Quizzy rascal

Atrophy amidst daytime trivia

Regular readers will know that I’ve been unemployed since just before Christmas¹. Irregular readers, you’re now up to speed. Well done, have a biscuit. I had always planned a few months off between jobs and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself thus far. I fill my days by writing, getting steadily better at the piano, pottering along the Thames towpath and keeping my small home spick and span. Retirement would look so good on me.

It takes iron will to stick to the script, though. I often hit my daily word count by lunchtime (2,000 words a day, same as Stephen King), so I’ll fix myself a superb sandwich², have a pootle, and find myself listless around 3pm. Can’t go to the pub, that would be a deliciously bad habit to pick up for someone who has to drop back into work life in the near future.

Video games appear to have passed me by; I wandered into CEX the other day and was completely unenthused by the what was on offer. How many Calls of Duty (Call of Duties? No, that sounds like a euphemism for pooping) does one gamer need? Is Grand Theft Auto 6 out yet? So I wander out of the store empty handed and go home. I tried experimenting with napping, but that seemed dreadfully indulgent, left me feeling groggy, and is something that toddlers do.

No, to kill the last couple of hours of my ‘working day’ (stop laughing at the back) I really only have one option: I put the telly on. TV is, after all, my oldest friend. I should probably tick off one of the glaring omissions on my watchlist (I have never seen The Sopranos, Band of Brothers or The Wire), but at that time of day something longform feels like too much of a commitment. I need frivolity, regular ad breaks, and to feel like the smartest man in the room³. So I succumb to the siren song of trivia.

Photo by Laurin Steffens on Unsplash

Everyone loves a quiz show, right? Shiny, high concept opportunities to prove your own wits from the safety of the sofa. Big money opportunities fronted by shark white grins. Intellectual gladiatorial combat. The Muse and I enjoy the occasional Saturday night in with The Wheel or The 1% Club - the latter of which I am incredibly good at after I’ve been out at the football all day. Fullers’⁴ finest is clearly some sort of cognitive performance enhancer. Get me MENSA on the blower. I love a primetime quiz so much that I can even tolerate Jeremy Clarkson droning on like a white noise machine on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

But the primetime shows are a whole separate conversation. We’re not talking about the heavy hitters when we sit down late-afternoon on a Wednesday. No Lee Mack here, just a bemused Ross Kemp looking like he’s trying not to murder his contestants when they fuck up his bridge (don’t worry, we’ll get to it). Daytime offerings are the Carabao Cup of TV trivia: half-cooked gimmicks, B team talent, a poorer prize pot and way fewer silky skills on show.

A brief mention for The Chase, which is the GOAT and there shall be no debate about that. Format nailed down, chances to win big, recognisable antagonists, Bradley ‘Bradders’ Walsh holding it all together with top tier patter. It has been running since 2009, has spawned an equally successful prime time spin off (Beat the Chasers) and I will appear on it one day, no matter how many times they try to ignore my applications. But that 5pm slot sort of rules it out of this conversation, because it’s not really daytime TV, is it?

Same with Pointless, BBC’s scrappy underdog pretender. Offering an often miserly prize pot and a rotating cast of foils to Alexander ‘Xander’ Armstrong’s patter, it may not be fit to lace The Chase’s boots, but there is an undeniable giddy thrill to be had when you nail a pointless answer. Like Blockbusters back in the day, these two old sparring partners exist in ease us gently from the daytime into the evening. They stand above the rest.

ITV are the undisputed kings of the afternoon quiz. Their current schedule has them punting out their daytime all stars in an unrelenting run from 3pm onwards: Deal or No Deal, Tipping Point, The Chase. They’re like Temu Hunger Games knock offs just with better suits, more neon, and worse hair.

Let’s address the elephant in the room. What is Deal or No Deal doing there? It has been allowed to nuzzle up to the other quiz shows for over twenty-five years, like Punch the Monkey trying to find his pack. But it’s not a game show really, is it? There’s zero talent needed. It’s a game of chance, a conniving fox in the trivia hen house. It’s like beating that spiv doing the three cup trick at the end of the pier, and saying you won the pub quiz.

Contestants come in, form bonds, become pals. All of them with weird, overtly complex plans and strategies, when ultimately they’re in the hands of the TV gods. “Darren, The Dazzler. You’ve been my ride or die since day one. You’ve always had a low blue. Let’s do box number twelve.”

The Dazzler opens box twelve and duly reveals £100k.

“It’s okay, mate, it’s fine. I don’t blame you. You’re still my ride or die.”

Don’t give me that shit, son - you’re never going to speak to him again.

The success of Deal or No Deal is a constant bafflement to me. There should be a national inquiry into how many people have been chewed up and spat out in the name of those red boxes.

However, the latest version fronted by Stephen Mulhern is a marked improvement on its previous iteration. Freed from his life of indentured servitude, living in Ant and Dec’s rec room, Mulhern is perfect for this format. He’s infinitely more tolerable than Noel Edmonds, that sinister Santa’s elf who used to be inexplicably everywhere. Don’t tell me you loved Noel’s House Party way back when, that shit was a cult and you know it.

Tipping Point might be the apex of ITV’s afternoon silliness. Somehow already old enough to be picking its GCSE options, Tipping Point is another one based on an end of the pier game (those coin shoving machines⁵), but they at least add in a trivia element so you can feel smug while slowly dying in front of the telly.

It’s a bit weird, though. Said trivia element wheels wildly from questions my six-year-old nephew could answer, to the sort of obscure titbit that causes panic in the eyes of seasoned Mastermind contestants.

Ben Shepherd is our benevolent overseer, and he delivers both in a style smoother than silk. He has a weird little tic on those difficult questions. When the contestant fails to deduce how many quarks are in a neutral baryon, he’ll reveal the correct answer like it was the easiest question ever asked.

