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As an English Literature student, I spend a lot of time procrastinating, and much of said procrastination involves sitting in front of my TV. While I love Deal or No Deal as much as the next girl, sometimes you want something a bit different. Something that’s got a few more brains and a lot less Noel Edmonds. I like to be able to kid myself that, while I might not be studying for my degree, I am educating myself in some way, which is why I’m more thankful than usual to the BBC at the moment - and, as a Doctor Who nerd, my level of appreciation is generally pretty high. On several BBC channels at the moment, there are a number of intelligent, geeky and just plain odd quizzes for you to sink your teeth into, and this is my guide to the best of them.
The seemingly endless loop of this programme is oddly comforting: disaster and tragedy may strike, but turn BBC2 on at 6pm on a weekday, and Eggheads will be there, or that’s what it feels like, anyway. The premise simple: 5 amateur quizzers take on 5 of the country’s biggest trivia nerds. The questions vary from the insultingly easy to the ludicrously difficult, but I mostly watch for those joyous moments that the smug expressions are wiped off the Eggheads’ faces: I’m personally convinced that behind Daphne’s sweet old-lady smile lies a heart of pure evil.
Older than even Eggheads, University Challenge has been around forever. Airing on BBC2 at 8pm on Monday evenings, Jeremy Paxman’s distinctive presenting style is a huge part of the programme’s appeal: often he’s like an exasperated professor, or at other times he’s more of an impatient teacher dealing with clueless children, and, just often enough, he’s suitably amazed at some of the more impressive contestants. This is a tough quiz for people with remarkable intelligence and knowledge bases that expects its audience to do some work – the other big draw for University Challenge is those rare but wonderful moments that I actually get a question right.
And straight after University Challenge, you can turn over to BBC4 for one of my absolute favourite quiz shows, Only Connect. Like the BBC2 programme, it’s fiendishly difficult, and offers that same sense of satisfaction when you get a question right. In varying forms, the point of this programme is to find the link between ostensibly unrelated clues. The format has only changed in one way in four series: the questions are now denoted by Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than Greek letters. Presented in indomitable style by Victoria Coren, this very British quiz requires both a broad range of trivia knowledge and an ability to think laterally.
I love Pointless more than is entirely rational or completely explicable. It’s a bit like Family Fortunes in reverse: one hundred people have been given one hundred seconds to name as many things as possible in one particular category; the contestants simply have to guess the answers they think the fewest of those one hundred people will have known. For a geek like my who prides herself on her bizarre trivia knowledge, it’s a perfect concept. But what makes Pointless so special are the attempts at humour of their resident nerd, Richard Osman, and his awkward chemistry with presenter Alexander Armstrong. As Malcolm Tucker so beautifully said, “That’s the banter!”
Once more presided over by national treasure Stephen Fry, with national treasure in the making Alan Davies at his side, the programme that rewards ingenuity and obscurity is back on our screens tonight at 8.30pm on BBC1. Now that we’ve worked our way through the alphabet down to the letter ‘H’, the QI elves will have to work harder than ever to bait the guests into making the claxons blare. This series promises many delights, including a special hocus-pocus themed episode with Harry Potter himself. No more do we have to feed our addiction on much-loved repeats and guessing the series by Stephen Fry’s weight. QI is back, and not a moment too soon.
Marvellous, this reads like crystal meth to me.
Exception goes to the televisual bile that is 'Eggheads'. "What's that? Five questions per episode? You have to be kidding , we haven't possibly got that sort of time! If we had that many questions where would we put all of the inane tripe?!"
Anyone that's a fan of 'Pointless' deserves to live their lives on www.sporcle.com
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