Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Q: WHO LOVES A TV QUIZ? A: WE ALL DO!
To celebrate Britain’s much-loved game shows we put five top quiz masters to the test
Trust the man from Countdown to throw in some unexpected vocabulary. Traditionally, says Nick Hewer, host of the Channel 4 show, you had to be a certain sort of person to be a quiz show host. ‘I think there was a certain gooeyness to hosts in the old days,’ he muses. ‘It was all very smiley and saccharine when it was based on the American approach, and I don’t think that’s true now with British quiz shows. I think we’re tougher than the American ones.’
His fellow host John Humphrys, of BBC2’s Mastermind, is certainly not a man anyone has ever described as gooey. Indeed, dare we suggest that he’s more grumpy than gooey? Certainly, when we bring together a few familiar faces to celebrate the magic of the quiz show – and lob them a fun little general knowledge quiz to test them out (see panel, below right) – John is the only one to point-blank refuse to take part. Spoilsport!
He reveals that when he was first contacted and asked if he wanted to ‘do’ Mastermind, he assumed he was wanted as a contestant – and couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘I emailed back, “Are you kidding? No way!” Then I got a call from someone high up at the Beeb saying, ‘I hear you’re not interested in chairing Mastermind?’ John then fell over himself to grab the job. ‘I said, “Of course I’d love to chair Mastermind. It’s sitting in the black chair that scares me!”’
So what characteristics does he think the job requires? ‘I don’t think you’ve got much choice on Mastermind – you have to be brusque. You can’t allow yourself to indulge in any niceties,’ he says, brusquely.
That nice Ben Shephard, host of Tipping Point on ITV, says it’s different for him. On his show, contestants who answer questions correctly gain counters that they use on an arcadestyle coin-pushing machine to try to win money. He says the job requires him to be ‘warm, enthusiastic and energetic’ and also to have a poker face.
Nick Knowles (BBC1’s Who Dares Wins) thinks it’s the job of the quiz show host to ‘ringmaster the whole experience’, but warns that if you try too hard you’ll come a cropper. ‘A long time ago I did six episodes of a daytime quiz show. It was a short run but it was rubbish and I realised that the reason it was rubbish was because I was trying to be a quiz show host, and I think a lot of people do that. To a certain extent you have to go slightly larger than life, but you don’t want to go all Monty Python.’
Do you have to be a Brain of Britain yourself, though? Judith Keppel – one of the panel of quiz show champions who compete with the contestants trying to win money on Eggheads on BBC2, and famously the first person (and only woman) to win £1 million on ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? – is perhaps too modest to say yes to this one. But she does believe that the true skill of the quiz show host lies in the ability to be entertaining. ‘A host should bring jokes, really. Lightheartedness and jokes. There are professional quizzers who do events such as the Quiz Olympiad or quizzing Grands Prix – but that’s like sitting an exam. The key to a TV quiz is that people have to be entertained.’
Why is the quiz show such an enduring part of our televisual history, though? Knowles has an intriguing answer. ‘Because they’re massively cost-effective. You can make a lot of them very quickly, so in terms of Saturday-night entertainment, they’re really good value. And when you get it right, there’s an audience for it.’ We certainly do seem to be a nation of quiz show addicts – screaming answers at the telly is practically a national sport.
The format has come a long way since the first ever TV game show, a programme called Spelling Bee aired by the BBC in 1938. Competing teams simply had to try to spell challenging words, with correct answers earning points, wrong answers getting a gong sound.
The genre really took hold in the USA, and quiz shows were rather snottily regarded in the UK as lowbrow until the arrival of commercial TV in 1955. Take Your Pick, on ITV,
‘I have to be brusque on Mastermind. No niceties’ JOHN HUMPHRYS
was the first game show to offer cash prizes, and Double Your Money – with Hughie Green at the helm – was the first to offer a £1,000 prize. A huge debate followed about whether cash prizes would warp the nation’s morals. The subject was even debated in Parliament in 1959, with Labour peer Lord Taylor remarking, ‘Occasionally ITV gives us something good, but for the most part it is pathetic and puerile. Its give-away quiz programmes are socially unhealthy.’
By the 60s, though, more cerebral shows such as University Challenge, with its often obscure questions across an incredible range of academic subjects, were part of the mix. And by 1972 Mastermind had arrived, with its famous black chair that contestants would sit in to answer questions on their specialist subject, as well as general knowledge teasers.
