Popbitch Popquiz at The East Room

Popbitch Popquiz at The East Room

09 September, 2009
by: Sandraleong

The Popbitch Popquiz is for ahem, a very select group of people.  The type who spend an inordinate amount of time poring over world events like Katie/Peter’s divorce (OMG, over in 67 seconds), the Mercury Prize (tough luck, Florence) and Lady Gaga’s cocaine addiction (tut tut) - instead of say, getting on with some work.  So when all-star Spoonfed quiz team Alice, Gemma and I rock up to The East Room in Shoreditch for a stab at pop quiz glory, we’re pretty confident we’ve got it in the bag. Renegades that we are, we’ve also blatantly ignored instructions from the top brass to name ourselves the brand-friendly ‘Spoonfed: The best website in the world’ - and gone for the more subtle ‘Norfolk n’ Chance’.

Predictably, we get lost. Located along Tabernacle Road, The East Room is largely a members-only bar-cum-restaurant.  It’s so exclusive it’s not even signposted. We blindly shuffle past several times till a sympathetic stranger helps us out.  Thankfully, we make it for half-seven and then we’re off like a trivia-powered rocket.

The quiz is hosted by the rather sweary comedian Tom Webb and his partner Mary Turner. It involves several rounds of pop culture-related brain teasers, ranging from Q&A to picture puzzles to musical challenges like ‘Maryoke’ (more on that later).  It’s also affiliated to the website and online gossip bible popbitch.com.  Sample headlines from their daily news grind include ‘Racoon in Turmoil’ and ‘Ponsy Sleb Spot’.  So if you’re expecting to come here to flaunt your knowledge of Britain’s fiscal policy or the Kyoto Protocol, you’ll be out of your depth.  Thankfully, we conclude early on that everyone here is uniformly low-brow, judging from the roar of approval that erupts when Tom announces that sex paraphernalia and an enormous tiger shark soft toy are up for grabs as part of the tombola draw.  Screw the top prizes - gig tickets and food/drink tabs – everyone’s gunning for the c*** colouring book.

Norfolk n’ Chance whiz through the school-themed questions round and news round, which has pretty standard posers like ‘Which member of AC/DC famously dresses as a schoolboy on stage?’ and ‘Who won Big Brother 10?’ We rest our hopes on Alice for the drinks round, where a designated team member has to drink and then identify three types of poison.  Teetotaller that she is (yeah, right), she gets them wrong and we start tumbling down a slippery slope. Tom, being horrible, makes fun of Team Spoonfed.  Nevertheless, the whole room gangs up on him when he skips over some questions by mistake and we realise the man might be funny, but he can’t read.

The long-awaited ‘Maryoke’ starts midway through the evening, where co-host Mary plays pop tunes on a violin and we listen with ears pricked. We get four out of five, missing out on S Club 7’s Reach. The shame!  The ‘Ask A Celebrity’ round is another pub quiz novelty. It involves guessing what a famous so-and-so would say in response to a set of questions like ‘what’s your favourite pasta’ and ‘who would win in a fight between a badger and a baboon’.  Tonight’s sitting duck is the deplorable Mika, who’s speaking to us via a pre-recorded interview.  In a moment of LaToya Jackson-esque clairvoyance, Alice redeems herself by guessing correctly that Mika likes ‘fusili’. Sadly, we don’t get his favourite obscenity: ‘flatulent c***’.  More reason to hate him.

At the end of the night, we come in - drum roll - 6th out of 11 teams.  Sob, where did it all go wrong?  We’re gutted we haven’t won the tickets to see JLS or Ian Brown live, and even missed out on the dildo.  But we’ll be back for more. Our verdict on this twisted pub quiz?  It’s surely a welcome change from your local boozer.  At £5 per head and with a small portion of fries going at £3, it might be a bit more expensive but at least you don’t have to jostle for seats, serve yourself at the bar and go up against crusty old men who’ll trounce you anyway.

Excuse us while we go swot for the next one.

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Sandraleong