My quizzical life

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.