Pub quiz kings so brainy they were barred

So what happened when JANE FRYER joined their team for a tournament? Clue: They won’t be inviting her back

NEITHER Nick Mepham, Norman Hughan nor Graham Deaves looks particularly daunting in the woolly-jumpered flesh. Nick is a teaching assistant and part-time Father Christmas. Graham, 65, is beardy, earnest and very chatty.

And 82-year-old Norman has a hearing aid, which he’s forgotten.

But collectively, they are Storming Norman, one of the most formidable quiz teams in the Britain and, four nights a week, for up to 50 weeks a year, they terrorise rival teams with their fiendishly good general knowledge about everything from the Periodic Table of chemical elements to B-list stars.

Or so the landlord of The Horn pub in St Albans, Hertfordshire, would have us believe. Because earlier this month they were sent packing (or hobbling; poor Norman’s got bad knees) from the pub’s Monday night quiz. The blunt message was: ‘ Take your winnings and go — and don’t come back in a hurry.’

‘We were permanently banned,’ says Nick, 49. According to the pub landlord, their crime was simply being too good. They discouraged other teams and made Monday nights boringly predictable.

It was time that others were given a chance to win the £40 bar-tab first prize.

This is sort of understandable. If it were true. But according to Storming Norman, it’s not. ‘In a total of 38 or 39 weeks at The Horn, we’ve won only 11 times!’ says Graham. ‘ And we’ve had loads of close finishes with our nemesis, Team Win.’

They’ve come second a few times, having to do with a prize of a bottle of wine. And third, twice. ‘Third prize is a bag of crisps — ham and mustard flavour.’ They say the real reason for the ban is that they are old — or, at least, some of them are.

‘It’s a trendy music pub. We’re the only old group and we’re the only ones who got banned,’ says Nick. ‘It’s disgusting to ban an 82-year-old man from his evening out.’ Norman chips in: ‘I was only 81 then!’

Whatever. Furious, they went to their local Citizens Advice centre, where staff suggested they considered making a claim for age discrimination under the Equality Act and to contact the local Press.

‘We spoke to the St Albans & Harpenden Review and then it exploded,’ says Graham. Their plight was reported as far away as New Zealand and Japan. The reaction hasn’t all been sympathetic. ‘Some have said we’re boring old farts and should get a life.’

For ‘old farts’, though, they have a tough schedule. Monday night is now spent at The King Harry in St Albans. Tuesday, The Ewe & Lamb in Dunstable. Every other Wednesday, it’s The Froth & Elbow in Dunstable. And the last Thursday of the month is at the Cat and Fiddle in Radlett.

Kindly, they agree to let me join them on Monday night at ‘The Harry’ — just down the road from The Horrid Horn.

First job, of course, is to order drinks. It’s lager for Nick and soft drinks for the others. Next, they address the basic ground rules and quiz etiquette. No loud whispering. No conferring until they’ve each had time to think about the answer. It’s Norman’s job to write down the answers — and his word is final. They each have specialist areas. ‘I’m good on history,’ says Norman. ‘And cricket. And anything military.’

‘Anything a bit dated,’ adds Nick.

GRAHAM does science, nature and general knowledge — and he’s their secret weapon if they have to do a charade to act out an answer. The last time it was the film The Manchurian Candidate. ‘He did slitty eyes and marked four syllables on his arm. It was a bit unPC, but we all got it,’ says Nick.

Nick — ‘I go to lots of pop concerts such as Lady Gaga and Adele’ — specialises in popular culture.

While he’s never been married, IT consultant Graham is divorced and Norman ( a retired Sainsbury’s manager) was widowed 15 years ago. They’ve been quizzing separately and together for more than 20 years.

They take it very seriously, but have never run into any trouble before.

Tonight, we start with a picture round — where we have to identify photos of famous people.

Collectively, we confuse t he colonialist Cecil Rhodes with the writer Mark Twain. But Nick rescues us by identifying a couple of pop stars, two young actresses, Rita Ora, the judge of BBC1’s The Voice, and a close-up picture of a VHS cassette.

