Fact hunt

For all its dressing up as an grown adult’s game (those Victorian line-art pretensions, foil-embossed board and extravagant citrus plastic stylings), Trivial Pursuit was never going to replace Rummikub or Backgammon as the contemplative post-prandial pastime. Its sole purpose was to foster family arguments about obsolete world record holders and how many James Bonds there’ve been, and reduce even the most mature player to childishly smug remarks like “I’m sorry, that’s not what it says on the card”. Ironically, a game which contained often wildly out of date information about various national borders has driven a wedge¹ between more relatives than any previous board game in history.

Blessed with a cover quote from The Rape Of The Lock by Alexander Pope, Trivial Pursuit featured your archetypal designed-on-a-beermat gameboard (particularly fitting since it was a direct forerunner of the pub quiz machine²), intricate “playing piece is also the scoreboard” counter system and 6000 questions per box. But let’s not kid ourselves these were University Challenge strength general knowledge teasers, more a battle of half-wits. When the expensive, dad-purchased “Genius edition³” first hit the coffee table back in the early ‘80s, it all seemed ridiculously complicated, even though half the time the clue was pretty much given in the question. Gameplay typically progressed in one of two ways; the pedants’ revolt insistence that all pronunciation of questions and answers must be to-the-letter, including foreign accents if necessary; or the “let’s just let the next correct answer win” school of giving up early ‘cos EastEnders is starting. As time passed, even the makers decided to go all po-mo-fo wacky, leading to such recently annoying questions as “Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?” Ho fucking ho.

In the intervening years, the trivia game craze took hold, requiring the supposed purchase of refill boxes for the Master Game⁴, or the purchase of duff competitors like Genius - seemingly inspired by a Guinness Book Of Records’ advertising campaign - and BBC’s “The News from the BBC”. (Oh how we would’ve loved to have seen a couple of sequels to that one: “The Weather from the Met Office” or “From The North: The Great Granada Game”, perhaps.) None ever really caught on. Originators Horn Abbot (created by the two pornalike journalist Triv inventors, one of whom was nicknamed “The Horn”, although we’d hope that was ‘cos of his voice or something, not because general knowledge gives him a stiffy) kept up demand for their own brand by issuing ever-more genre-narrowing editions, including Silver Screen, RPM and Baby Boomer, although nowadays there’s so many knocking around you can probably go online and order Trivial Pursuit: Top 40 Hits Of February 1984⁵.

Forsooth, Trivial Pursuit was a triumph of the cerebral over the athletic. Appropriately for an indoor Olympiad that promoted fat backsides and furring arteries, the 1990 BBC TV version was hosted by comedy chubster Rory McGrath (who himself was succeeded by the even more porktastic Tony Slattery). In 2005, Christmas boxes of After Eight chocolates (they’re not mints, that’s a disguise) even featured mini-Triv packets to test sedentary relatives with whilst you stuffed your face before the big film. No wonder sport and leisure are in the same category.