Smarty-pants quizmaster who will make you feel like a nitwit
Too clever by half. So sharp he’ll cut himself. Nobody likes a smart alec. Richard osman must hear remarks like that all the time.
The famously brainy quizmaster — who created Pointless, the gameshow that made him a household name — is always top of the class on telly, whether he’s presenting Child Genius or guesting on shows such as QI.
He had a stab at inventing a traditional quiz format a couple of years ago with Two Tribes, where players swapped teams every round. It didn’t catch on: watching contestants zigzag about tended to bring on motion sickness.
House Of Games (BBC2) is another attempt to establish a teatime gameshow. This time Richard has fixed the player problem, with a single set of celebs who stay put all week. But he can’t control his compulsion to over- complicate everything else.
House of Games uses every type of trivia question ever devised, and then comes up with more. It’s an imagination eruption, a brainbox effervescence.
There are games based on codes, puns, picture clues, rhymes, guesswork, teamwork and musical memory.
Even the general knowledge tests are tortuous: in one round, players picked up their iPads to see a map of Britain, and had to point out the location of the UK’s first nuclear power station (Windscale, on the Cumbrian coast) and its highest mountain (Ben Nevis, in the Grampians).
Another game challenged players to find the rhyming connection between a former Foreign Secretary and a gooey yellow spread (Douglas Hurd, lemon curd).
As ever, Richard seems supremely superior to all the confusion. Every thoughtless mistake is mocked with gentle thoroughness and arched eyebrows.
Radio 1 DJ Clara Amfo had to estimate how many British babies were named Richard in 2015, and said: ‘60,000.’ With lethal logic and statistical analysis, the host explained that, if Clara was right, 20 per cent of all baby boys that year would be Richards.
It’s like watching a university don eviscerate a hapless first- year student. No surprise that Richard, as he occasionally likes to remind us, went to Cambridge.
But nobody likes to feel stupid — and this show leaves viewers floundering. No sooner have we worked out the rules to one game than Richard has strode on to the next. There’s no space to reflect. Questions come so fast that we barely have time to start thinking of answers.
Great quiz shows, such as Eggheads and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, convince the viewers that we are geniuses. This one leaves the viewer feeling dimmer than a 40-watt bulb.
An excess of intellect was the perennial flaw of Peep Show, the sitcom featuring David Mitchell and Robert Webb that let us eavesdrop on the characters’ inner thoughts.
The stars were supposed to be idiots. But Mitchell and Webb always look like escaped mutants from a brainiac breeding programme. Their new comedy Back (C4) addresses that problem by casting them in the same basic roles. Mitchell is Stephen, a nervous wreck tortured by indecision. Webb is Andrew, a vain, shallow confidence trickster.
Peep Show fans will need no introductions.
But there’s more of a plot here. Andrew turns up uninvited at the funeral for Stephen’s dad, and claims he was one of the dozens of children fostered by the family. By the end of the wake, he has smarmed his way into their home. It’s a smart idea — undermined by endless sex jokes and repetitive swearing.
That’s not so clever.