Popmaster Live

Last night, the Radio 2 quiz Popmaster had a live quiz in London which was hosted by Ken Bruce himself and organised by Classic Pop Magazine. Unlike the radio quiz which covers anything from the 50s until today, this quiz just covered the 80s.

It was quite difficult to know what to expect, whether it would be like your regular Popmaster quiz or more like champions league (the end of year ones which the highest scoring contestants take part in which are much harder).

I play along on the radio each day and I tend to do quite well. My average score is just under 34 and I have scored the maximum 39 points more than I've scored any other score. It's also very rare for the contestant on the radio to score higher than me. I do have gaps in my knowledge though, I tend to do badly at lyrics questions, albums that I don't own questions and "what movie is this song from?" questions.

Pre quiz entertainment came from Owen Paul, who played a few covers before ending with his hit. He also played at the interval too and again finished the set with his hit.

So the quiz itself. Well the questions were all multiple choice which came up on a big screen and were accompanied by a clip of music. Each team had a remote control to select our choice from, the answers were revealed straight after the time was up to answer each question.

My team got a quite respectable 9/10 on round one which was on intros and outros. We were however on the back foot already though as the leading team took till something like the fifth round to drop their first point. Unfortunately for me we did have rounds on "which movie is this song from?" and "which album is this on?". There was also a TV themes round, not something you tend to get on actual Popmaster, but to make things more difficult the options were anagrams of TV show names. Other rounds included records which didn't make the top 40 and one on rare and collectable records. Needless to say, this was definitely much more Champions League standard than regular Popmaster.

Two of the rounds had prizes for the winners of that particular round, both of which resulted in tie breaks because of several teams getting maximum points. I knew the answer to the first tie break question, who had hits in 1981 with "I Shot the Sheriff" and "I'm So Happy" (I won't reveal the answer in case you want to attempt it), but I didn't know the answer to the second one which was the double a side to "You're All I Need" by Motley Crue. Both times it was the same team that won these rounds.

Going into the final round it was now mathematically impossible for us to win as we were 110 points behind the two leading teams (each question was worth 10 points). We did get the maximum score on the final round and finished 11th out of 32 having got just 16 questions out of 110 wrong. The two leading teams also scored maximum points on the final round, both getting just 5 questions wrong. The tie break question which won it for the winning team was asking who the uncredited vocalist on a number 39 from 1980 was (apologies I cannot remember what it was now, wasn't anything I'd ever heard though). The overall winners were the same team that won the two bonus rounds.

Despite the high scores, it was not an easy quiz, the participants were just ridiculously knowledgeable about 80s music. I have written my own music quizzes before and have often been told they are very difficult, the last one I did the winner got just under 50%. Compared to last nights quiz though, my ones are a piece of cake.

Still, given the calibre of people there last night, if it was more regular Popmaster standard then you'd have probably had all 32 teams score 100%. Would I go again? absolutely, but I would have to do a lot of swatting up to stand a chance of winning.