Unimportant Things That Really Bug Me #237

The Idea That "It's A Bit Before My Time" Is An Acceptable Explanation For A Quiz Show Contestant To Not Know The Answer To A Question About Pop Culture

Host: Who, in 1680, composed Canon In D?

Contestant: That would be Johann Pachebel.

Host: Correct. Who released the 1986 album 'The Queen Is Dead?'

Contestant: I'll have to pass. A bit before my time, I'm afraid, ha ha!

"A bit before my time." YOU JUST CORRECTLY ANSWERED A QUESTION ABOUT A PIECE OF MUSIC THAT'S OVER 300 YEARS OLD! THAT WAS PRETTY BEFORE YOUR TIME TOO, BUT YOU KNEW THAT!

Fair enough if they say 'pop music isn't my thing.' But 'before my time' isn't a valid reason for not knowing the answer about an 1986 pop album any more than it's a valid reason for not knowing about the Franco-Prussian War or the fall of the Berlin Wall. If 'before my time' was an acceptable answer for not knowing something, nobody would know about anything that occurred before their birth, or later. "Ooh, World War 2? Sorry, bit before my time."

The thing that really bugs me is that quiz show hosts tend to accept this as a reasonable excuse. The worst offender is Jeremy Paxman, who frequently sympathises with students on 'University Challenge' who get questions on pop culture from 'before their time', often excusing them entirely with a chuckle, like, yeah, why would you know who played the lead in 'Gilda'? And yet they'll have just answered a question about the invention of penicillin, or even more tellingly, Paxman will have just berated them for not knowing the answer to a question about penicillin. Like anything, if you don't know something, you just don't know it. It has nothing to do with when it happened relative to your birth.

I guess what really grinds my goat here is the barely concealed subtext that pop culture isn't important enough to learn about, that nobody is expected to have accumulated any knowledge about it outside of whatever they've happened to experience first-hand during their lifetime. It's snobbery, basically - you're expected to read re-prints of classical literature, but not watch re-runs of Dragnet. It's almost like the idea itself is ludicrous. As somebody who has dedicated much of his life to the study of pop culture, I know this idea is simply wrong. You can do it. It is perfectly possible to take modern history and 20th Century pop culture seriously, and there's no reason an intelligent 19 year old student on University Challenge should be any less knowledgeable about John Ford movies than they are about the paintings of Rembrandt.