Chronicles of the Last Quizmaster in the Age of Big Trivia

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On a Sunday afternoon last fall, a man who, in his three-decade career on the fringes of show business, has gone by Paul Smash and Paul Partridge but is in fact named Paul Dixon, entered a pub called the White Hart. The establishment, which stands in New Cross, 4 miles southeast of the British Parliament, embodies the changing face of South London. Once gritty, it now features baskets of petunias above its tiled frontage and a vending machine dispensing craft beers with names like Northern Monk Vague.

Dixon, who wore a button-down shirt and had a rumpled demeanor befitting a career pub quizmaster, set up the portable PA system he hauls from venue to venue. The Paul Partridge Quiz Experience was about to begin. “Two pounds a player to join in,” he announced. At stake would be £60 ($75) in bar vouchers and a bottle of wine. As teams picked up stapled answer sheets, he played the opening bars of Beautiful Noise by Neil Diamond, then demanded “Shh.” A certain amount of faffing carried on. “Order! Order!” Dixon said, in the manner of the speaker of the House of Commons.

“If you’re a new team, you just need to put your team name at the top of the page,” he instructed. “Please don’t try a rude name.” Patrons duly scrawled down handles such as Blackberries and Quiz Playing Games With My Heart. “OK, everyone ready?” He now gave the most crucial instruction: “It’s a mobile-free event at all times.”

The first round riffed off recent news events:

“Which cricketer broke a record with his final ball of the fifth test against India?” ¹

“Jennifer Hudson, one of the greatest actresses of her generation, just had a birthday. Is Jennifer Hudson in her 20s, 30s, or 40s?” ²

“Which top tennis player screamed ‘I have a daughter?’” ³ (“I’ve got a daughter; I don’t carry on like that,” Dixon interjected.)

“Who complains that she gets paid 40 percent less than Stephen Fry for doing the same job?” ⁴

“Which supermodel went on record as saying, ‘I regret saying “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels?”’” ⁵ (“We’ve all said it.”)

“Complete this film title with one word: Crazy Rich …?” ⁶

“Steve is unconvinced by Hannah’s story in which U.K. soap this week?” ⁷

“Which well-known English artist’s painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) could fetch $80 million at auction?” ⁸ (“Everyone knows him,” Dixon added. “Pool with Two Figures—you’d think he’d have included a few more figures for that sort of money.”)

“Which award did Ian Neale win in Harrogate this week?” ⁹ (“Quite a niche question.”)

“Big Brother is over, but in which year did it start in the U.K.?”¹⁰

The quiz proceeded at a steady pace, untimed, with each round scored before the next began, until one team won the £40 first-place voucher. Late in the evening, Parvati Perman-Howe, a doctoral student with a team called the Penge Slippers, a reference to a district farther south, recalled first encountering the quizmaster at another London pub. “I fell in love with Paul Partridge,” she said. “It’s quite unusual, as I’m a lesbian.” (Some months later she offered an update: She was no longer dating a woman, but she was still enjoying the Partridge Experience.)

Quizzes are a very British pastime. There are about 40,000 pubs in the U.K., and though a precise count of quizzes is impossible, trade magazines and other sources suggest that perhaps half the pubs hold one at least weekly. It’s a time-honored way to get patrons in and drinks sold on a quiet night. There can be real money at stake, too, with jackpots running upward of £1,000.

For years, men such as Dixon (and they are largely men) dominated the scene, producing their own material then standing and delivering alone. Recently, though, companies that compose quizzes centrally and supply dozens or even hundreds of venues have come to the fore. The industry isn’t enormous, drawing perhaps in the low tens of millions of pounds, but it’s lucrative enough to have attracted at least a half-dozen multiperson operations. The one-man band, in short, is under threat from Big Quiz.

“They’ve just flooded the market,” Dixon says. “They’re only interested in the bottom line. Whereas obviously I’m interested in the bottom line, as I need to make money, but I’m also interested in purveying the best quiz that I can.”

Dixon was born in 1960 and grew up in southeast London, in Forest Hill. Upon finishing school, he bounced between jobs. “I had no plan whatsoever,” he says. In the early 1980s he bought a set of turntables and started DJing at venues across South London, including one memorialized on the website Lost Pubs Project as “infamous for lots of trouble and drug dealing.” He later spun U.K. garage, a 1990s electronic music genre, in dives on the Old Kent Road, along a strip now largely purged by gentrification.

Then operating as Paul Smash, Dixon also conducted the occasional quiz. His true immersion in that world began in 2008, after the financial crisis, as technology was lowering the barriers to entry for DJing. Facing an influx of competition for music gigs, he revamped his quiz and began calling himself Paul Partridge, in reference to Alan Partridge, the comically inept television presenter played by Steve Coogan.

