Trivial pursuits

Jennifer Lang on CBC's Test the Nation. (Photo supplied)

If you were a dark-haired, meat-eating, coffee-drinking, Birkenstock-wearing man, you may have been pretty smug while watching CBC’s latest TV experiment, called Test the Nation.

That’s because, statistically speaking, dark-haired, meat-eating, coffee-drinking, Birkenstock-wearing men were scoring better than the rest of us.

It was Jennifer Lang’s job to crunch the data and find patterns as Test the Nation, a live, two-hour special, went to air back in January. The Dalhousie commerce grad tracked responses of in-studio participants divided into teams (for example, bloggers, taxi drivers and chefs) and Canadians taking part in the test online from home.

“We’re basically mining the data all night long so that we can come up with fun tidbits to tantalize our viewers, like when the black-haired men surpassed the red-haired women … things flip-flopped all night long.”

Every so often during the broadcast, host Brent Bambury would check in with Ms. Lang in a backroom crowded with people hovering over computer screens to ask which studio team was in the lead and how the folks at home were doing.

“It’s a lot of pressure for our whole team. We’re writing the crawls (script that gives results at the bottom of the TV screen), we’re comparing data, we’re talking to Brent,” says the 30-year-old Moncton native. “It’s a lot of fun but definitely tense.”

Test the Nation is a series of occasional specials airing on CBC-TV. The show kicked off last spring with an IQ test, followed by a show dubbed Watch Your Language in the fall, and Trivia a few months ago. 

The next show, with Wendy Mesley and Ron MacLean as hosts, tests sports trivia. Viewers can watch and play along on Sunday, May 25 at 8 p.m. Celebrity guests lined up for the show include Hockey Hall of Famer Paul Coffey, representing refs and umps; Debra Digiovanni, for the armchair athletes; Alan Thicke, the sportscasters leader; fashion designer Brian Bailey, leading the cheerleaders and mascots team; actress Victoria Pratt, with the Olympic medallists; and Sloan's Chris Murphy with "Team Extreme."

As the shows are being developed, Ms. Lang also tests the questions to make sure they’re neither too hard nor too easy.

But her work on Test the Nation is just one part of her job. As the manager of CBC’s research department, she’s doing audience research on the content CBC produces for television, radio and the web. For example, as CBC launched a slate of shows in January, Ms. Lang was tracking to see who was watching and if they liked what they saw. With new shows like MVP, Sophie and jPod, a lot was on the line for the public broadcaster.

While at Dalhousie plugging away at her commerce degree in marketing informatics and statistics, Ms. Lang wondered if she’d ever apply what she was learning “once in the real world.” Now it amazes her just how much she uses in her job everyday.

“It’s funny but I really am applying most of what I learned during my time at Dalhousie,” says Ms. Lang, who graduated in 2000. “I’m looking at numbers and interpreting them. It suits me to a T, because I’m very detail oriented.”

LINK: Test the Nation Sports, CBC-TV
TAKE A TEST: Test the Nation's Trivia. Good luck!