Juliet England: Saturday night at the quiz as a Deafie

Ah, Saturday night. The nightiest night of the week. The one where staying in makes you feel faintly guilty or sad, the one that dooms you to interminable hours of dismal TV floor shows or dire medical dramas. (The odd re-runs of Top of the Pops from the mid-1980s being the honourable exception.)

So when I got a last-minute invite recently to attend a charity ‘quiz nite’ at a community hall Somewhere in the South of England, I didn’t hang around. Sure I’ll come, I said. Bit of different company, and the smug certainty that I’d be helping a good cause. (Plus I’d taken great care to ascertain there would indeed be a bar at the gaff before accepting.) What could possibly go wrong?

And so it came to pass that I grabbed my lift. It was dark, we were rammed in the car. Friends 1-4 were babbling away, but I drifted off into my own little world, something I often do in a darkened vehicle when travelling with more than one other person.

It was even quite pleasant – a chance to stop and think for a minute, given the impossibility of doing anything else. (Actually, I could probably do an entire piece on not being able to hear properly in cars, but that’s for another time. Let us move on.)

Anyway, I thought, I’ll be fine at the venue, and able to lip-read, electric lights in village halls being, you know, fairly common these days.

We duly arrive, and get stuck into the bar’s stock and the complimentary salt-based snacks. But it soon becomes clear that this evening may not be the carefree, sociable night out I’d hoped for.

Despite our table being near the quiz master (or mistress, actually, if we’re being gender-specific), it’s no good. The only questions I can handle are those written down on paper, as sort of bonus rounds. I do crack one of these, but it’s a rare moment of triumph and my only real contribution to the evening’s team effort.

In fairness, Friend 1 does try, repeating questions for me. He even starts off writing each one down, but it just takes too long. The trouble is, I need all the questions to be repeated, and quite slowly. Inevitably, someone else on our team would excitedly hiss the answer before I’d had a chance to process what was being asked. And it’s not a particularly easy quiz – there’s even a whole round on sheep. And, perhaps equally inevitably, Friend 1 soon tires of having to repeat each question. (Indeed, he eventually tires of the whole thing and starts sketching me with a hairy face by way of diversion.)

Frustratingly, a huge screen at the front of the hall shows a spreadsheet of the teams’ progress throughout the various rounds. (If you’re interested, we came third, a perhaps not insignificant achievement given that one of our number was Deaf in Action.)

So why not just have the questions on there? No doubt some of the hearing participants might have appreciated that, too. And then the results of the quiz could just have been announced at the end.

Ten o’clock rolls round. We drain our glasses and hand them to the bored teenagers collecting them – they are the only under-40’s in the room – and help stack the tables before heading off into the cold night to do the dark car journey in reverse.

Just another Saturday night, just another event. Just one more thing that it would never have occurred to anyone to make more accessible. (While accepting that the whole thing was a voluntary effort all round.)

On the way home, I think, actually, some of those TV floor shows really aren’t that bad.

Read more of Juliet’s articles for us here. Juliet England does freelance social media and PR work for cSeeker.