Mary is an expert on soap operas and the lives of the Kardashians. Graham has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every sports result for the past forty years. John doesn’t know what day of the week it is but somehow knows every useless fact in creation. That covers most of the bases, but Margaret is included in the team because she watches about fifty hours of TV quiz shows a week.
Together they are known as “I
thought this was speed dating” and they win my local pub quiz every week. They
are so good, it makes it boring for the rest of us. It’s like being a decent
tennis player in the era of Roger Federer.
But in fairness, we don’t go to
win, the chance to catch up with a few mates once a week is a bigger driving
force. That and the beer of course. We are all at an age that would also count
as a decent score by a mid order cricketer. So, we tend to do well at history
questions and mainstream sport. By mainstream, I mean team sports that are
popular enough to have their results read out at the end of news.
It’s clear when you look at the
successful teams that a mix of genders and ages is the key. I like to think I
have good general knowledge, but each week I’m caught out by the fact that I’ve
only watched one James Bond movie, never watched any of the Star War franchise,
Star Trek or any movie based on a comic book. A question will come up each week
on these subjects. I’m also unfamiliar with any popular music recorded after
1989.
The first quiz I took part in was
when I was 16. I was in a youth club and through the benefit of two walkovers
and a close match against a team that were so dumb they they couldn’t spell
their own names properly, we were somehow crowned North East Ireland youth club
quiz champions. This qualified us for the national finals, which were held in
Leisureland in Galway.
We lived on the other side of the
country and boarded a bus in the early hours of the morning for the trip across
the island. There were no motorways in Ireland in those days and we had to pick
up all the other qualifiers from our region on route. We got to Galway at 10am
and were immediately ushered into a stuffy room and seated beside a team of
intense looking teenagers in tweed jackets and horn rimmed glasses.
By 10.15am that morning we had
lost by what I believe was a record score and were out of the competition.
Luckily the organisers had planned for this and brought all the first round
losers together for a repechage competition that was great fun.
That weekend is also notable for
marking my first ever stay in a hotel. Having a TV in the same room that you
slept in blew my mind back then, as was having a bathroom that wasn’t constantly
occupied by my three sisters.
I don’t remember any quizzes after
that until I got to Luxembourg at the age of 27. The Irish community there is employed
either in helping Europeans avoid taxes by investing in offshore investment
funds, or helping to set those tax rates by working for one of the administrative
branches of the European Union. I was on the tax avoiding side but spent most
of my socialising with Irish people working on the other side.
A group of them invited me to a
table quiz in the great hall of the European Commission. It was teams of ten
and we came up with ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ as our name, mainly to mess with the head
of the quiz master who was an ex British Army officer who became an EU
functionary in those days when the Brits still took it seriously.
We somehow ended up as joint
winners and our smartest member (not me, I hasten to add) was invited up to the
stage to take on a member from the other team in a tie break question. It’s worth
pointing out for the benefit of the story that the other team was called “Court
of Justice Jewish Lawyers Association”.
The quiz master smiled when he
saw the question. After a night of mangling our team name, he could see that
revenge was on the horizon.
“Ok, here goes. Name the twelve
sons of Jacob”.
Our team member didn’t even
bother writing anything down. He just muttered “I’ll get me coat” and walked
off the stage.
When I moved back to Dublin, pub
quizzes became a regular thing. I even organised a few myself at work.. These
were in the pre smart phone days when the accuracy of answers couldn’t really be challenged on the spot. But I did experience
a bit of abuse in the office the next day, when people had time to check and would
send me screen prints high lighting that County Louth didn’t actually win the first
All Ireland.
Here in New Zealand, most pubs run
a quiz on a Tuesday night. It’s not as though the pubs are packed every other
night, but on Tuesdays, they are particularly quiet. So, the quiz is a bonus to
the publican as it pulls in a lot of punters. A company in Christchurch saw an opening and
they set an online quiz every Tuesday that each pub can run on it’s own.
So, if you are in Invercargill or
my local in Auckland, you will face the same question and no doubt end up writing
the answer down that one of your teammates was absolutely convinced of, despite
the other three all agreeing on a different answer. And the three of you were
correct. Maybe that’s actually the secret of a good team. Democracy rather than
bullying is best, as it is in almost every other facet of life.
