The Weakest Link
Season 1 BBC Brit (*120) 20:00 Game Show
TV’s most intimidating and strategic quiz show has a new master as notoriously grouchy comedian Romesh Ranganathan steps onto the floor for The Weakest Link. There are just 15 increasingly difficult trivia questions to answer, and Romesh will keep the celebrity contestants secondguessing themselves as he ladles out the scorn. Will the teams vote off their weakest players, or will the smartest ones get taken down first so that they aren’t a threat later?
“You have eight celebrities in each episode, and you don’t know how people are going to react to a competitive situation until they’re in it. There were a lot of surprises in terms of how upset certain people were with not doing as well as they thought they were going to do. I loved seeing how affronted some of them were at getting voted [off], it’s so good. The problem is, they’re on a TV show, so they don’t want the mask to slip,” says Romesh.
“It’s amazing to discover how when put under the pressure of The Weakest Link, people can’t identify very simple things in a photo,” he adds. “We had one contestant who was shown a photograph from the theatre musical Cats, and I asked them, ‘What musical is this?’ and they said ‘Lion King’. Now, I think Cats is famous for everybody in the musical being a cat, so all you have to do is look at that picture!”
He adds that “it’s the first thing I’ve been involved with that my wife (Leesa) has shown genuine excitement about. So it felt like a blessing and a curse, because it’s an honour to take on that show, but also you can’t help thinking, ‘I hope people like the way I do this.’”