It being the first Sunday of the month, tonight was Geekest Link night in Brighton.

As the name suggests, the Geekest Link is a geek pub quiz. It’s held once a month at the Caroline of Brunswick, a nicely gothy pub with an enormous paper maché head of Cerberus on the wall above the bar. Jeremy and I have been going to the Geekest Link with an assortment of Brighton geeks for a good while now, and with a combination of knowledge and luck, we’ve managed to consistently do…pretty abysmally, actually.

The Geekest Link is just ridiculously tough, even for self-professed geeks, science fiction fans and general SF/fantasy pop culture nerds. The stress starts when we all show up and have to think of a team name. We get our drinks, sit down around the table, and proceed to stare silently at the ceiling for half an hour, trying to come up with something clever, funny and relevant to the evening’s quiz topics. Jeremy has had coups in the past with “Swine Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Come Cyberdyne with Me” (which is only funny if you know there’s a UK television show called “Come Dine with Me”—but then it’s very funny indeed), and I was quite pleased with myself for suggesting “Friends of Dumbledorothy” when there was a Harry Potter round one month, but flashes of inspiration are few and far between (for instance, this week we were reduced to “Jabba the Slut”—also my suggestion, I’m ashamed to say).

Once we’ve finally settled on a more-or-less appropriate name, the quiz itself gets underway and the real pain starts. Round after round, we all sit around groaning and wondering why we put ourselves through this every month. It’s not enough to know the Star Wars universe inside and out or to be well-versed in classic science fiction literature or to have seen the uncut versions of all the Lord of the Rings films, with director’s commentary, back to back, several times over. You have to know Star Trek (movies and every spin-off TV series), you have to know Dr. Who (old and new), you have to know everything about everything Joss Whedon has ever been involved with, you have to have in-depth knowledge of Harry Potter and the bloody Twilight “saga” and countless obscure (to me) British sci-fi TV shows from the 70s and 80s—not to mention video games, anime, aliens, spaceships, superheroes…

Despite this, the past few months haven’t been all that bad. Both last month and tonight, we placed around 7th out of 11 teams. This is a pretty good showing considering the fact that we mostly just aim to not come last (one month we came third from last, but the two teams which came last and second to last had actually left after the first two rounds, so really…we came last).

Tonight was especially good because not only did we not come last, we even won a special prize! We made a clean sweep of the classic Star Wars trilogy round and bagged ourselves some nifty Star Wars coloring books, sticker books and activity books, and even a Star Wars Hover Sphere. Oh yeah!

With this evening’s achievement, I think we’re clearly on the up and up when it comes to nerdy pub quizzes. But I think we can do even better (“We shall double efforts!”). If we all study for the next month’s rounds, and if we all wear costumes to the quiz (which gets you extra points), maybe we can even break into the top five! A geek can dream, anyway…