Shaun Wallace hosts his own quiz nights (Image: ITV)
TV brainiac , from ITV’s , often treats fans to quiz nights as he tours the UK spreading his knowledge and wit. Earlier this month he appeared in for a pub quiz, so I went along – but found it was very different to any pub quiz I’d ever encountered before.
Watching The Chase most days and attending the odd quizzing night, I like to think I’m pretty brushed up on my general knowledge. I was confident in thinking that the Chaser would make the night fun with some of the categories and questions being fairly straightforward – but how wrong was I.
Shaun hosted a night at Liverpool’s Bierkeller (Image: Gemma Jones)
The night, which cost £15 per ticket, got off to a very slow start. The doors opened at 7pm but at 7.20pm Shaun decided to host an impromptu meet and greet, with fans queuing right around the stage waiting to get their pictures taken and have a few seconds with The Dark Destroyer.
Eventually, things got started as Shaun took his seat on stage, with a pile of papers in his hand prepared for a heavy night of questions. While the game night had some similiarities with your bog standard pub quiz – for example a picture round and a Joker card – it was nothing like what I was expecting.
The game was made up of nine rounds, with very specific and unusual categories. They included in the news, forests, helicopters, orange, a picture round, a special round named ‘pin’, music throughout the decades, true or false and a general knowledge wipeout.
Some very strict rules were also implemented before the rounds began and Shaun was not afraid to halt the quiz to tell people off. No phones were allowed and conferring with other teams was completely banned, with the Chaser’s eagle eyes being on the lookout for any wrongdoers.
When the quiz finally got off to a start, I was excited for some quickfire questions – just like on The Chase. Instead, it was a night of long winded, drawn out questions.
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Shaun is also known as The Dark Destroyer on The Chase (Image: Getty)
Some were so long that by the time Shaun reached the end of the question, the beginning of it had been forgotten. The Chaser found himself having to repeat some of the questions several times after shouts from the audience, which dragged the night out even more.
The picture round was also different to normal, and had a much more intellectual feel to it rather than fun. In these rounds, famous faces are normally the subject, but in Shaun’s quiz it centred around star signs of the zodiac. My confidence was dwindling, and fast.
Eventually the actual quizzing was over and it was time to tally up the scores. Teams swapped their papers with someone on another table as Shaun once again read out every single question, but this time accompanied it with an answer in an exercise that felt like it took years rather than about an hour.
It seemed even the ITV star was getting tired in his own quiz as he kept getting the question that he was up to mixed up, with attendees correcting him multiple times.
One thing I did like about the quiz was that even the losing team was acknowledged with a prize. Those who came out on top won a board game and a mug, with gold, silver and bronze medals, and the team that came dead last went home with signed wooden spoons.
All in all, it was a nice night but it felt draining and drawn out rather than fun and fast. I went to the quiz expecting my own little taste of The Chase, but in reality it was worlds apart from the TV show. Unless you’re already a hardcore quizzer, I would not recommend.