27 Feb Q: What is one of Britain’s fast-growing pastimes? A: The pub quiz
The problems besieging Britain’s pubs industry are well known. Beer tax rises, cheap supermarket booze and the increased social acceptability of drinking at home mean an average of 18 pubs are closing every week. But landlords do have one trick up their sleeve and it is proving an almost surefire way of bringing paying customers through the door: the humble pub quiz.
While many publicans have ditched their big television screens – because Monday night football fans cannot be counted on to drink enough to cover the cost of the pub’s subsription to Sky – more and more pubs are laying on quizzes.
A survey by the trade magazine The Publican shows that about 23,000 of the UK’s 60,000 or so pubs have at least one weekly quiz, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the proportion has increased further over the past few years. It is a trend very much noticed by quizmasters, question-setters, contestants and landlords.
The economic downturn is cited as one of the most likely causes. Martin Green, the managing director Redtooth, a pub entertainment company that sends out ready-to-go quizzes to more than 4,000 pubs a week, has his theory.
“The reason that they’re back in fashion is that there has been a big increase in people applying to be on TV game shows,” he says. “That has gone up by 75 per cent in the past few years. People are applying to go on Pointless, The Chase and The Million Pound Drop instead of buying a lottery ticket. They think it’s far more realistic to get on a game show and win five or ten grand. And there’s a lot of them on TV at the moment, and that’s getting people back in to pubs, even just to win £20, £30 or £50.”
A pre-made quiz from Redtooth costs a publican only £7. The ubiquitous smartphone is an obvious menace to the pub quiz, if people want to cheat, but the emergence of the centralised quiz factories such as Redtooth can give rise to other opportunities to game the system.
One serious quizzer, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Independent how he came to discover that the quiz in a north London pub on a Wednesday was always repeated in a pub in south London the following Monday, every single week.
“We actually got bored with winning in the end,” he says. “It became more fun gambling on how many we would risk getting wrong.”
It is a problem, though, that Redtooth is aware of. “We write it on a daily basis. So as long as everyone sticks to how it should work then it’s kind of foolproof,” says Green.
His company, based in Barlborough, Derbyshire, is also working on a new format whereby a landlord can download the quiz on a laptop and entrants play along on a television screen with a multiple choice fob, making speed as important as general knowledge, and where the Google app in your pocket does you no favours…..