Age has its Privileges . . . but should it?

Here’s an open question to think about. How much should you think about and take into account the relative ages of the members of the regular teams when you’re setting a quiz? I ask the question because it’s not an easy question to come up with a definitive answer to.

On Thursday night my friend Adam set the quiz for the rugby club. I don’t know Adam and Fran’s ages, but I think they’d be similar to Jess and Dan who both turn 30 in July. Now that makes them the youngest regular players in the quiz, and by decades rather than years, to be honest. Like Jess and Dan in the two preceding weeks Adam set a great quiz which I found really enjoyable. His handout was opening lines from well known pop songs through the decades from the 1950s until the 2020s.It’s a good idea and was a fine handout – I always personally prefer handouts which either test your knowledge, or your ability to work out what you don’t know through using what you do know, rather than your ability to recognise faces. I won’t tell you how long it took to work out Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA , but if it had taken much longer he would have had enough time to record the follow up – and Snuffed it there, too.

However, there were predictably moans from some quarters about the number of songs from 2000 onwards referenced. I’m almost 60 and I’ve never heard of some of the songs and artists referenced, so it’s no surprise that the over 70s struggled. Which returns us to the issue – how much right do you have to expect the QM to tailor the quiz specifically to appeal to the most numerous age group amongst the regular players?

Well, let’s think about it. Some of those making the loudest noises about it either:

Have never set a quiz themselves for the club, which to my mind means their arguments have no moral validity

-        Or –

Do set their own quizzes in which they blatantly include questions about films/TV/Music from the 1950’s and early 60s, before I was born let alone the rest of the team. What’s more they are perfectly aware they are doing it, because they sometimes even apologise to us for it. Then they do I again every time they set a quiz. Again, to me that means their arguments also have no moral validity.

A Mastermind finalist whose misfortune it was to reach the final in the same series as the great Kevin Ashman once said that where it is not necessary to make a change then it is necessary NOT to make a change. Well, while I understand that point of view I think it’s a hell of a lot harder to judge when to make a change than this rather simplistic viewpoint would have us believe. Because the fact is that in the case of pretty much all of the setters from other teams they ask sets of questions which could have been asked 30 years ago when I first started playing myself. This doesn’t make them bad questions and it doesn’t even make them bad quizzes. But it does mean that they are cutting themselves off from areas of knowledge which are fruitful grounds for quiz questions. For example, it’s still extremely rare for one of the other setters to ask a question on ICT (and when they do it is often – what does CPU stand for?) That’s just one example – I’m pretty sure you could quickly come up with half a dozen others.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want any of the current teams to stop coming. But despite my own personal plans, none of us are going to live forever, and it would be nice if on the odd occasions a younger person played in the quiz they’d find something relevant to their own lives and their own areas of knowledge and maybe want to keep coming when the regulars shuffle of this mortal coil and join the choir invisible.