On the Victoria Embankment in central London, there is a bench overlooking the River Thames. Jay Flynn, the 42-year-old quizmaster who ran online pub quizzes for hundreds of thousands of people during lockdown, knows it well. It’s where he slept rough for the best part of the two years on the streets of the capital.
“I wasn’t an alcoholic, I wasn’t a drug addict. I was just the pure definition of a homeless person, which is a person without a home,” he says. “My mental health struggles were what led me to that point. I’d gone through a relationship breakdown, I’d fallen out with all of my family and, in my head, I was becoming a burden on my friends. I felt my only option was to end my life – or choose to live on the streets.”
He spent two years living on the streets after becoming estranged from his family following a series of events that began with the sudden death of his grandfather when Flynn was still a teenager. He had helped to raise him in the absence of his dad. Another difficult moment came later when he chose to open up to his mother about the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of a family friend when he had been nine years old. She told him he was lying.
Over the course of the two years he spent homeless in his 20s, he often considered suicide. Each time he did so, he would remind himself that he had no form of ID on him and no criminal record, which meant it would not be easy for the police to identify him. He would force himself to think about the emotional impact his death would have on the people who found his body. “That’s what stopped me; that empathy with my fellow humans.”
Flynn is speaking to me today from Tenerife, where he is on holiday with his wife, Sarah, and seven-year-old son, Jack. “I’m sitting here on a balcony,” he says, looking over the edge of it as he loses himself in the darkest moments of his life. “And if I went over there now – which I’m not thinking about doing – but if I did, who’s got to deal with the aftermath? It’s not fair on those people, to suffer that, for my personal decision.”
It was this sense of empathy that would inspire him to create Jay’s Virtual Pub Quiz, more than a decade later, at the beginning of the pandemic. “It allowed me to understand what people were going through, isolated on their own during lockdown,” he says. “I was there for them, because I’ve been through it. I know what loneliness is like.”
Flynn initially created the quiz merely to replace his own local Thursday night pub quiz, after hearing that all the pubs and restaurants were about to be shut down by the government. “When Boris announced the pubs were going to be closed, I instantly went: ‘Hang on a minute, where’s my Thursday night gone?’”
At that point, few of the people in Flynn’s life knew about his past. But they did know how much he loved pub quizzes. For years, he’d run various pubs in Darwen in Lancashire, hosting many quizzes in the process, before getting a job as a car salesman shortly before the pandemic began. Getting together with his friends to quiz was the key social outing of his week and he knew a whole community of pub-quiz teams out there would be feeling equally bereft.
“We’re a very competitive nation – quizzing is up there with other great British institutions like fish and chips,” he says. The camaraderie of the pub quiz is like an addictive drug to loyal players. “Most quiz nights, it will generally be the same group of people going head-to-head every week.”
That Saturday, he wrote a message on Facebook, suggesting an online pub quiz on the following Thursday night. He confined the post to friends only and forgot about it. But on Monday morning, he received a message from a stranger, enquiring about the quiz – and realised 700 people were planning to turn up. Somehow, the post had gone out publicly.
By the time lockdown was imposed that evening, thousands of people had declared they were coming to Flynn’s quiz. The following day, the media got wind of the story about the “accidental quizmaster”, and that figure exceeded 100,000. By Thursday, Flynn says, about 200,000 people in teams had turned up to play.
Afterwards, participants who were isolating alone wrote to him, thanking him for giving them something to look forward to. “If you had to write a guide to surviving a lockdown, I don’t think doing an online quiz would have been high on anyone’s list,” he says. “But people loved the idea. I gave them a reason to not be on their own.”
Flynn remembered finding an old radio when he was homeless on which he could listen to his favourite DJ, Chris Moyles. “Chris wasn’t talking to seven million people. He was just talking to me. And I think, from the responses I got, people felt that, too – that I was just talking to them.” He thinks the fact that he wasn’t a celebrity and his quiz wasn’t very slick helped people who were struggling with the new normal of lockdown to connect with him. “I was just a normal person in their living room. And for an hour, they could forget about what was going on in the world.”