Much of their knowledge has been absorbed during everyday life — though Graham can’t remember how he knows the Andorra flag has two cows on it. Nick is an avid reader of newspapers and watches countless quiz shows. He tried his luck on TV shows, but he hasn’t done well.

No joy on Fifteen To One and a ‘heart-breaking’ fifth and second in 2001 during the preliminary stage of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which meant he never got into the hot seat.

‘ We were asked t o put f our Elizabeths in birth-date order. They were Gaskell (the author), Taylor (Hollywood star), Hurley (actress) and Elizabeth I.’

He got the order correct, but was 0.8 of a second too slow. ‘ I’m still haunted by it. If only I’d been faster.’

Happily, he’s triumphed since — winning holidays in Ireland and France, a year’s supply of beer (twice), a microwave and several footballs in supermarket competitions writing snappy captions.

Norman and Graham stick to pub quizzes. To limber up beforehand, they meet early to discuss football, politics and current affairs — then stride into the pub at the last minute to try to create a stir.

We begin. It’s not until the second round I know an answer they don’t.

‘About who was Holly Willoughby [the TV presenter] talking when she said celebrities encourage sexting?’ asks Rebecca, the quiz mistress.

‘ Sexting? What’s that?!’ asks Norman, struggling without his hearing aid. ‘It’s Kim Kardashian,’ I say.

‘That could be right,’ says Nick, not very graciously. ‘I suppose we don’t have any other answers.’

Norman writes down the answer very faintly — adding: ‘We can always come back to it later.’ Quite right, too. One wrong answer can be the difference between being victorious and vanquished. Pub quiz prize money varies, but is usually the cumulative pot of everyone’s £2 entry fee.

The attraction of The Horn pub from which they have been banned was the so-called ‘rollover’ when the prize money builds up if no one wins by answering fiendish final questions.

They won it twice — once when it was £250 and again when it was £1,590, but they split it with Team Win in what Nick describes as ‘a very sporting way’.

THE next round is easy: London Underground lines that correspond with colours of the rainbow and some simple pop music questions for Nick to shine at. We’re going great guns. They know pop star Prince’s real name is actually Prince, ‘rhodium’ is the answer to a complicated science question I don’t even catch and Alec Guinness played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.

They only wobble on the breed of dog that won Crufts recently. (It was a West Highland white terrier.)

After each quiz they conduct a painful and extended post-mortem. Indeed, they nurse old grievances tenderly. Graham recalls their fury when they were asked a question about which celebrity was getting divorced that week.

The answer was pin-up model Katie Price, but they called her by her better-known name of ‘Jordan’.

Their answer was rejected. ‘ It wasn’t fair,’ says Graham. ‘We lost by a point!’

And when you’re as deadly focused as this lot, rows are inevitable.

‘Of course we argue. Sometimes someone says: “I’ve had enough. I’m not coming next week.” But we always do.’ Of course they do. It’s fun, it’s often lucrative, it only costs £2 to enter and it’s a chance to show off at something they’re all good at.

With very little help from me, we roar through rounds four and five, only grinding to a halt when asked what is the longest word without repeated letters.

‘That is exactly the sort of answer we should know!’ they snap at each other. And are so busy berating themselves for not knowing the answer (it’s ‘uncopyrightable’), that somehow my wrong answer of ‘tomato’ for the question ‘ Murcott is the most popular type of which fruit beginning with “t’’?’ slips through. (The correct answer was ‘tangerine’.)

Sadly, it was a costly mistake. We come third with 41 out of a possible 50 points. But for my tomato trip-up and their Crufts confusion, we’d have won. They are clearly disappointed. They could have done with a win tonight after their shabby treatment by The Horn.

It still rankles. ‘Everyone was always very friendly, so we don’t really want to sue them,’ says Nick. ‘We’d have happily compromised — only gone three weeks a month, if they’d wanted. But they don’t want us because we’re old.’

I suspect he’s right. Because while Storming Norman are good, they are not, dare I say it, unbeatable.