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Trivia really is very important, you know

Mark Mason

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

But it’s a boy thing, admits Mark Mason. Women are just too sensible to watch Spinal Tap 35 times — but they don’t know what connects Ringo Starr and Shane Warne

For years I thought it was just me and my friends. Merrily we dotted our conversations with random facts — Carlsberg Special Brew was invented for Winston Churchill, the M2 is the only British motorway that connects with no other motorway, a Rubik’s Cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century... Never did we stop to think that this trait might actually say anything about us. But then along came Schott’s Miscellany, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and QI. All of a sudden trivia is trendy. The pub quiz has escaped its traditional home, finding favour everywhere from corporate jollies to political conferences. Just why do tiny facts hold us in such a spell?

An early thought as I researched my new book on the subject was that trivia symbolises what J.B. Priestley called ‘truth’s determination to keep right on being stranger than fiction’. The nugget, for instance, that the second-fastest accelerating animal on the planet — behind the cheetah — is the greyhound: 0 to 45 miles per hour in one second. An invented animal that did that would be of no interest. Then my enquiries began to demolish myths. These random facts, it transpired, aren’t random at all: trivia operates along tangents. There is no file in your brain marked ‘Interesting Facts’ into which you can dip at will. Only when a stimulus occurs do you remember that you’ve remembered. A friend told me that the policeman who discovered Eddie Cochran’s body was Dave Dee (later to find fame with Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich) — which reminded me that one of the British soldiers guarding Rudolf Hess at Spandau prison was a young Bernard Manning.

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