When the creators of Trivial Pursuit marketed their product, did they envisage the forces of evil they would unleash into society? Since then, we have been living in the age of the smart arse; where having an unlimited general knowledge, an ability to answer obscure questions or have a mindful of useless facts guarantees much revere.

I admit to being one of those sad people who purchased Trivial Pursuit, which apparently, was originally intended for children and when it swiftly replaced the lunch time round of whist or bridge in my place of employment, I began to see why. The inevitable post-mortem of the game was replaced by fights over cheesers, debates over questions deemed unfair or misleading, calls for rulings and the dummy player became the person who insisted on reading the questions but didn’t want to play. What had happened? Lunch time interaction was now a battlefield for the biggest smart arse to avoid the worst possible scenario of having your name written up on the notice board as the dunce of the day, (or words to that effect) if you came last. I can recall sitting around the table in the staff tea-room, beads of perspiration forming on the forehead of the poor lamb who got stuck on a question, the smug smirk on the faces of the other players whether they knew the answer or not, including the dummy player with the answer card in front of them, and the merciless laughter that rang out if a wrong answer was given. Yes, the expression it’s not the winning it’s the taking part that counts, had been relegated to the same archive as Darwin’s’ original evolutionary theories. Winning and proving yourself the smartest was the all important factor and the only way to raise your esteem in the eyes of you peers.

This new fad like a lot of other things has invaded other environments and spiralled out of control. The harmless pass-time of bar-room debating where no one actually cares what the answer is but likes to discuss it anyway, has been replaced by the pub quiz. The highest bar room honour you can be awarded today is to be co-opted onto a pub quiz team and the criteria for your election relates not to camaraderie and social bonding, but being able to answer more questions correctly than anyone else, rather than because people actually like you. Bar-room conversation now consists of ripping the back out of any team who scored less than you, lording it over everyone else if you won, or hating anyone else who does exactly the same if you didn’t as opposed to the traditional solving of the worlds problems debate.