There must be people who don’t like quizzes, but I have yet to meet them. Meanwhile, the rest of us launch ourselves with obsessive-compulsive regularity into Wordiply, Wordle, the New York Times’s utterly infuriating Connections and the Guardian’s own Thursday quiz, which comes complete with its own official dog. Why do we do it? Presumably there’s a competitive element, though I have muted “wordle” on my Bluesky timeline, and it would never occur to me to boast about having named the Framed film in one go, or identified a west African country purely from its shape in Worldle.
Quizzes are educational, but only to a degree; Artistle has taught me more about 19th-century Russian landscape painters than is ever likely to be of use in any sphere of life apart from other quizzes. It’s certainly not social, though quizzes are not a solitary pastime per se, hence the popularity of Trivial Pursuit; I like to brag about having once won the French version – against French people! – but am less keen to be reminded of that time I humiliated myself at my sister’s local pub quiz by expecting to ace the round on 1980s cinema, only for most of the questions to be about The Goonies, which I have never seen.
Naturally, when I was asked if I would like to help set questions for a Guardian film quiz, I jumped at it. This should be a doddle, I thought, a useful way of utilising a memory that can dredge up petty details from obscure 1980s slasher movies while increasingly forgetting where I left my specs five minutes ago. For a blissful period I conjured variations on “Name a vampire movie starring Lucy Liu”, or “Name a film in which Oliver Reed played a priest”. Alas, none of that malarkey quite worked in a system that didn’t recognise descriptors such as “film noir”, “superhero” or “adapted from a work of 19th-century French literature”.
I filled notebooks with lists (my favourite thing!), and devised a filing-card strategy that was probably much too sophisticated for its main purpose, which was to prevent Adam Driver from popping up again and again and again. From the outset I was determined to include as much diversity as possible, and also wanted to dip back into the past, but combining these two aims was sometimes tricky. Apart from, say, Sidney Poitier and Toshiro Mifune, how many prominent non-white film actors can you name from the 1950s?
My earliest sample questions were impossibly hard. I know this because only a few weeks later I had trouble answering them myself. Name a film in which Emily Blunt appeared with Brendan Gleeson, anybody? A western starring Marilyn Monroe? Making the quizzes easier, but not too easy, turned out to be easier said than done. But I’m finally getting there, I hope.
I try to convince myself that playing quizzes and word games helps stave off dementia, though I suspect it’s more a form of procrastination, postponing the moment where one must finally start work, tidy the flat or go to sleep. But so long as your brain is engaged in trying to solve a puzzle, you can forget the horrible headlines, your bank balance, global warming and so on, if only for a few precious moments. So please have a go. Polite feedback welcome. And don’t hesitate to cheat, though it’s probably more fun if you don’t.
