'A brain city to discover': Presenter Alex Zane on Leeds as the ultimate setting for Trivial Pursuit takeover
Presenter and podcaster Alex Zane returns to his hometown for a city-wide Trivial Pursuit challenge. Benjamin Jackson and Dennis Morton find out more.
Did you know the world's first commercially viable steam locomotive was built in Leeds? Salamanca, which carried coal from Middleton Colliery to the city some 214 years ago, helped put Leeds on the map and kickstart the global Industrial Revolution.
It's one of the many facts visitors will discover this summer through a giant interactive board game which is celebrating 400 years since Leeds received its royal charter in 1626.
For decades, Trivial Pursuit has been the ultimate test of family harmony and obscure knowledge. Now, the game has left the living room table and has taken over Leeds, with giant cheese wheels installed at locations across the city to each represent one of the game's six categories.
Like the classic Hasbro game, the aim is to collect all six cheeses by correctly answering questions from the different categories. But instead of moving around a board with a dice, players travel between landmarks, before heading to the final checkpoint at Brodrick Hall inside Leeds City Museum to answer a deciding question.
Among those at the heart of the celebration is Leeds-born presenter and podcaster Alex Zane, who jumped at the chance to return to his old stomping ground to curate the entertainment history of the city. For Alex, the standout memories of Leeds are inseparable from the live music that defined his youth. While he was too young to attend many of the 80s gigs inside the arena, he vividly recalls standing on the other side of the fence at Roundhay Park to hear The Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson play.
"I wish there was an exciting story for my involvement in this (Trivial Pursuit), like a bat signal was launched from the glorious northern powerhouse of Leeds down here to London," Alex jokes. "I saw it in the sky, hopped on the LNER from King's Cross, and when I arrived, they were waiting for me.”
In reality, a simple email invitation to speak about music at Roundhay Park was all it took - largely because the connection is deeply personal, with his mother still residing in the area near Soldiers Field. But even a professional broadcaster admits he has his limitations when it comes to general knowledge.
"I am a very competitive person, so it was nice to be able to engage with Trivial Pursuit in a much more relaxed manner," Alex admits. "But I have to say, Brown (Art and Literature) is my absolute blind spot. I was never very well-read as a child - I was almost exclusively a Stephen King reader. If I'm forced to pick Brown and someone around the table is literary in their knowledge, I cannot believe how useless I am.” "However,” Alex is quick to point out, “put me on Pink for Pop Culture, or Green for Science and Nature, and I'm your man.”
Of course, playing the game comes with its own age-old debates; most notably, what to call the plastic tokens collected in your circular mover. "It's a wedge. It's officially a wedge, but growing up, my family always called them 'pieces of cheese,'" Alex laughs. "Though I've had intense arguments with friends who insist they are 'slices of pie’. Frankly, if you call it a slice of pie, we can't be friends".
When asked what he would change if he were designing a custom Leeds edition of the game, Alex had a specific "elevated pitch" for Hasbro: a new category called "Forgotten History". "I think there is a huge passion for forgotten history. It’s about the things that used to be in Leeds that have gradually been lost to the sands of time and redevelopment," Alex suggests. "For example, the Dark Arches by Leeds City Station, where I spent many a Saturday afternoon. It was this labyrinthine, underground city selling strange, handcrafted goods like beads and strange pagan jewellery. Everything down there smelt of Joss sticks - it felt like a fantasy film".
Ultimately, the presenter believes the trail is the perfect excuse for residents to look at their surroundings with fresh eyes, rather than taking local landmarks for granted. "It's a brain city to discover," Alex says. "When we go on holiday to another city, we visit every museum, cathedral, and landmark. But we rarely do it in our hometown because it's right there on our doorstep, and we think, 'Oh, I'll do it tomorrow'. This trail provides the perfect opportunity to actually go out, unleash your competitive side, and find out a little bit more about the place you call home.”
The trail, organised by LeedsBID in partnership with toy giant Hasbro, takes players to Trinity Leeds, Merrion Centre, Victoria Gate, Royal Armouries, the Corn Exchange and Wellington Place. Each stop is staffed by two hosts - complete with pun-filled names such as Trivia Newton-John and Quiz-Pine - who present the questions on interactive screens and hand out cheese wedges to successful players.
Organisers have gone well beyond simply placing question boards around the city. Alongside the quiz stations are displays featuring props, artefacts and lesser-known facts about Leeds, while familiar faces from across the city also make appearances throughout the experience.
The reason for spreading the stations across the city centre, Martin Dickson of LeedsBID says, is to encourage people to discover places they might otherwise walk past. "Every year we find a location that many people tell us they've never been to before. They still come into the city centre often, but they've never found the Corn Exchange, or they've never found the Lifting Tower at Wellington Place. So hopefully that part of the game teaches people new things about the city centre that they thought they knew and maybe places they'll then go back to again."
The game runs until August 30.