Starter for 10: Which contest draws 25,000 NZers to the pub each week?

Brendan Lochead turned a spare ticket to a London pub quiz into an NZ phenomenon when he brought the idea home with him. Now on tour with The Chase’s ‘Dark Destroyer’ Shaun Wallace, Lochead talks about why Kiwis love pub quiz.

Brendan Lochead was working at a bank in London – “literally the lowest rung on the ladder, me and the cleaner” – one day in 1996 when his boss asked if he’d like to come along on a spare ticket to a pub quiz that night.

“And honestly,” he recalls, “I’d never had so much fun in my life.”

What he didn’t know then was that that surprise night out would change his life. Two years later, when he came home New Zealand, he had the quiz bug. “But I tried to go to a pub quiz night and I just couldn’t find one. And the fact that I couldn’t find one meant I sort of saw an opportunity.”

So it was that on November 7, 1998, Lochead ran his first quiz night in the Promenade room of Auckland’s Waipuna Hotel. “After three or four weeks, I realised that if I was going to continue to do this, I really needed a better plan. And that better plan was to take it to more than one venue. That’s when I got in my car and tried to sell the idea around the country.

“Most people thought I was completely barking crazy. How’s that ever going to work? That’s just stupid. It was rough for quite a while, to be honest.”

Twenty-six years later, Believe It or Not, the company Lochead founded to promote quizzes, employs seven staff and provides five streams of quiz questions weekly to hundreds of bars and clubs the length of the country, and to venues in Australia, Canada, USA and the Netherlands.

In NZ alone, the company runs up to 350 quizzes a week - August is peak month - with each attended by, on average, 70 people, although Lochead says 200 go to the biggest one. That works out to about 25,000 NZers heading out each week to answer general knowledge questions at their local.

Along the way, Lochead has “tried things out and found out what worked well, and what didn’t” but, he says, it’s basically still the same team format.