How Britain fell in love with the highbrow game show
Aclassicist, a ceramicist, an academic author and an art historian sit in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, answering questions about ancient Mesopotamia. Occasionally, they solve a fiendish riddle, clash over the attribution of a literary quote or exchange erudite witticisms. Welcome to The Quizeum (BBC Four, Wednesday). Presented by Griff Rhys Jones, each week this new brain-acher visits a different museum around Britain, highlighting their artefacts and putting experts to the test. Like QI meets Call My Bluff, it features mystery objects, treasure hunts and quick-fire rounds. It might be impenetrable at times and verge on smug at others, but it’s an enjoyable treat. It’s also the latest in a trend towards highbrow TV quiz shows. During the Noughties, game shows seemed to be dumbing down. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link asked general knowledge questions, sure, but they were more about pressure, ticktocking music, moody lighting and the cult of the presenter – chummy, chortling Chris Tarrant or Queen of Mean Anne Robinson. Then along came the glorified guessing games: huge Channel 4 teatime hit Deal or No Deal and ITV’s Red or Black? – a Simon Cowell-masterminded flop memorably described by this paper as “so devoid of intellect that it sucks nearby intelligence into its vortex”. Thankfully, those days are behind us. The BBC has become home to a burgeoning stable of quiz shows with higher intelligence quotients. Key to this resurgence, fittingly enough, is QI – the most perspicacious panel show around, a self-styled “non-boring encyclopedia” with burblingly verbose Stephen Fry presiding over proceedings so whip-smart that Alan Davies – a private school-educated graduate of the University of Kent – is considered the class dunce. Old warhorse University Challenge is one of BBC Two’s highest-rated shows. For many of us, answering one of pitbull Paxman’s question correctly per episode is a triumph. Answer several and you feel like an intellectual titan. It’s followed on a Monday night by Only Connect, Victoria Coren’s spotthe-link quiz which earned a promotion from BBC Four to BBC Two last year. It’s as scholarly as you might expect from a show named after an EM Forster epigraph and which uses ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to label questions. On radio, of course, Brain of Britain is still going strong. Its TV equivalent, Mastermind, remains equally studious – despite quizmaster John Humphrys’s typically grumpy claim this week that it’s just a memory test, rather than an intellectual challenge. Even daytime TV is getting in on the act, with Pointless being a particularly robust antidote to the usual flimsy fare. The appeal of tough TV quizzes is that sometimes, we want to be taxed. The lowest common denominator doesn’t always have to win. Difficult things can be fun. That competitive element, a touch of showing off on the sofa, doesn’t hurt either. There have been attempts that haven’t worked: see The Book Quiz, hosted by Kirsty Wark, and Julian Fellowes’s punctuation-based panel game Never Mind the Full Stops. But these are exceptions. Highbrow TV quizzing is a noble TV tradition that stretches back over half a century to the tweedy likes of Bamber Gascoigne, pianist Joseph Cooper on Face the Music, Frank Muir on Call My Bluff and dear old Robert Robinson on Ask the Family. Long may it continue. “Father and elder child only. Ah, would that it were, would that it were…” Michael Hogan