Dixon sometimes still DJs, but quizzing is the heart of his business. His operational radius is some 10 miles around southeast London, centered on his home in Sydenham, though he travels farther for private events. He writes his quizzes weekly, drawing on trivia books and formulating news-based questions late in the process to be sure they’re current. He claims he last took a week off in the early aughts.

Most Sunday evenings, after concluding business at the White Hart, Dixon drives to the Beehive off Walworth Road, to emcee for another crowd of young hipsters. The next night takes him to the suburban district of Sidcup, where one evening late last year an enormous rectangular sign stood outside a pub called the Charcoal. “The Paul Partridge Quiz,” it announced. “Cash and Wine Prizes. (Longest-running quiz in Sidcup).” Inside, manager Angela Timmins, a formidable-looking blonde wearing a soft-pink sweater, blue jeans, and a bangle on her left wrist, described the Monday punters as a tame lot. “Mainly pints of Coke, Diet Coke, coffee,” she said. “Friday, Saturday night—oh my God.”

Partridge set up in what looked like a hybrid DJ booth/preacher’s pulpit. After running through the same news round he’d done in New Cross, he moved on to a celebrity-identification segment called Who Am I? and then one called Connect 4. “We’re trying to connect four answers with a common theme,” he explained to the crowd. “You can sum up today’s theme with one word only,” he added. The questions followed:

“Which politician is Marina Wheeler in the process of leaving?” ¹¹

“In the classic children’s tale Alice in Wonderland, which creature—not a human—which creature says, ‘Well, I never heard it before, but it sounds uncommon nonsense to me’?” ¹² (“Let me rule out the rabbit,” Dixon advised.)

“Paul Hogan plays an Australian plucked from the outback who ends up in New York in which ’80s film comedy?” ¹³

“What’s the name of this song?” ¹⁴ (He followed this with the opening snippet of a track.)

And finally: “What’s the connection, for two more points?” ¹⁵

The atmosphere was collegiate, almost churchlike, with no sign of overindulgence. Cheeky doodles on a paper tablecloth was as raucous as it got. But everyone seemed into it. “I think Paul’s a good host,” said Neil Leverett, a freelance journalist who was playing with some university friends. “I definitely think it helps to know the host.”
 

Paul Partridge’s corporate competitors include Question One, whose tag line is the faintly Orwellian “the Real Social Network.” The company provides quiz materials and a “professionally trained” host for more than 200 venues in the U.K., Australia, and Poland. It dates to 2003, when Andrew Burns, an aspiring actor, left Australia to pursue an acting career. “He went to London seeking fame and fortune,” says Andrew’s brother and co-director, Edward. “Which meant that he ended up behind a bar.” Andrew’s duties included quiz hosting, and before long he was doing so much of it he needed support staff. Acting largely fell by the wayside. He still curates Question One’s quizzes, though now from Australia, drawing on a central repository of questions that the company periodically refreshes.

Question One is privately held; the company says it brings in about $1 million per year. In London it charges pubs about £60 per quiz, plus £1 per player, with higher fees for corporate gigs. Dixon, by comparison, charges pubs £110 or more in addition to the £2 per player, though he often reserves much of the ante for the jackpot. “We’re basically an IT company,” Edward says. Early on, Andrew kept a photocopier in his living room and hand-mailed every quiz, but once they hit a few dozen weekly events, the system became onerous. So the brothers developed a platform called Cirqus, maintained by six full-time developers, which Question One uses to send thousands of automated emails and text messages each month on behalf of more than 300 contractors. These people are largely quizmasters, who range, in Edward’s words, “from actors to stand-up comics to people who work in finance.” The system ensures “everyone remembers where they are supposed to be, when they’re supposed to arrive, and whether or not they have downloaded their materials ahead of time,” he says.

Compared with Partridge’s artisanal product, Question One’s does verge on the corporate. On a recent Tuesday evening, Tyrone Atkins, an actor and stand-up comic, hosted a quiz at the Fentiman Arms, a pub on a street of elegant Victorian houses just south of the River Thames. The event followed a format standardized enough that one regular successfully predicted several aspects of the night’s proceedings, including a round featuring composite images of celebrities.

Atkins maintained high energy throughout, though at one stage he seemed a little abashed by the programmed material. “Ugggh,” he said after requesting the name of the kingdom in the animated film Frozen. ¹⁶ “This quiz used to be cool. We used to have questions about Evel Knievel—and drugs.”

Rick Hartley, who was playing with a team of British customs employees, voiced a preference for the traditional solo quizmaster. “But you can’t seem to get that many places anyway,” he said. “All the pub quizzes I go to now are all the same format. It gets a little repetitive.”

“It depends who they are, though,” countermanded his teammate Niamh Baxendale. “There’s a pub quiz near my house—I live in New Cross—which I go to quite a lot, and the quizmaster there is quite annoying. Because he puts all this ad-lib stuff in between the rounds, and it’s just too much.” (Subsequent inquiries revealed that the irksome quizmaster was not Paul Partridge.)

Other Big Quiz companies include Redtooth, which sends 3,500 question packages a week to pubs that provide their own hosts and reports revenue of more than £2 million annually. Another, QuizQuizQuiz, began after founder Jack Waley-Cohen spotted a market opportunity during a stint working at Deutsche Bank AG, where he observed the popularity of quizzes at corporate events. “My theory was that every company in the U.K. with more than about 30 employees might think of doing a pub quiz as one of their nights out at least once every couple of years,” he says.

QuizQuizQuiz also tried the pub market, but the fees from corporate events—anywhere from £300 to even several thousand pounds—proved more attractive. “We ended up putting our prices down twice while we were running pub quizzes, over the four or five years that we did that,” Waley-Cohen recalls. And the company still risked being undercut by a competitor offering quizzes without frills such as monitors providing visual cues for as little as £25. QuizQuizQuiz has since gone global in the corporate market, putting on events in France, Germany, Portugal, and the U.S. It also writes questions for TV shows and smartphone apps, helping bring in about £500,000 a year.

Another company, Weekly Quiz, was founded by an entrepreneur named Daniel Lassman, who in 2014 pitched his approximately 50-venue business on the British version of The Apprentice before being fired in Week 11. His enterprise now puts on events in 200 venues, at prices ranging from £10 to £150 depending on the sophistication of the setup, and draws revenue of roughly £750,000 a year. Weekly Quiz’s key competitive advantage, Lassman says, is offering chain pubs a consistent price across venues. “Major taverns need to police their outgoings,” he says.

Still, his approach isn’t exactly mercenary. “If I was to call a venue,” he says, and “they already have a quiz, and they have a quizmaster that’s local, we wouldn’t try and take it off their hands.” Instead, propriety reigns. “It’s working—don’t change it. We don’t want to ruin something for you.”

Big Quiz and the independents are aligned, too, in their hostility to smartphones and the opportunities for digital doping that they provide. The approaches quizmasters take to cheating can differ markedly, though. Dixon, despite his no-phones request, takes a fatalistic view. “If you really want to cheat at any quiz, you’re going to cheat,” he says. In his entire career, he’s kicked out no more than five teams for searching out answers on their phones. Other indie quizmasters rely on shame. “Basically, you engender an atmosphere of hatred and distrust,” says Paul Diamond, who operates in Edinburgh under the nom de plume Dr. Paul. He tells quizzers that if they see someone cheating, “you’re allowed to punch them in the throat.”

Alan Leach, founder of SpeedQuizzing, says that, in some respects, ’twas ever thus: “People used to turn up with encyclopedias in the boot of the car and sneak out.” His company, which has been around since 2011, tries to co-opt tech to render cheating impossible. At SpeedQuizzing events, teams place one phone on the table. Once the question has been read, a 10-second countdown begins and everyone races to respond on the phone, usually either by selecting the right answer from a list or by providing the first letter. There’s simply not enough time for players to Google an answer. The approach has proved popular enough to give SpeedQuizzing global reach, with 800 quizzes per week in the U.K., the U.S., and 25 other countries.

One of the other companies is even more tech-friendly, drawing on big (or at least medium) data. Andrew Wildgoose’s Goose’s Quizzes runs 40 or so weekly pub events, almost all in Edinburgh, along with periodic corporate and charity nights. A while back, Goose’s began mining data, hoping to divine a formula for the perfect quiz question—one that would draw neither scorn for being too easy nor ire for being too hard. The company wanted, too, to better tailor its questions to different crowds and different stages. (Easy, encouraging opening rounds are the industry standard.)

To everyone’s surprise, their instincts often proved wrong. Wildgoose uses the question “How many stars on the American flag?” ¹⁷ to illustrate. “We would rate that as a fairly easy question,” he says. In practice, not quite half of 400 sampled teams got it right. “We instantly then realized there’s something in those kinds of questions, certain types of questions, they just don’t go down so easily,” he says. “That can really throw off a round.”

Goose’s Quizzes concluded that a 10-question round should aim for a “5-3-2” model, with five questions most people should get, three some will get, and two few will know. “We would call that experience a guide through your emotional experience as a team,” Wildgoose says.