He decided to carry on hosting free pub quizzes twice a week throughout the pandemic, while fundraising for charities. “I thought: ‘I’ve got a platform here that I could use to do so much good.’ It became a community. It was like: the pub came online for a couple of hours a week.”
Lockdown passed in a blur. Juggling creating the quizzes with looking after his two-year-old son, while Sarah, an NHS administrator, was at work was no mean feat. “I didn’t really stop,” he says.
The charities connected him with celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Gary Barlow who made guest appearances to support his fundraising efforts. At one point, Sarah opened the door to find him on a pre-quiz Zoom call with Rick Astley. “She walked in and said: ‘That’s Rick Astley – you’re talking to Rick Astley!’” he recalls. He tried to play it cool, but she found it too surreal and walked straight out again.
Like the 300,000 other workers who had started new jobs in March 2020, he discovered in April that he didn’t qualify for the government’s furlough scheme. But luckily his viewers also started donating enough money to him via the crowdfunding platform Patreon for him to be able to get by and carry on quizzing.
This led to some negative comments. “People said I had dishonest intentions and that I wasn’t to be trusted, which really hurt, because I was trying to do the best I could in the situation I was in,” he says.
Despite raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity, he began to think about giving up the quiz. He had never begged for money when he was homeless and he didn’t like the feeling he was doing so now. “I’d walk around London looking for loose change or bits of food, but even though I was really low and had no self-esteem, I didn’t do anything illegal. I didn’t sit on a street corner begging, I didn’t go around stealing food from shops.”
Luckily, he says, a packet of custard cream biscuits cost just 20p, so he told himself even a few discarded pennies were worth collecting. “For almost two years, I probably lived off custard creams. They are still my favourite biscuit today.”
He was emaciated when a worker from the homelessness charity, the Connection at St Martin’s, found him sleeping on his bench on Victoria Embankment and helped him turn his life around. When the charity first approached him, he had barely spoken to anyone for two years. “Talking to people for the first time was very tricky,” he tells me, struggling even now to describe how isolated he felt. “Homeless people are perceived as drug takers, thieves and beggars. Very few people in the world view homeless people as humans.”
After six months of support, he was able to move into sheltered accommodation and get a job at a supermarket. It was remembering the life-changing impact the charity had on him – and how connecting with people at the charity had helped him to reconnect with the world – that gave him a renewed sense of purpose about his quizzes during lockdown. “It was like a lightbulb moment: ‘I’m still here so I can make a difference to people in their darkest moments.’ And I needed to continue to make that difference.”
He decided to open up about his past to his fellow quizzers and challenge people’s perceptions about him while simultaneously starting to raise money for the Connection. To his surprise, and great relief, his players didn’t judge him negatively. “It made them respect me more.”
Since lockdown ended, Flynn has carried on hosting quizzes twice a week online and once a week on BBC Radio 2. To date, he has raised £1.4m for charity and received numerous accolades for his efforts, including an MBE and the Point of Light volunteering award.
His memoir, The Quizmaster, went straight into the bestseller lists when it was published in May and now, on that bench in Embankment, there is a plaque that honours him, funded by the people who played his quiz during the pandemic. “Number 3, Riverside View,” it reads. “This bench was home to Jay Flynn from Jay’s Virtual Pub Quiz. He proves you are not alone and there is always hope.”
He and Sarah still live in Darwen, in the same house, and he goes to a local pub quiz every Wednesday night with friends. He has also reconciled with his mother, who is “dead proud” of him and his achievements. “I’ve got a very good relationship with her now. We’re probably stronger than we ever have been.”
Reflecting now on what his experiences during the pandemic taught him, he says: “For me, I think it’s that we all need to keep an eye out for each other, we all need to find that sense of community.” He looks out over the balcony in sunny Tenerife, and tells me he believes in the plaque his players wrote. “People fall into dark places when they feel there is no hope, but what I have learned is that there is always someone, somewhere, that can pull you out of the darkness.”
The Quizmaster by Jay Flynn (Hodder & Stoughton, £22) is out now. Buy a copy for £19.36 at guardianbookshop.com.
For more information about the Connection at St Martin’s, go to connection-at-stmartins.org.uk
If these issues affect you, contact Samaritans on 116 123
