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Pub Quiz Questions - Trivial Pursuit and My First Pub Quiz
by Barry Kinnerton
I had my first taste of pub quiz questions in Dubai in 1988. There is some debate as to when pub quizzes started, in the UK anyway. I've seen one source which claims there was no such thing before 1970, and another article reckons they didn't really take off until Trivial Pursuit came along in 1982. My own view is that Trivial Pursuit is the father of the pub quiz.
Some trivia about that original quiz game:
Wikipedia says it was invented in Nerja, a small Spanish seaside town, on the south coast about 40 km from Málaga, in 1979. The New York Times says it happened in Montreal, but does acknowledge that one of the co-inventors, Chris Haney, a Canadian photo editor, used to go to Spain every winter, and that year spent 16 hours a day writing questions for his new game. It was launched in 1982, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Anyway, back to Dubai. At the time there were only a dozen or so pubs where you could legally drink, and all of those were in hotels, so the pub quiz had obviously been imported from the UK by some of the thousands of British Expats who were working in the oil business and related industries.
The quiz we used to go to was in the Ramada Hotel, close to our office, in a pub called The Old Vic. Our team was called A² + 2 (Our company was Asset Analysis, my business partner and I plus two others made up the team).
The Quiz Master was a teacher at Dubai International School, so I'd say the level of questions was reasonably advanced. There was no world wide web in those days for online access to (mostly) free pub quiz questions, so it really was a labour of love to compile them.
In Dubai at the time the working week began on Saturday through to Thursday lunchtime, with Friday a full day's holiday. The Old Vic Quiz Night was on a Monday, obviously a quiet night for trade, hence the quiz to bring people in. First prize was a meal for 4 in the hotel's restaurant, and I can honestly say that we won many times, always choosing Thursday lunchtime for our prize meal, the start of our weekend!
As for the pub quiz questions, it's a long time ago, but I do remember one, because 3 of the 4 of us in the team didn't have a clue, and as we won by 1 point that night it turned out to be a crucial answer for us. The question? "In equestrianism, what is a martingale?"
Since those pub quizzes in Dubai I've been a big fan, and now ironically live about 20 minutes away from the bar where many of the original Trivial Pusuit questions were written all those years ago.
Sadly, Chris Haney passed away in 2010 at the age of 59. I really do believe that he and his co-inventor Scott Abbott were the fathers of pub quizzes; their legacy - the sometimes exasperating, but always entertaining, pub quiz questions which thousands of people try to answer every week.
The author is a keen pub quizzer, now living in Spain not far from where the co-inventor of Trivial Pursuit wrote many of the first questions for that game.
About the Author
His blog Pub Quiz Questions is intended to become a resource for quizmasters and quizzers alike.
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