are all engaged on a quest for the perfect question. Most of the time it lies tantalisingly beyond our reach. Just occasionally, walking in those woods or lying in that bath, we think we have found it. (If in the bath, we even shout "Eureka!") We are usually wrong.

For instance: which famous London theatre shares its name with a malleable silvery-white metallic element occurring principally in nickel-bearing ores, atomic number 46? When I dreamt this one up, I really thought I had hit the motherlode. It has all the hallmarks of perfection: at first glance it's terrifying - all that extraneous information about "nickel-bearing ores" being designed purely to put the wind up you - but give it a little thought and either i) the answer will come to you in a blinding flash, or ii) you will end up at two in the morning leafing through a list of London theatres while looking up the periodic table in Wikipedia. Two points, by the way, if you worked out it was "palladium" before the beginning of this sentence.

And yet, when I came to put together the book, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who had thought of this question. Indeed, of the 10 writers (or teams of writers), four of us had used it at some point. The wording may have been different, but the question was essentially the same. I asked them about it. They were all particularly proud of that question. They all swore blind that they hadn't stolen it from anyone. It was theirs, all theirs. Do you want to fight about it, I shouted. It's mine, all mine!

All quests seem to involve some bloodshed.

What you become, increasingly, is intolerant of the merely adequate. Certain subjects crop up in quizzes over and over again, so that no connoisseur would ask a question about US state capitals or the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or the periodic table of elements, unless it was new or fresh or unexpected.

I have a friend who, in his forties and scarily well off, will no longer drink a bottle of wine that costs less than £15, and I mock him for his pretension. Yet if you asked me which Hollywood stars were born Marion Morrison or Norma Jean Baker, I would harrumph no less pompously. Example: Abba had countless No 1s in the UK (actually, I think it was nine) but only one in the US. What was it? Well, either you know it was "Dancing Queen" or you don't. And if you do know it, it's probably because you heard it in a previous quiz.

Alternatively, try this: what is the only No 1 whose title was a palindrome, performed by a group whose name was a palindrome? Much more fun.

A great question must be elegant in construction, it shouldn't depend on mere knowledge - which disqualifies the John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe questions above - and ideally it should embody a fact that will stay with you for ever.

The palindromic nature of Abba's "SOS" may have escaped Bjorn and Benny when they wrote and recorded it, but it is certainly entrenched in the memories of a whole generation of north London pub quizzers. (It has since turned up on at least one website, from which it was stolen by someone else setting the quiz in the PoW, where it was greeted like an old friend.)

Tastes vary, of course. Some quizmasters relish a question as abstract as that Abba one; others prefer something that actually resonates in some way with real life. One of my favourites over the years has been to describe a current and frequently broadcast TV ad for a car, something we have all seen a hundred times, and then ask what car it was advertising. No one remembers, of course.

Questions about celebrities divide the pub neatly. Do we need to know this rubbish, ask grumpy old men. Yes, reply all teams who know the answers. Quiz questions can make surprisingly pertinent points about the way we live now, and in the book each writer's worldview comes over very strongly in their questions. (We didn't include the man who used to set questions about nothing but science fiction and rugby league - questions that, on the whole, only he was capable of answering.)

My favourite question in the book was devised by a couple of blokes in their fifties called Chris and John, who started coming to the quiz in the early 1990s and are therefore the pub's longest-serving team. (Chris, however, has since moved to Herefordshire, leaving his old friend bereft and quizless.) It's this: What, rather bizarrely and theoretically lethally, links the M1's London Gateway services, formerly known as Scratchwood, and HMS Belfast on the Thames? When that question was asked, we sat and thought and wondered and scratched our heads and particularly pondered those words "rather bizarrely and theoretically lethally". Without those words the question would be unanswerable and therefore boring and irritating. As it is you feel you should be able to work it out. "Theoretically lethally": hmm.

After much cogitation we put down something to the effect that HMS Belfast's guns probably had a range that encompassed London Gateway services, for which we were given one point out of two. The actual answer was far better. HMS Belfast rests permanently on the Thames, and its guns, now silent, have a range of 12.5 miles. To illustrate this, all these guns are trained on London Gateway, which they could take out with a single volley. Stop for a sandwich there and you are within their sights.

Chris had visited the ship with his daughter the previous week and read all this on a plaque. Only someone slightly obsessed with quizzes, who had one to write by the following Tuesday, would have had the nous to turn this magnificent fact into the sort of question that warms the cockles of the heart.

The point is that a question like this sets the standard, and challenges the rest of us to come up with something better. We are all working on it, when by rights we should probably be doing something important, like earning a living or remembering the names of our children. It probably goes without saying - because we wouldn't be listening anyway - but the quest for the perfect quiz question never ends.

Marcus Berkmann is the editor of, and Russell Taylor a contributor to, The Prince of Wales (Highgate) Quiz Book, to be published by Hodder (www.hodderheadline.co.uk) on 2 November at £12.99. To order it for £11.50, including free p&p, phone Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk