Tuesday nights in Grahamstown are generally quiet. The Rat and Parrot is not particularly busy, and there are few cars on the streets.
Tuesday nights in Grahamstown are generally quiet. The Rat and Parrot is not particularly busy, and there are few cars on the streets.
However, if you find yourself in the Graemian Centre, a small pub in Graeme College, you may struggle to find yourself a seat.
Tuesday night is QuizNite night, and it’s filled with Grahamstonians who have formed teams like the Half-baked Beans, the Hip-Hop Hippopotami and the Fuzzy Ducks.
Though the atmosphere in the pub is competitive, the point of the contest is not the prizes, but the company.
This is exactly what Tom Maydon and two of his friends intended when they started running quiz nights in Johannesburg back in 2004.
It started as a way for friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while to socialise. According to Maydon, “quiz night gave people an opportunity to get together for a couple of hours, do something challenging, have a meal and catch up with what had been going on in each others lives.”
Before long, the quiz grew from about 28 friends coming together each week, to more than 200 people wanting to take part. The quiz nights also spread from Johannesburg to Cape Town and Grahamstown.
This was when Maydon and the two friends who had started the quiz nights decided to make it into a business, and QuizNite was started.
Although these quiz nights don’t happen weekly in Cape Town anymore, one can still find people gathering in two pubs in Johannesburg to take part in the fun.
The venues might be different, but the atmospheres and the questions are the same. Each week, Maydon rattles his brain and scoures the internet for questions.
Not only is Maydon a credit consultant as well as director and owner of QuizNite, but he also compiles the quizzes from his Johannesburg home.
"I collect questions from any source I can find," he says. "Naturally you need to be vigilant as there are a lot of incorrect facts out there, but the internet provides a good source to check the facts."
As Maydon cannot be in three places at once, he hires quizmasters to ask the questions in each venue. In Grahamstown, the title of quizmaster is shared between Warren Schmidt and Nadia Czeredrecki-Schmidt.
About a year after QuizNite arrived in Grahamstown, the two got involved, as part of what Schmidt refers to as “a very successful team.”
However, when the previous quizmaster left for Australia almost two years ago, the two jumped at the chance to host the game.
Of all the questions Schmidt asks, his favourites are what are referred to as the “blindingly obscure”questions. “Some are quite out there,” Schmidt admits, and this is often true.
After all, how many people would know what year the first United States phonebooks were printed in? By the way, it was in 1878.
