Who is older, Gary Numan or Gary Oldman? If you know the answer to this question (see below), you are probably one of hundreds of thousands of Brits who attend a pub quiz every week.
As a nation of committed trivia buffs, it was unsurprising that news of a quizmaster in Manchester outing a team for cheating was leapt on. Just where, we asked, is the special place in hell reserved for those quizzers who take a sneaky look at their phones under the table?
According to the BBC, a “massive whodunnit” ensued after the landlord at the Barking Dog in Urmston revealed that the cheats were whispering questions into their smartphones, but refused to name and shame them.
It is a misdemeanour that is, according to some quizmasters, an increasingly common blight on one of the nation’s favourite pastimes.
“I think it’s definitely more prolific now, especially with smartwatches – even if you don’t have a phone in your hand, there’s still a way for you to be able to cheat,” said David Hartley, a quizmaster from Staffordshire.
The 33-year-old has hosted quizzes in four venues for nearly a decade and started banning devices about two years ago. “It just takes the mickey out of your quizmaster, if all you’re going to do is sit on your phone,” he said.
David Moyce, the landlord and quizmaster at the Alma in Cambridge, said he recently had to ban a group of students who won in suspicious circumstances. He had suspected cheating after the painfully weak team suddenly played their “joker” – which doubles points – before a round in which they got every question right.
“There was no proof. But then one of the gentlemen came back, handed over some money and said: ‘Yeah, we did cheat,’” Moyce said. “The guilt must have been so heavy on him that he literally handed his share of the money back. None of the others did though, so maybe he slept better than the other four.”
Some pubs have taken hi-tech measures to stop cheats, such as hosting smartphone quizzes where participants have to type in answers on their phones – and lose points if they suspiciously click away from the dedicated quizzing app to use another.
The SpeedQuizzing app promises to see off “the cheats and the chancers” by giving users only 10 seconds per question to lock in their answers in an attempt to restore what it calls “a once proud British tradition”.
Others take more traditional routes. The Prince of Wales in Highgate, north London, has a fiercely peer-policed quiz, according to Marcus Berkmann, who has competed in it more than 200 times and now regularly writes its questions.
“We’re very harsh on anyone who cheats, so no one does it,” said Berkmann, who is the author of A Matter of Facts: The Insider’s Guide to Quizzing. “The regulars would rather boil themselves in oil than cheat.
“Occasionally, you read out a warning and say: ‘We’re testing you on what you know, not what you can look up on Google,’ and people generally go along with that.”
The precise origins of the pub quiz are shrouded in a pre-smoking-ban haze, but they became popular in the 1970s, boosted by Sharon Burns and Tom Porter, whose company Burns and Porter supplied readymade quizzes as a way for pubs to lure drinkers in on quieter nights.
Today, quizzing in the UK remains a serious business, marrying as it does the great British pastimes of drinking and taking pleasure in being right. According to a recent survey commissioned by the brewer Greene King, 70% of people regularly take part in a pub quiz and almost one in 10 goes every single week.
Quizmasters could be forgiven for wanting to return to the simpler times of Burns and Porter, but can also take some solace in knowing that their predecessors also had to deal with cheats.
Gail Taylor, for example, responded to a Guardian callout this week to finally come clean about her youthful cheating in Sheffield pubs in the 1980s.
According to Taylor, she planting rudimentary bugging devices underneath pub tables for transmitting the questions to encyclopedia-armed friends in a van outside.
The Guardian could not independently verify her tale, but she insisted it was true. “Something always went wrong,” Taylor said. “If the signal didn’t work, we’d write the questions down, rush out to the van with two pints and a list, then someone else would go out and bring back the answers. Nobody seemed to catch on what we were doing.”
Reflecting on the crime more than three decades later, Taylor is entirely without remorse. “We didn’t have Google then, so we never won anything anyway,” she says. “I don’t feel guilty about it at all. And if I had the chance, I’d do it again tomorrow.”
Answer: Gary Numan is older than Gary Oldman by 13 days.
