Back to the hot seat once more
MASTERMIND BBC TWO, TONIGHT, 8PM
DESPITE the competition provided by the wild proliferation of quiz shows on TV, Mastermind remains the Big Daddy of them all.
On our screens since 1972, one urban legend has it that the creator of the show, Bill Wright, drew inspiration for the format from his own experiences as a POW during the war and the interrogations he endured at the hands of the Gestapo.
That may or may not be the case, and it certainly seems almost too good to be true.
But it’s still the most intimidating quiz show of all, even if it is no longer the most difficult and it’s certainly not the most lucrative – the winner walks away with nothing more than a plaque and the satisfaction of being crowned that year’s champion.
The key to the success of the show is that no matter how brilliant someone may be at their own specialist subject, there’s always the chance that they’ll fall on the general knowledge round, and it’s still a source of silent jubilation for the viewer to score more in that section than the contestants. The topics tonight seem unusually accessible, which is usually a sign that the questions will be fiendishly difficult.
Featuring specialised rounds on Muhammad Ali, Eva Peron and Tony Hancock, there is also a rather fortuitous piece of timing with the inclusion of Philip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials as a topic. That trilogy was pretty vast in scale so it’ll be a tough hurdle to leap, but with the publication yesterday of La Belle
Sauvage, Pullman’s long awaited return to the world of His Dark Materials, fans will be surely be eager to tune in and see how much they can remember.
And for any reader who is thinking about buying La
Belle Sauvage, go out now and grab it – I got a copy last week and finished the 500-plus pages in two days.
Is W1A (BBC2 NI, tonight, 10pm) just taking the Mickey at this stage?
The plots were always pretty flimsy, but that was part of the charm and the conversations were always ridiculously stilted, but that was part of the point.
This third season has had some decent moments as you would expect, but the treatment of some of the characters has gone beyond parody and entered the realms of sheer unbelievability.
The most obvious example of this can be found with Anna Rampton.
Played with glacial inscrutability by Sarah Parish, what was once a rude, virtually monosyllabic TV executive now merely seems to exist to mutter genuine gibberish.
It’s now as if her character either doesn’t or can’t actually speak English, and it has become predictable and intensely irritating rather than wryly amusing.