Quiz clash draws near
In 1976, Wayne Mills received what is perhaps the lamest prize ever given to a winning contestant on a nationally televised quiz show.
He correctly answered questions including ‘‘Which countries are separated by the Great Lakes?’’ and ‘‘What shape is a pool table?’’, then Selwyn Toogood offered him the money or the bag.
Rather than take $275, Mills, then aged 27 and reckless, took the bag, and the bag contained a lollipop, which was later consumed by ants in the top drawer of his desk.
The moral of the story is that you should always eat lollipops at the first opportunity, but the real point of the story is to demonstrate that Mills, now 67, has been mildly obsessed by quizzes since forever, which is part of the reason he presides over the world’s biggest, and possibly only, international literary quiz for children – an annual eight country extravaganza involving more than 1000 four-child teams who compete in local heats and national finals before convening for the world finals.
The past few grand finals were held in the US, the UK and South Africa, but this year the ‘‘Kids’ Lit Quiz’’ is back in its homeland.
In August Mills hopes to pack out a large theatre in Auckland’s Aotea Centre with people keen to witness a race for the buzzer between teams of the kind of 10to 13-year-olds who’ve read all the Harry Potters 67 times, who know Margaret Mahy’s birth date and can rattle off not only the names of all the animals in The Wind in the Willows, but the name of the author’s son.
Mills retired from his job as a senior lecturer in education at Auckland University two years ago, but his stewardship of the quiz, which he kicked off back in 1991 in Hamilton with just 14 teams, is still going strong.
He reckons he’ll run the quiz for another five or 10 years, and is hatching plans to ensure it carries on even after that.
This year the New Zealand team is from Eastbourne’s fee-paying boys-only Wellesley College, and they’ll be up against teams from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada.
At the heats, students were set 100 questions in conventional pub-quiz format, but for the national and world finals, the questions are progressive, with Mills offering a long sequence of decreasingly difficult clues until a team feels confident enough to hit their buzzer and shriek out ‘‘Philip Pullman!’’, or ‘‘The Wizard of Oz!’’, or ‘‘Katniss!’’