The Barking Dog quiz trap: BBC visits pub and sees questions

Huddled around their tables, locals flocked to The Barking Dog each week to take a pub quiz, but one thing was wrong.

The same team went on to win the prize of a £30 bar bill, leaving regulars scratching their heads and some stopping turning up in protest.

Then, a twist. Bosses at the pub in Urmston, Greater Manchester, said they received an anonymous tip-off and caught the team “cheating red-handed” when players were seen whispering into their smartwatches for answers.

They revealed the curious events in an Instagram post last week, and it quickly went viral, attracting the interest of people around the world.

Here in Barking Dog, on a damp, dark Wednesday night this week, BBC News came to witness the first edition of the quiz since the scandal emerged.

And the regulars have had a packed return, with 17 teams participating, although the almost Traitors-style story about alleged cheating looms large.

The suspect team, whose managers refuse to name, were excluded from the questionnaire but can still attend the pub; However, some regular customers say the furore has left them “too scared” to use their smartwatches.

One of the teams, made up of Grace, Beth, Olivia, Ellie and Jack, has been taking part in the quiz for about three years.

They say they are happy that the cheating team has finally been defeated, since other teams had stopped coming. “It’s kept people coming back and it’s nice to see familiar faces in the pub,” says Grace.

Olivia says the latest quiz has an electric atmosphere, while Beth says the “drama” caused by the alleged cheating saga has been “crazy”, with her teammate Ellie’s sister even talking about it in Australia.

They say they knew the cheating team had been up to no good for “years.”

“It was so obvious,” says Grace, adding that in the music round the team would know all the answers and who is featured on every track played in every genre, from ’90s Hip Hop to Rock n Roll.

“At first we thought they were incredibly smart,” he tells us.

However, she says it soon emerged that “they weren’t as intellectual as we thought they were.”

However, Jack is taking extra precautions tonight. “I didn’t wear my smartwatch because I didn’t want to finish,” he admits.

Try five questions from The Barking Dog’s pub quizzes from the last few weeks.

At another table, Nia, who was taking part in the quiz with her friends Callum and Anastasia, says the recent media attention on the local pub quiz has been “crazy”.

She also says she’s seen people “on their phones and smartphones” recently, but doesn’t know for sure if they were cheating.

Instead of feeling robbed of a cash prize when he found out about the scandal, Callum says he actually found it “quite funny”.

Nia adds, “We never do well enough to be in the top three to get mad enough.”

As well as attracting regulars, the antics have drawn new teams to the quiz, including John and Carole Kelly, who are taking part for the first time.

Carole says she and John are desperate “to find out who he is, like everyone else.”

She says they had a great night but they also don’t dare use their cell phones even to check the time.

“I don’t even take my phone out of my bag,” Carole confesses.

Rob Hardie, co-director of Barking Dog, says the cheating team often got answers “pretty much 100% correct, which no one really does, so it was a telltale sign that something was wrong.”

It says managers received an anonymous tip from a customer that the same team was still winning with near-perfect scores, prompting an investigation.

So how did the pub staff finally weed out the cheaters?

Bobby Bruen, assistant principal and test director, says he devised some questions for a musical round so that it would be highly unlikely that anyone would answer them all correctly.

He says Hardie then rang the team when he came outside and saw the players through a window looking at the answers on their smart watches, using the Shazam app to identify the songs.

Mr. Hardie let his mother, Lynda, and sister, Lydia, take the table where the cheating team usually sat.

Lydia says the exhibition has been “hilarious”, although her mother feels it is a “shame people resort to that at a local pub quiz”.

“This ruined the situation for everyone, all the regular customers stopped coming.”

Bruen says he has been interviewed by radio stations as far away as New Zealand and Canada about the “great whodunit.”

As the night draws to a close here at the pub, the losers of the last contest, a team called Short, Bark and Sides, receive a packet of Jammie Dodgers biscuits.

The £30 bar tab winners are appropriately named: Agatha Quiztie.