Online exclusive
Brendan Lochead turned a spare ticket to a London pub quiz into an NZ phenomenon when he brought the idea home with him. Now on tour with The Chase’s ‘Dark Destroyer’ Shaun Wallace, Lochead talks about why Kiwis love pub quiz.
Brendan Lochead was working at a bank in London – “literally the lowest rung on the ladder, me and the cleaner” – one day in 1996 when his boss asked if he’d like to come along on a spare ticket to a pub quiz that night.
“And honestly,” he recalls, “I’d never had so much fun in my life.”
What he didn’t know then was that that surprise night out would change his life. Two years later, when he came home New Zealand, he had the quiz bug. “But I tried to go to a pub quiz night and I just couldn’t find one. And the fact that I couldn’t find one meant I sort of saw an opportunity.”
So it was that on November 7, 1998, Lochead ran his first quiz night in the Promenade room of Auckland’s Waipuna Hotel. “After three or four weeks, I realised that if I was going to continue to do this, I really needed a better plan. And that better plan was to take it to more than one venue. That’s when I got in my car and tried to sell the idea around the country.
“Most people thought I was completely barking crazy. How’s that ever going to work? That’s just stupid. It was rough for quite a while, to be honest.”
Twenty-six years later, Believe It or Not, the company Lochead founded to promote quizzes, employs seven staff and provides five streams of quiz questions weekly to hundreds of bars and clubs the length of the country, and to venues in Australia, Canada, USA and the Netherlands.
In NZ alone, the company runs up to 350 quizzes a week - August is peak month - with each attended by, on average, 70 people, although Lochead says 200 go to the biggest one. That works out to about 25,000 NZers heading out each week to answer general knowledge questions at their local.
Along the way, Lochead has “tried things out and found out what worked well, and what didn’t” but, he says, it’s basically still the same team format.
The pub quiz format itself was born in Britain. According to the Guardian, pub historians trace its origins back to the late-1950s in Merseyside and Lancashire, but, notes the paper, the guinnessworldrecords.com mentions a night in Yorkshire dating from 1946.
Burns and Porter, the first mass-market quiz company, launched in the UK in 1976. The founders’ pitch to pub owners back then was basically the same as Believe It or Not’s is now: a quiz is a good way to boost custom on quiet midweek nights. But what’s the appeal for the thousands of people who turn up every week?
“You have to say that it’s an excuse to go to the pub,” says Lochead. “It’s one of the highlights of my week when I go to a pub quiz. You catch up with your mates and you can sit there in a semi-social environment, but also a competitive environment, and just spend time doing something that’s really enjoyable.
“Most people won’t tell you they’re there to win, but they secretly are. They don’t really expect to, but they want to. Three-quarters of the people in pubs are doing it for fun, really. And it might be that they get the best-ever score, or that for the first time they got third place. It’s not about winning all the time.”
Believe It or Not built a national profile with the help of a liquor brand sponsorship, but the big turning point came when South Pacific Pictures’ Nothing Trivial debuted on TVNZ 1 in 2011.
“That was the point where it all took off, really – the final break we needed. We actually had the people from Nothing Trivial along to the New Zealand Pub Quiz Championships as well. They had their own team and got horrendously drunk. It was pretty funny, actually. And that just really cemented its place in New Zealand pop culture.”
The championships now bear the name of Sky TV, which acquired Believe It or Not in 2014. The company isn’t the only game in town and there are other quizzes – including specialist ones like the Monday Music Quiz at the Tuning Fork, where comedian and independent quizmaster Brendon Green presides and the prizes take the form of tickets to gigs at the venue.
“Our staff go to that,” says Lochead. “We really like it and we think it’s clever. But it’s very much a niche market. When I started the business, we did have some music trivia nights, maybe four of them across the whole country in a month. It’s the same as sports quizzes –they start out okay, but if you try and do them regularly, they fizzle out.
“It’s just better to do general knowledge that everybody can be involved in. If I took my wife to a sports quiz she’d just get horribly upset with me and not want to be there. And even me with my love of sport, I don’t think I could do a sports quiz every week.”
If the questions are diverse, he says, the teams must be too. “If you go to football training with all your mates and then you go to a pub quiz, you’re not going to succeed, because you’re gonna be a bunch of blokes with all the same interests. I think that if you can have as many different genders, age groups, ethnicities, a real balance of people on your team. Have some teenagers in your team, some older people, people from different walks of life and the professionals and tradies. There’s no point all six of you getting the same answer right. You want to get six different answers right. Really, that is the crux of it.”
Lochead says he has talked about what makes a good quiz contestant with The Chase’s Shaun Wallace, who is on his fourth New Zealand visit in a decade in partnership with Believe It or Not.
“And he agrees with me on this: you have to have had a life. Or an interest in being interested in things, remembering things and being curious. What is that? What is the capital of that country? Where is that country? What is the name of that bird? You have to have that sort of philosophy. If you do, the quiz night’s right in your wheelhouse. If you don’t have that perspective on life, you’re not going to enjoy it as much as other people.”
