Ireland needs more table quizzes

The crowd is silent, expectant. All eyes are on the stage, on me. I take a breath and say it:

“The Old Curiosity Shop?” “Wrong!” says the quizmaster. The crowd snicker. My shoulders slump. But still, I feel so alive.

Quizzes — there’s not half enough of them. Nothing gets the blood racing like a good quiz — be it of the table or common-or-garden variety.

Table quizzes have been through some tough times recently. The rise of personal internet devices and the inbuilt human tendency towards cheating has meant that potentially everyone has the capital of Equatorial Guinea at their finger tips.

Quizmasters have had to go to ever more extreme lengths to set questions that are google proof with questions in the form of pictograms, ‘what’s next in this sequence?’ but soon people are wise to all of them. The only alternative seems to be holding the quiz in an old passage-tomb where there’s no signal.

And that’s a pity because for generations table quizzes have provided an outlet for people who wouldn’t necessarily put themselves forward.

The boom gave Irish people a lot of confidence in our talents. Combined with the success of reality TV shows, the notion of celebrity for its own sake became a valuable commodity and people aspired to it without shame. Twenty years ago in Cork if you burned with ambition to be famous you would be accused of being ‘septic’. It says a lot about the Cork psyche that we would equate high self-esteem with a form of blood poisoning.

Out in Dripsey and we had a more gentle term for someone who displayed a predilection for the arts. They would be referred to as one of ‘the show people’ The classification known as ‘show people’ was broad, ranging from Andy Warhol to anyone who ate brown sliced pan.

But not everyone wanted to be septic or in the show people. Table quizzes — particularly when the prize was cold hard cash and there was none of this charity nonsense — were serious business. You may have been privileged enough to be at a quiz where Table Quiz Pros were at work. They were easy to spot. The typical Pro was a middle-aged man wearing a navy jumper or a Cork 800 polo shirt, navy slacks and Ecco shoes. The Pro knew everything and even if he didn’t know everything, he knows exactly which three of his friends know the other bits. This Wikipedic knowledge meant if they were operating now, people who looked like your uncle Jimmy would know the title of Taylor Swift’s latest single.

You never saw the Pros indulge in that other classic table quiz moment — shouting out an obviously wrong answer to a tricky question. They left it to the morons to cry “Enda Kenny” or “Your mother knows all about it” as the Pros quietly wrote down “Enoch Powell” or “Montevideo” and exchanged glances that simply said “We have it, lads.”

We need to bring back the quizzes — and start with RTÉ. Just a simple quiz, none of your fancy gimmicks. Maybe bring back Where In The World with cash increments of a fiver and a holiday to Santa Ponza as the prize and Theresa Lowe restored to her rightful place as the queen of Sunday night telly.

I want to see the return of 45-year-old men whose only concession to fashion and logos is the Club Tricot insignia on a blue jumper, who tell Teresa the Mitchelstown Caves are in fact in Tipperary.

Will people watch it? I don’t have all the answers. I’ll leave that to the Pros.

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