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A trivia quiz is a pleasant way to spend an evening with friends or family, particularly when there is a little friendly competition involved. These days I am usually a participant or team member, enjoying the evening and contributing my tuppence worth to the answers. I do still set the occasional quiz, but a few years ago I was setting and hosting three full trivia quizzes a week at different establishments. It was a bit like hard work at the time, although at least it bought me a couple of boats.
I am not quite so mercenary these days and tend to set quizzes simply for the fun of it and to ‘keep my hand in’, so to speak.
Setting three quizzes, each consisting of six rounds of 10 questions, takes quite a bit of time. Back then, however, I was a computer programmer, so I created a database and got an unemployed teenager to type the entire contents of two Trivial Pursuit boxes into it. I then wrote some routines that would select 10 questions for each round and, once they had been used, cycle them to the back of the system.
I still have that database, although quite a lot of the questions are now somewhat dated. I had a look at it recently and found question 11,409: “Who is the current England football manager?” The answer in my database is Glen Hoddle, which was correct in 1999 but might need a little updating. Perhaps a project for when I eventually retire.
Setting a quiz is a bit of an art. The one thing you must never do is try to prove how clever you are, because you’re not. You looked up all the answers, and if your audience doesn’t know any of them, they will very quickly switch off and go back to Facebook or Instagram.
The trick is to set questions that aren’t so difficult that everyone is staring blankly at their answer sheets, but not so easy that everybody gets 10 out of 10. I try to structure each round in such a way that most teams have a reasonable chance of getting seven or eight correct, with a couple of trickier questions to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine who is going to win.
Then there are the special questions you keep for tie-breaks. If two or more teams finish with the same score, you invite someone from each team to take part in a tie-break. You could simply ask another question, but there is a danger that everyone gets it right, or everyone gets it wrong, and you could be there all night.
Instead, ask a question with a numerical answer. For example: “What is the speed of the Earth in kilometres per hour as it orbits the Sun?” The answer is approximately 106,600kmph, which nobody is likely to know. The winner is simply the person who gets closest.
If you are including a music round, you also need to know your audience. There is little point asking a group of over-50s to identify obscure hip-hop or rap tracks. On the other hand, most generations will recognise the rock classics, so Queen and Led Zeppelin should probably make an appearance.
The whole point of a quiz is that it should be an enjoyable evening out. There should be a few small prizes for individual rounds, perhaps a slightly better one for the overall winner, and plenty of opportunities for teams to argue about answers that were ‘obviously’ correct.
And ultimately, the real measure of a successful quiz is not the size of the prize fund or how difficult the questions were. It is being asked: “When are you doing the next one?”
Jackie@jbeedie.com
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