Colm O'Regan: When it comes to the joy of pub quizzes there are no wrong answers

Colm O'Regan: I love quizzes and used to roar abuse at the person on The Chase or Tipping Point who throws away all that cash because they didn’t know what I thought to be The Most Obvious Thing Ever. Picture: iStock

This week I am thinking mainly about funny wrong answers to quizzes. I love quizzes and used to roar abuse at the person on The Chase or Tipping Point who throws away all that cash because they didn’t know what I thought to be The Most Obvious Thing Ever.

I’ve since mellowed and it’s thanks a pub called the Lion Bar in Treorchy Wales. It’s the latest TikTok sensation. I know everything is the latest TikTok sensation. But this is fun, harmless and contains very healthy doses of the Welsh accent which are deficient in normally in our media.

The Lion Challenge is a trivia quiz filmed in the pub. Punters have to answer seven questions to win a shot. There’s no passing. They have to shout out what comes into their head. An, get this, they’re already probably fairly fluthered with the drink.

So the answers they shout are a study of a what happens in your brain when you hear words and need to act quickly. And when you’re locked. I have been laughing and also puzzled at answers like “What is the capital of Ireland?””GYPSY!” or Most populated country beginning with T - TASMANIA

The acknowledged star is Garyn, a charming mixture of unexpected knowledge as he pulls some incredible answers out of the hat (yes skin IS the largest organ, well done Gar) and then sheer trivia lunacy.

The catchphrase appended to him is “AQUARIUM” a wrong answer to an unknown question that is lost in the mists of Tiktok time (so probably only a few weeks ago).

The closest thing we had to it here was Larry Gogan’s Just a Minute Quiz (1979-2019).

The pressure of live radio, the half-remembered facts as the neurons fire off and the synapses transmit a message to search an unpredictable location in the brain; it all led to memorable answers. Some actually happened. Q: Where is the Taj Mahal? A: Opposite the Dental Hospital. The caller thought it was about an Indian takeaway.

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Some were just jokes that got repurposed – name a bird with a long neck? Naomi Campbell. Others were parodies that became real. Q: Complete the phrase: As happy as…? Think of me (Larry) A: As happy as a pig in shite” said the caller. Actually, that was Brendan Grace doing it on the Late Late Show.

The one I definitely witnessed live was Barry from Coolock: “What city does the River Lee flow through?” “Shanghai, Larry.” This was the first time I realised that Dubliners neither know nor care about Cork. It was humbling.

The one I really want to be true is where someone got nothing right. At the end they weren’t buying Larry’s standard commiseration: “Ah the questions didn’t go your way today” and they lost it and replied “Ah f**k off Larry y’oul bollox.” But that might also be an urban myth.

The origin of the word quiz itself is definitely an urban myth. Officially it comes from the 18th century and could be any one of the following: a toy from that time, a word that originally meant hoax, the word inquisitive, the Latin “qui es” (who are you) or another word that originally meant oddball.

The urban myth is that in the 1840s, a Dublin Theatre owner bet he could add a new word to the language by having a nonsense word “quiz” graffitied around the city until it stuck.

Alex Horne from Grandmaster tried this a few years ago when he wanted to force “honk” to mean money. I would love to do it with some of my own nonsense words but then I’d be giving away most letters of most of my internet passwords.

Back to the Lion Bar in Treorchy, the question is “What makes up 70% of the Human Body?” “ALCOHOL!”

They’re not far wrong.

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