We’ve started so we’ll finish...why we all love a quiz
YOUR starter for 10: what are Britons addicted to?
If you haven’t guessed already, it’s quizzes, puzzles, word games, anything that stretches our grey matter.
Even those who were dunces at school are turned on by brainteasers, be they in newspapers, online or on TV, according to a new poll.
Nine in 10 adults play some sort of game, a survey of 1,000 adults by the online question site Ask Jeeves found.
Crosswords, word puzzles and sudoku are the nations’ favourites. Seven out of 10 woman can’t get enough but six out of 10 men admit they love them too.
The games are most popular with the over-60s and under-30s.
Next come television quizzes, with 61 per cent saying they love shows such as the BBC’S University Challenge and Mastermind.
Newspaper trivia games are adored by 43 per cent, while 27 per cent like board games.
Other popular brain-stretching pursuits include being in a pub quiz team (12 per cent) and chatting on an internet forum (23 per cent).
Sadly, just seven per cent of today’s adults are in a book club.
This compares with 11 per cent who follow a celebrity on either Twitter or Facebook and just four per cent who are in an old-fashioned “fan club”.
An Ask Jeeves spokesman said: “It is interesting that even though a lot of people feel they have forgotten what they learned at school, they have not lost a thirst for knowledge.
“It is all kinds of knowledge they hunger for, from modern subjects such as television programmes and sport to more traditional ones such as science and literature.”
The survey showed 77 per cent enjoy learning and 35 per cent wish they had studied harder at school.
However, half believe they have learned more since leaving school while only one in three say what they learned as pupils is useful for their jobs.
ANOTHER FINE GAME: Even for dunces Laurel and Hardy TRIVIA is probably, well, trivial to you but it is my bread and butter.
I had always had a talent for remembering things which were of no use to me whatsoever until that magical day in 1984 when I played Trivial Pursuit for the first time. At last, I was good at something.
I got in touch with the guys who had written the British version and they asked me to help write the second and third editions. I’ve made a career out of trivia with TV game shows, 60 books and a column in this newspaper.
In nominating me as his friend to phone if he were on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Chris Tarrant said I knew “more totally useless things about useless subjects than anybody on earth”. I think it was a compliment. Mitchell’s Did You Know? column is on Page 62