“Oh, Colin!” Shep will beam. “There’s six quarks in a neutral baryon. Six, Colin!”⁶

Shepherd has also developed an annoying lexicon for his trivia empire. There’s ‘tempting zones’ and ‘teasing clusters’ hanging over the edge. When contestants drop their massive chip into the massive machine, if it doesn’t land perfectly Dear Leader Shep will christen it a ‘leaner’ or a ‘rider’. Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen pal, you’re fifty-one-years old⁷. Just ask the questions and dole out the cash, you’ll never be Bradders.

Cor, look at that teasing cluster in drop zone four. Credit: Liverpool Echo.

Another fun little secondary narrative on Tipping Point is that of the Bumbling Old Man Contestant. It seems to happen at least once a week. You’ll have Adil, a data scientist; Monica, a marine biologist; and Ron, a retired pigeon fancier. From the off, Ron will appear close to coma while his genius opponents seem to have eaten encyclopaedias for breakfast. And it often plays out exactly how you’d expect it to.

“No, Ron,” Shep grins as he prepares to coup de grace the unfortunate aged dunce in his kingdom. “Robbie Williams was in Take That, you old fool! It was Zayn who left One Direction first! Zayn, Ron!”

Occasionally though, The Ron will stun all involved by revealing himself to be the secret protégé of Ken Jennings⁸. He’ll rouse from his slumber and annihilate the younger smart Alecs alongside him, dazzling Great Coin Shover Godhead Shep in the process. It’s entirely deliberate, there’s no other explanation, and as such I am delaying my application to Tipping Point by twenty-five years, because I want to be The Ron.

If Ben Shepherd treats his contestants like a benevolent dictator, Ross Kemp on Bridge of Lies is more like a tinpot warlord. Of all the recognisable faces to choose from, some gonk at the BBC put the former snarling pug of Walford on a genteel afternoon quiz show. Ross Kemp has mixed it up with Mexican cartels, that does not parlay into relaxing afternoon telly for the sedentary.

Bridge of Lies sees a team of four trying to navigate Kemp’s bridge (and it is undoubtedly his, don’t you dare think otherwise) by distinguishing truth from lies. So the category will be Actors from the MCU, and the schmuck du jour will be presented with Mark Ruffalo and Mark Wahlberg. Step on Ruffalo, they’ll progress. Step on Wahlberg and, as satisfying as that might be, they lose a life. Lose three lives and they’re off the bridge. Kemp delivers this warning like he literally wants to cast them into the abyss.

Cross his bridge or die trying. Credit: The Guardian.

Bridge of Lies is great fun but, like Pointless, it suffers from the BBC’s chronic tight-itis. I can see the conversations. “No! We can justify tens of thousands of pounds to McIntyre’s Wheel on Saturday night primetime, but Ross Kemp cannot give big bucks to a surveyor from Hitchin on a weekday afternoon. The Daily Mail will shit a kidney if we do that. The budget for Bridge of Lies shall be buttons and that’s final. Now tell Ross to stop snarling at me, he’s drooling on the carpet.”

Aside from low stakes, Bridge of Lies is hamstrung by pacing issues. As well as losing lives, contestants have to contend with a time limit when negotiating Kemp’s crossing. The nature of TV trivia dictates it should get harder as it progresses, so by the time the contestant is down to their last few seconds of identifying actors from the MCU, they’re forced to choose between the guy who played Hydra goon #3, and a man who was once a cop in a non-Nolan Batman movie.

The naked fear in their face as the final seconds count down suggests that Ross Kemp is behind them with his hands around their throat, rather than trying to smile benignly from a platform twenty feet away. Bridge of Lies then completely shoots its own fox by negating all of this peril and allowing the team to rescue someone who’s been eliminated.

Listen, Susan, if Ross Kemp actually had hoyed your mate into the void, you couldn’t buy them back for two grand. Can we either fully commit to the bit, or pie it off altogether, please? I’m trying to work out which one out of Heidi Range and Jenny Frost was in Sugarbabes⁹.

Of course, we’re all aware that I’m a fucking know-it-all, right? And being unemployed as I am, I’ve got all the time in the world on my hands. I’d tear it up on daytime telly. So yes, I might’ve applied to one or two all of these shows. Except Tipping Point, because being The Ron is reserved for my dotage.

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Thanks for reading. My ego is vast yet fragile, so please show some love on your way out. Restack the piece to help people find it, or leave a comment if anything landed well with you. Or just bang the like button before you go, even that will help the algos find me. Coin in my Ko-Fi means I’ll love you forever. Cheers, hope to see you again soon.

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1. So what if I’m playing the Bob Cratchit sympathy card in the first sentence? Stop sneering and hit the Ko-Fi button, you heartless cynic.

2. As you know, I love sandwiches.

3. Not hard when you’re on your own, fathead. Shut up, inner voice.

4. Fullers is a brewery located in Chiswick. Although now owned by Asahi, the brewery, its pubs and its beers are synonymous with West London. Brentford’s former home, Griffin Park, was named after the first brewery on the site.

5. I googled to find out what these things are officially called. They’re just called coin pushers. Anti-climax or what?

6. Don’t try and science shame me on this one, okay? We all know I haven’t got a fucking clue. I still don’t understand how we have allowed the word ‘quark’ to be both a subatomic particle and a cheese.

7. He’s in good nick, though, isn’t he? I find myself breathing in when he’s onscreen.

8. Jennings won seventy-four consecutive episodes of Jeopardy! and pocketed $4.5m in the process.

9. It’s Heidi Range. Jenny Frost was in Atomic Kitten. And you thought I was just a hairy old punk.