Goose’s has found, too, that it can adjust the difficulty in seemingly counterintuitive ways. “What’s the capital of Germany?” ¹⁸ will produce a lower success rate, for example, as a multiple-choice question with Bonn and Munich as possible answers than if it’s asked straight-out.

“That’s our edge at the moment,” Wildgoose says. “We level questions correctly.”

After his Monday gig in Sidcup, Paul Partridge usually heads on Tuesdays to the Clock House, another pub in the gentrifying inner zone of South London. On Wednesdays he’s back deep in unreconstructed suburbia, at the Eltham GPO. His weekly finale is at the Wood House, a pub in the upscale area of Dulwich, 6 miles south of central London. The clientele are older than the Beehive and White Hart hipsters but glossier than the old-school South Londoners of Sidcup and Eltham.

On his tour last fall, Dixon had harder questions in store for the Wood House crowd. One team of regulars, the Partridge Pluckers, features Gavin Fuller, who became the youngest champion of the BBC quiz show Mastermind as a 24-year-old in 1993 and now works as a librarian and quiz setter for the Telegraph newspaper. Fuller’s group has earned a reputation for descending on unsuspecting pubs with high accumulator jackpots—competitions whose prizes rise in value over time until they’re claimed.

“Anywhere over £500 to over £1,000, and we go there till we win,” Mick Lancaster said. He estimated the Pluckers make about £5,000 per year this way, once taking in £3,700 for a single jackpot. On one occasion they recruited a second Mastermind champion, Marianne Fairthorne, to bolster Fuller. (“We did strike very lucky that night and won about £1,200,” Fuller said.) Such tactics irritate Dixon, who views them as violating the soul of the quiz. When the Pluckers are at the Wood House, he subjects them to a stream of creative abuse.

On this night, after moving briskly through Newsround, Who Am I, and Connect 4, Dixon landed on a round called Word to the Wise, a string of questions in which the first letter of the answers spells out a word. He offered to give the teams the bonus word in advance to help them divine the individual answers, at a cost of two points. Sipping on his signature drink, a Tia Maria and Coke, he advised everyone to take the handicapper, pointing out that “quite a good team” had tried to do without at the Charcoal on Monday and ended up with a wretched score.

The Pluckers abstained. “You have been warned,” Dixon said. “This word is a killer.” The questions ensued:

“In which country is the Golden Orange film festival held?” ¹⁹

“Kampala is the capital of which country?” ²⁰

“Sleeping Murder was the last book to feature which detective? Just surname.” ²¹

“Surname again: Which Liverpool playwright wrote the Boys From the Blackstuff?” ²² (“Tough one for younger players,” Dixon said, noting that the 1982 TV series was “a story of despair in Thatcher-led Britain.”)

“Which action movie star born in 1957, so he’s 61 now, has a master’s degree in chemical engineering?” ²³ (“Good luck with this one.”)

“Which Twilight book title—one word—comes between New Moon and Breaking Dawn?” ²⁴

“Which agreement—it had a special name—brought an end to the war in Bosnia? One-word answer.” ²⁵

“The filmmaker Jonny Greenwood is also a member of which British band?” ²⁶ (“Very big late ’90s, early noughties,” Dixon said; he’d misstated Greenwood’s usual role of film composer.)

“Which English town has these three postal districts: BA20, BA21, BA22?” ²⁷

The bonus word, it emerged, was “tumbledry.”

As the quiz wound down, Fuller—none the worse for more than one withering dis from Dixon—fondly recalled a solo win at a pub he’d come across while hiking in northern England. Another Plucker mused on the importance of fair play, despite his side’s mercenary history. “It’s not fair for a team to come and keep winning. It annoys everyone else,” the Plucker said. “So now we only come fortnightly.”

Even that’s been too often for Dixon, purist to the last. Asked later on whether he enforces the Pluckers’ periodic absences from the Wood House, he replied, “I don’t encourage them to come to any of my events.”

The Answers

1. James Anderson
2. 30s (37)
3. Serena Williams
4. Sandi Toksvig
5. Kate Moss
6. Asians
7. Coronation Street
8. David Hockney (The painting sold for $90 million in November 2018.)
9. Heaviest cabbage
10. 2000
11. Boris Johnson
12. The Mock Turtle
13. Crocodile Dundee
14. Karma Chameleon by Culture Club
15. They are all reptiles (“What’s the link, Paul, between Boris Johnson and reptiles? Well, he’s a reptile.”)
16. Arendelle
17. 50
18. Berlin
19. Turkey
20. Uganda
21. (Miss Jane) Marple
22. (Alan) Bleasdale
23. Dolph Lundgren
24. Eclipse
25. Dayton
26. Radiohead
27. Yeovil

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeremy Keehn at jkeehn3@bloomberg.net, Daniel Ferrara

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