There was an air of excitement about the place, unmatched since Baldy Bradshaw won that big Lotto prize and blew it on a toupee. He reckons you can’t notice the join, but he’s not standing where we are.
In the absence of any other volunteer, I was told I’d be setting the quiz questions — 90 of them spread over nine rounds. On the night, my job was to sit at the bar and mark the answer sheets from the dozen or so teams.
I’d decided to make the first question a really easy one, a kind of free hit. "Which New Zealander was a double VC winner?" When the sheets came in I realised that I had much to learn. Charles Upham was there, of course, but he was outnumbered by Willie Apiata.
More shocks followed. Only a couple of teams could name the Lions as the side beaten 18-17 by the All Blacks at Carisbrook in 1959 and I don’t think anyone named Ian Quigley as Central Otago’s Labour MP in the 1970s. That’s only 50 years ago!
Then the penny dropped! To remember the 1970s with any clarity you need to be getting on a bit.
At once my heart went out to a trio of young people next to me at the bar. Under-age drinkers, perhaps? It turned out they were in their 20s and in despair as question after question baffled them. "Which musical featured the song Some Enchanted Evening?" had them sobbing into their drinks.
Thankfully, each question set included one I’d had to research with younger teams in mind. They cheered up when they scored with, "What’s the name of Kanye West’s latest album?" (I’d never heard of Mr West before my research).
It was too late to change the questions but the youngsters joined the spirit of the thing and cheered loudly when they scored more than one point in a round.
Meanwhile, the more mature teams were racking up some impressive scores, even a 10 out of 10 a couple of times. Of course, when the top prize was cakes of chocolate and similar goodies rather than the thousands of dollars as thrown away on television you can afford to have some light-hearted nonsense. "Which airport has the abbreviation BUM?" for instance. And each round had a picture question. One was of Patearoa in 1900 showing the church. We wanted to know if the photo was taken in 1885, 1895 or 1905. If you knew that the church opened in 1898 that was a gift, but as the answers came in I realised I was probably the only person on the planet who knew what year the church opened. The benefit of being such a religious sort of bloke, I suppose. My favourite photo question involved a picture of myself and Cliff Richard recording a radio interview in the mid-1970s. Just about everyone picked Cliff, but then he hasn’t changed much, has he? On the other hand, the interviewer was named variously as "some dude", Michael Parkinson, Paul Holmes or Dougal Stevenson. That Dougal would forfeit his gravitas to interview a pop singer defies belief. But there it was. Proof that the 1970s was a long time ago.
I doubt if the system will be in force by the time the next pub quiz rolls around but I won’t be volunteering as quizmaster. Instead, I’m already rustling up my team. Elizabeth is 25, a fan for women’s sport of any code and enjoys pop music and cooking. Tom is a 30-something boffin at the university and knows about physics and chemistry with a sideline of knowing the capital city of every country and each American state. Old Norm will have to be in the team as he’s almost 80 and by his own admission "knows all there is to know". I hope Janet’s a starter because she knows nothing but shouts after every round. I’ll captain the side, of course, and my ability to name every member of the 1956 Springbok side and my ongoing fascination with airport abbreviations should make us a force to be reckoned with.
Who knows? The first question may well be, "Which airport has the abbreviation POO?"
It’s Pocos de Caldas Airport in Brazil and not a lot of people know that.
I think we can be quietly confident.
— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
