Welcome back to my interview with Brydon “The Shark” Coverdale, one of the stars of The Chase Australia. We’re discussing Brydon’s new book, The Quiz Masters: Inside The World of Trivia, Obsession and Million Dollar Prizes, which is now available, and which I highly recommend.
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SH: One thing that results from your book being so up-to-date is the bit where you talk about quizzing in lockdown. I related to that because, in the depths of Melbourne’s many lockdowns, our niece in New South Wales organized a weekly online family get-together to play the trivia game Buzz. It was a real morale booster.
BC: Yeah, that was a thing you could do reasonably easily. You could remotely have a trivia game where you ask the questions out of the newspaper or you can do it in a more organized way. And pub trivia was really just nonexistent for a couple of years in actual pubs. But a lot of those operators were, at least, able to still have a show in some form that they could do online. And in fact, in many cases, they could have a wider range of contestants, because you could log on from anywhere. Or, if you had to be home, because you had kids in bed or something, you could still log in and you might not have been able to get to the pub in real life if it was on. And that just kept ticking over for people. At the more high-level quizzing as well, it just brought all of these quizzers together from around the world who were suddenly doing quizzes over Zoom together.
Issa (Schultz, one of Brydon’s colleagues on The Chase Australia) has played in many tournaments, World Cups, and Asian quiz leagues, and in lockdown, he suddenly found himself playing against the Eggheads, from the UK, and-
SH: Doing very well.
BC: Exactly! And the great American quizzes and stuff. And I guess, because I have three small kids and quite a lot on, I didn’t do as much of that sort of stuff as he did. But I did a couple of bits here and there. I did a quiz that Paul Sinha, the UK Chaser, was writing heaps of questions for during lockdowns. And in a weird way, I think all that made a lot of the quizzing sort of people more of a close community than they had been before.
SH: So your show, The Chase Australia, has been going for seven years now. Have there been many unusual or unexpected moments that you’ve encountered during your time on the show?
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