Understanding the Pub Quiz

I travelled to Durham on Wednesday to take part in a pub quiz – which is a long way to go from London (where I live) at the best of times, but it was even further to go given that on Wednesday morning I was in Lithuania.

But there was a good reason for the trip (if going to a pub quiz is not quite a good enough reason by itself). I was attending an event organised by Dr. Nick Pearce of Durham University about Understanding the Pub Quiz.

The event itself was “just” a pub quiz night, but was designed to increase awareness of the university’s work in sociology, and to kick off some research into the role of the pub quiz in British culture. A podcast was recorded before the quiz night started, involving comments and chit-chat from Dr. Pearce, some of his colleagues, the QuizMaster and bar staff at the pub, and me, to start getting into the topic of “Understanding the Pub Quiz.”

You can listen to the podcast here.

Some of the questions that the research might be able to answer include:

How and why did pub quizzes start?
How uniquely British is the phenomenon?
How have they evolved over time?
What role do they play in British culture and social interatcions?
What is the future of the pub quiz in our ever-changing world?

But here is a question for readers of this blog: when did you first go to a pub quiz?