Want to ease family tensions? Then have a quiz
Chances are you’ve quizzed in the last month. Whether it’s the end-of-year work party, or family Trivial Pursuit, it’s practically impossible to avoid quizzing over the festive period – and for me, that’s one of the joys of the season. I am a quiz addict. In fact, I recently went on Mastermind, scoring full marks on my specialist subject (Harry Potter), but when asked “Which North Yorkshire coastal town has a North and South Bay separated by a Norman Castle?” replied, “The Peak District.” (Answer: Scarborough.)
Not everyone is so keen. When organised fun is suggested, a few killjoys will always say, “Why can’t we just talk?” Unwittingly, this complaint gets to the heart of why quizzing is so popular. Like booze, quizzes offer an escape from the minefield of conversation, which is why both go down well with awkward Brits. And when tempers run high, a family quiz can be just the thing to restore good relations.
Every year, my family digs out our Eighties edition of Trivial Pursuit. It’s like entering a space-time anomaly where the Berlin Wall has yet to fall and Gary Glitter is best known for Another Rock and Roll Christmas. Vintage questions aside, quizzing brings people together brilliantly. It’s tempting to withdraw into familiar groups at parties; young and old, male and female, those interested in cricket and those not interested in cricket. But to win at any quiz worth its salt, you need to forge alliances.
A mixture of highbrow and lowbrow knowledge, and decent age-span, are essential. Grandparent/ teenager pairings often do well, their collective knowledge of Seventies TV, horticulture, Game of Thrones and Taylor Swift albums proving a winning combination. While bookish types might expect their smarts to see them through, those with lower-brow interests can leave the boffins for dead on the pop music round. One unique answer can mean the difference between first and second place. In other words, the quizzing equivalent of scoring the winner at Wembley is only ever a question away.
As anyone who’s read Little Women or The Pickwick Papers knows, our Victorian forebears loved singing, dancing and playing games. Today, our pleasures have moved from active to passive. We mostly spend Christmas Day watching others perform, on, say, Strictly. But real games like quizzes heighten the senses, sharpening our minds and giving a far greater sense of reward.
We take little from a game of Monopoly except a feeling of impotent rage, but my last quiz taught me that China, despite its size, has only one time zone, and that the Channel Island Sark retained a feudal system of government until 2008.
The invention of the smartphone should have undermined the cultural value of general knowledge – after all, with the whole field of human endeavour at our fingertips, what use is memorising the capitals of Europe or the wives of Henry VIII? But the ability to dredge up information under pressure is a mental muscle we don’t stretch very often. And those who, like me, seem to be hardwired for remembering useless trivia can finally find a purpose for it. Even in our iPhone-addled age, there is something deeply satisfying about the acquisition of trivia for trivia’s sake. FOLLOW Madeline Grant on Twitter @Madz_Grant;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
It has been the custom of this column to start each new year with a series of negative predictions: a list of things that might have been expected to occur over the following 12 months but which I believed would not, in fact, come to pass. But given the bizarrely startling events of the past year, all bets are off. In order to avoid mortifying error, I would have to confine my forecast of Things That Will Not Happen to an invasion by extra-terrestrials. On second thought, maybe not even that. So if you will forgive the deviation from custom, there will be a slight modification. What follows are my considered thoughts on what unlikely outcomes the next 12 months will possibly produce. Maybe.
First, every stage of the coming Brexit negotiations will look as if it is collapsing into chaos and recrimination – until five minutes to midnight when, in an incomprehensible (because largely unexplained) miraculous transmutation, it will be resolved. Everybody engaged in the process will instantly switch from reciprocal insults and blood-curdling threats to universal approbation and