Crisps, Grudges and a Battered Notebook: The Team Names That Made Trelispen’s Quiz Nights

Every Thursday, shortly after 8pm, a notebook appears at The Barley Mow. It is not a recipe book or a till ledger. It is Maggie Prowse's quiz notebook: part scorecard, part confession booth, part comedy archive. Page after page, in biro and occasional gravy, are the team names that have made Trelispen's pub quizzes what they are.

The notebook that runs on crisps and grudges

Maggie has run the Thursday quiz for years. The earliest page in the current notebook is dated 2014, and the cover is held together with a rubber band and hope. She writes down every team name, even the ones she does not understand. Especially those. 'You can tell a lot about a team from its name,' she says. 'Mostly that they have had one pint and a think.'

The notebook is not official. There is no committee, no plaque, no trophy cabinet. But ask around Trelispen and you will find people who can recite the great names of quiz past the way other towns recite football line-ups. A name is not just a label. It is a pre-match team talk, a small act of defiance, and often a plea for the quizmaster to go easy on the geography round.

The regulars, and the names that stuck

Take The Fennel Row Irregulars. They arrive separately, sit together, and insist they are a collective. Their name suggests chaos and they deliver: one member answers every question with 'pass', another writes the answers down in a tiny notebook of her own, and a third spends most of the interval explaining why the music round was better in the old days.

Then there are Quiztopher Walken, a team of four teachers who have never once walked in like Christopher Walken but who have made the name work through sheer commitment. Three Men and a Bap is, on closer inspection, two men and a bap; the third man is on a rota. Les Quizerables are a retired choir who hum the answers before writing them down, which is either charming or deeply annoying depending on which side of the room you are on.

And then there is Norfolk and Chance, a name that has followed one team through three different pubs and at least two major life events. They are not from Norfolk. They are not, as far as anyone can prove, much of a chance either. But the name has stuck, and in Trelispen that is what counts.

Do the best names ever win?

Short answer: not often. The unofficial Hall of Fame is not a league table. The best name frequently belongs to the team that finishes fourth and goes home with a bag of crisps and a story. Quiztopher Walken have a loyal following but a modest haul of coasters. The Fennel Row Irregulars once won a festive quiz and have mentioned it every week since, which is fair enough.

Maggie reckons the winner is usually the team with the quietest name and the most settled order of drinks. 'The funny ones are busy being funny,' she says. 'The boring ones are listening.' That may be true. It may also be the kind of thing a quizmaster says to make the rest of us feel better. Either way, the hall of fame is not about victory. It is about the name you chose when you thought no one was listening, and the fact that everyone was.

The disputed points, and the half-point for humming

No history of Trelispen quiz nights would be complete without the rulings. Maggie's decisions are final, except when they are not. There is the famous half-point for humming, introduced after Les Quizerables supplied the missing word to an Abba lyric in a way that could only be described as enthusiastic. There is the spelling amnesty, which allows 'Bowie' to be written as 'Bowie' even when it looks like 'Bowy'. There is also the long-running disagreement about whether a point should be awarded for an answer that is technically wrong but spiritually close. Maggie says no. The notebook suggests otherwise.

These are the small arguments that keep a town quiz alive. They are also why the notebook matters. Scores fade. Team names do not.

Nominate the daftest moniker before the 2026 festive quiz

With the 2026 festive quizzes already pencilled in, we want to add to the unofficial Hall of Fame. Is there a team name you still think about? A pun so bad it became a tradition? A moniker that made the quizmaster put down her pen and stare at the ceiling? Send us your nominations for Trelispen's most gloriously daft quiz team name. We will compile a shortlist before the tinsel rounds begin.

The rules are simple: it must be a name you have seen on a quiz sheet or heard called across a pub. It must have raised at least one eyebrow. And it must, ideally, make someone in the corner laugh into their pint. The best names never win. But they do get remembered. And in Trelispen, that is the real quiz.