Pub quiz 'was harder than Weakest Link'

&149 Quiz addict Jen Turner

They're new faces in Fortrose and everybody knows they've arrived to clean up... at the town's pub quiz. With just glasses of tap water in front of them to lubricate their increasingly dry throats, 52-year-old Jen and the rest of the Harvey's Angels team wait with trepidation for the questioning to begin.

While others around them in the bar of the Highland town's hotel, The Anderson, sip from pints of beer and glasses of wine, the alcohol relieving the tension, the quintet of quiz experts are all too edgy. They're desperate to get off to a good start by answering the first round of the pub quiz correctly. Unfortunately it turns out they don't know too many of the prefixes of British airports.

It doesn't bode well for the five who've been brought together by Channel 4 to form the ultimate pub quiz team.

The new show Quiz Trippers begins next Monday and sees the strangers get to grips with sharing a motor home for a week as they travel 270 miles around Scotland visiting five different quiz nights – from Fortrose to Moffat – and voting for the best team member after each event. All for a prize of 500.

With a tongue-in-cheek voiceover by Christopher Biggins in the style of the C4's Come Dine With Me, the dry humour is obvious from the start. But so is the tension, for only if they win a cash prize will they have any money to spend on luxuries - like a glass of wine.

Jen, an IT consultant, was asked to join the team after being turned down for a slot on yet another quiz show, the BBC's Eggheads. "I was very nervous about what it was going to be like," she says, now safely ensconsed in her family's Murrayfield home.

"Living in such close quarters with people you don't know... I had my earplugs with me in case of snoring. And also being filmed for almost 24 hours a day, well, that's a pressure that you just don't know how you will deal with. And then there's the pressure of all the other teams knowing that we're supposed to be experts," she laughs.

Not that Jen is unused to showing off her general knowledge on TV. She was bitten by the quiz bug around ten years ago when her three children urged her to apply for a slot on The Weakest Link. Since then she's appeared on Sky 1's Sell Me Your Answer, BBC2's The Chase and most recently in March she was on the winning team in STV's Postcode Lottery alongside work colleagues, and managed to scoop 10,000.

"When I did the Weakest Link that horrible woman (Anne Robinson) put me off for ages because I didn't do very well, but I love doing competitions – and winning prizes – so I have kept at it. I have a love of knowing things - like all the capital cities of the world and all the kings and queens of England. I really enjoy learning and so I want to use it when I can. When I saw that the channel was auditioning for this show, I thought I'd give it a go.

"I'm quite open-minded and I thought it would be a laugh. It was mostly. I got on very well with Audrey, and we were always in hysterics, but there were tensions as well. The worse thing was having to just drink water in the pubs. We didn't have any money to buy a drink – apart from the students in Dundee nobody offered to get us a round. That was a good night – I ended up singing karaoke."

After the first night where they fail to scoop the 100 prize – the landlord of the hotel Jim Anderson predicts before the quiz even begins that the team "didn't stand a chance" and no wonder when Jen even makes some place names up – they move on to Aviemore. And it's here that things start to boil over.

While three of the team are from Glasgow, Manchester and Belfast, there is another Edinburgh member, even if the city is her adopted home. Lauren Berning is a Californian and runs a creative improv troupe in the city. "I'm creative, silly, a bit of an oddball," she says. "I am an only child so I pretty much play with anyone." However, when she gets behind the wheel of the motor home and almost crashes, the team are distinctly unamused. Audrey also gets furious when Lauren appears to question her answers and even more so when the American fails to sell ski passes they win that night – so they can have a chance at buying something other than the basic rations they've been given to live on. They end up rowing in the car park.

Things don't get any better and by the time they arrive in Edinburgh for The Newsroom quiz, Lauren's treat of an improvised comedy performance goes down like a lead balloon. And at the quiz, things go from bad to worse for her, after a few silly guesses to some of the questions.

Jen says: "There was definitely a clash between Audrey and Lauren. Lauren is American and very able to say what she thinks and what she wants while the rest of us were more reserved. At one point Audrey felt like leaving because it was getting too much. By the end of the week we knew each other's good points and bad points. It's probably lucky we didn't have to decide how to spend any winnings as we would probably have wanted a drink – and Lauren doesn't drink."

"I think there were tensions too because the producers thought we would win every quiz. We had all been on TV quizzes before so we did have a very broad knowledge, but pub quizzes aren't always about that. The first night the questions were really, really difficult. And it seems the person who has the pad and pencil has the power."

The whole pub quiz concept was new to Jen. "It's not something I've really done before," she admits. "I'm generally too busy during the week to get to one, but since the programme my husband and I did end up in The Murrayfield when there was a quiz on so we joined in."

She admits she hasn't seen any of the episodes yet and is a little concerned about the editing.

She said: "I'm mostly concerned about how I'll look in the first one as I was out the night before till 2am and was picked up at 7am to be taken to Inverness to meet the team.

"But it was mostly good fun. Audrey and I have kept in touch and Lauren has invited me to one of her shows, but you know, I'm so busy . . ."

Quiz Trippers begins on July 11 at 5pm on Channel 4.

Who knew that it's often a case of striking it lucky?

PUB quizzes are among the most fiendish of general knowledge tests, ranging from the bizarre to the outright baffling – and the experts in Quiz Trippers soon found their own proficiency somewhat lacking.

They faced questions such as guessing the name of the UK airport from its prefix – TRE, anyone? the answer is Tiree – to who lives in a house known as Kesranta (apparently it's the Finnish prime minister).

In Edinburgh, the team pitched up at Leith Street's The Newsroom Thursday night quiz, which is devised by Dr Paul, who claims to be Scotland's top quizmaster and has been posing imponderables for 15 years.

On his blog he says of the night Channel 4 filmed: "The quiz itself wasn't quite the usual Dr Paul situation... I had to show them the questions beforehand for fact-checking and taste and had several questions rejected. I was allowed to keep the question 'What are there more of in Scotland: left handers or ginger people?' on the provision that I change 'ginger' to 'red-haired' because 'ginger' is, apparently, an offensive term."

Assistant manager at the bar, Michael Hornig, says: "From my experience, knowing loads of things helps but doesn't always mean you will win. I've even won and I'm not Brain of Britain.

"Dr Paul asks all sorts of different things, and a lot of them are just for fun. For example, "Who's the tallest – Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera?" That kind of thing is a 50/50 guess and it doesn't matter how smart you are."

And Dr Paul adds: "The director seemed troubled that the TV team had been relatively unsuccessful, almost as if it was expected that they would be winning a lot of quizzes just by turning up. Real pub quiz truth: it's not that easy."

For more information on Dr Paul, visit www.dpquizlive.co.uk