Pub Problems

Who said all your troubles can be solved in a bar?

Maybe now isn’t the right time, Brooke…

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

Alice is playing alone at the Duke of York trivia night, trying hard to keep ahead of Chuck - her trivia night frenemy. It seems a bout with mono has left her with an encyclopaedic knowledge of early 90s TV.

Brooke comes in, late. As Alice struggle to keep up with the Trivia Master, Brooke drops the bomb on her. He’s her new team leader and boss. He expects her to be upset, so she surprises him by getting the room to give him a round of applause.

But, alas, it was only a ruse to distract him whilst stealing his keys. She bolts from the room, as Brooke hurries after her.

Meanwhile, Chuck’s confused - he thought Brooke was a girl’s name.

Production Notes

Wow, we’re out of the office and onto the street. Well, kind of; into the pub, anyway.

This was a big day for us, and a crucial one. If we didn’t get enough people to fill the bar, the scene wouldn’t work. To our eternal delight, pretty much everyone we asked came out to help us shoot a pub scene mid morning on a Sunday. We owe the people who came that day a distinct debt of gratitude, they aren’t actors, they weren’t getting paid. They’re just friends and family who wanted our dreams to succeed.

The one thing that day we didn’t plan on was that Sunday being the very same Sunday as the annual Santa Claus Day parade. Basically, you couldn’t get from one side of downtown to the other, they were completely cut off by the parade route. We were shooting that morning in the pub, and then that afternoon at a different location. What would normally be a twenty minute trip between locations turned into an hour and a half. And we didn’t get to see Santa.

When we first conceived of this scene, they were playing NTN, the bar trivia game with the big, weird remotes. I’m not sure they even have them anymore, but I can tell you for sure they had them in my college pub. We all had a long lunch one day each week, and our sound professor would complain about the reek of beer on our breaths when we finally showed up for his class… if we showed up at all.

But watching trivia on a screen didn’t seem very dramatic. So we changed it to a live pub trivia night. To get the feel of one, we went to a Pub Stumpers Trivia League event at the Duke of York - the same bar as this episode. We brought the whole cast and crew down with us, kind of a bonding night before we started filming. We had a blast. I will always remember what the flag of Vatican City looks like. I went against Brad Cowan and said it was the Swedish flag. Big mistake. Never doubt Brad Cowan in trivia - the man is a trivia machine.

We ended up having Pub Stumpers Trivia League help us out in producing that scene. They made sure that we got the pub to use as a location (getting locations for free is always hard) and kicked in a little money to help with the production costs. One of the things we promised was that Luke, the Duke of York trivia master, would be wearing a Pub Stumpers Trivia League baseball cap in the scene.

The weekend before we shot the trivia scene, our production van was broken into. Some homeless guy slept in it for a night. In the back of the van was a bunch of expensive lighting equipment, but when we took inventory we didn’t find anything missing. Phew!

Then came the day at the Duke of York. Kim from the Pub Stumpers Trivia League came by to sit in the audience for us. We were just about to roll when she asked us about the hat. Hat? Oh! The hat. Yeah, where is that hat? We know we had it last weekend… and then it hit us. The hat was missing.

The homeless guy had left a truck full of equipment alone, but right now he was somewhere out on the street wearing a brand new, brightly coloured Pub Stumpers Trivia League baseball cap.