Oh that!

I have an amusing anecdote about the 2004 TNN...

It turns out that (at least) two people scored higher than the advertised at-home high scorer. I was one of them. Sort of...

The Beeb ran the online quiz for a while before the show, and then contacted the highest UK-based scorers to find out if they were willing to be on the show itself.

It just so happens that two of my best mates back home decided to have a crack at the quiz for a laugh and used an amalgamation of their their two names as an identity. For reasons that I'm not entirely sure about, they used a third mutual friend's phone number as the contact number.

Anyway, about a third of the way through the test, they decided that there must be an easier way, and hit google. Lo and behold, someone at the Beeb had already put the results page up and it had somehow gotten spidered. So my two friends duly copied all the answers and clicked submit.

You can only imagine their frustration when they only got 68 out of 70. It turned out that the results page contained 2 errors. So they went through the answers with a fine tooth comb and found the two that thought were the most likely candidates. To test the theory, they re-entered the quiz under another name and were pleased to see that this time they got the full 70/70 score.

I heard about all of this a few days later, when one of them called me in a near-hysterical state, barely able to breathe because of laughter. The Beeb had called the third friend, who had quickly twigged the amalgamated name, told the caller that the person that they were trying to call was out but could be reached on their mobile phone, and given them the number of one of the pair. My poor friend then spent about 20 minutes on the phone resisting overtures from some persistent lady at the Beeb, asking for him to appear on the TTN programme itself, and trying to extricate himself from the situation without giving the game away. Eventually he had to get mad to get her to go away, and told her that he wished that he'd never entered the bloody quiz in the first place, by this time not so far from the truth!

It was at this point that he asked if I had received any phone calls...