Today, the debate about which is the hardest quiz show on television is still raging. What’s hilarious about the quiz show hosts gathered here is how each one is convinced that theirs is the most difficult. ‘I’m a bit of a snob about Mastermind, which is a bit more cerebral and BBC2-ish,’ crows John Humphrys.
He swats away questions about whether the show has been dumbed down, saying that every time someone (‘usually a politician, I think the last one was Harriet Harman’) suggests that, he writes to them and invites them on. Funnily enough, no one has yet accepted his challenge.
Countdown, with its teasers involving numbers and letters, takes the longevity crown, Nick Hewer notes, at least in terms of number of episodes broadcast, even though Mastermind
predates it. It also has the best prize, he says – not quite as convincingly, given that the winners on Who Dares Wins can leave with £100,000. ‘I’m very proud of Countdown, which was awarded a Guinness World Record for most series broadcast for a TV game show, and it’s at the more cerebral end of the quiz show spectrum – I mean, the winning contestant gets a teapot! It’s brilliant. There’s no monetary gain, and I think that’s good.’
What does unite our quiz show stalwarts here is that they all – except perhaps for Judith Keppel, whose quiz show credentials are beyond compare – say they’re personally a bit lacking. ‘ Everyone thinks I’m going to be brilliant in a pub quiz team but, much to my frus-
tration, I can never retain the information,’ says Ben Shephard. ‘I will always confuse kings and queens, the Bronte sisters and various characters from Dickens.’
Humphrys also says he’s bad at retaining information. ‘You’d think after all these years [hosting the show as well as being a journalist and broadcaster] that winning Mastermind would be a cinch, but I’m afraid I’d probably only be able to correctly answer one or two questions in the general knowledge round. My excuse? I’ve got a bloody awful memory!’
And what would he choose as his specialist subject? ‘Do you know how many times I’ve been asked that question,’ he harrumphs. ‘I’m not being rude, but about half a million times.’ When pressed, he comes up with an answer, though. His specialist subject would be… John Humphrys.
What this lot do have is a vast bank of hilarious anecdotes about events that have happened on set, mostly involving contestants who seem to have temporarily lost their marbles. Nick Hewer recalls being the butt of ridicule himself. ‘In one of the first Countdown shows I hosted I spotted an eight-letter word – conifers – in the random collection of letters given to contestants, and I was so excited I shouted it out. Our adjudicator Susie Dent was horrified. We had to film it again.’
Nick Knowles’s favourite moments include the time Strictly’s Bruno Tonioli – excitable at the best of times – won £50,000 for his chosen charity on a celebrity edition of Who Dares Wins. ‘I thought he was going to explode out of the building,’ he says. ‘That was hilarious.’
So too was the episode featuring a couple of giggling girls, who were playing against two sports-obsessed boys. The format of Who Dares Wins involves teams predicting how many correct answers they can give on a certain subject, with the highest bidder getting the chance to say their answers and move closer to winning prize money. In this case the subject was Formula One champions.
‘The girls said they could name 15, and the boys – who thought the girls would only know two – said let them have a go,’ Nick recalls. ‘They thought it would be hilarious. Well, it was – but only because one of the girls proceeded to name not only 15 world champi-
ons, but she could probably have done another ten. She said she’d watched Formula One with her dad since she was five years old. In my earpiece, I could hear all the women in the production gallery shouting, “go ON!”’
Judith’s favourite moments are those when, as a resident expert on Eggheads, she’s beaten someone at their own game. ‘I beat a rocket scientist at science, and there was a very funny edition of Celebrity Eggheads when I beat the athlete Iwan Thomas. He took me on at sport and I won and he was annoyed. He carried a kind of grudge about it and came back on another Celebrity Eggheads – I beat him again and his reaction was so funny, we all laughed like mad.’
Some of the most entertaining moments, of course, come from the wrong answers rather than the right
ones – and our hosts have a selection of corkers. One of Ben’s comes courtesy of singer Alesha Dixon on a live National Lottery awards show celebrity quiz he was presenting. ‘The question was: What’s a mythical bird that is also the capital of Arizona? I had to hurry her up, time was running out, and she replied, “Magpie”. It was one of those magical moments when the contestant is under so much pressure they say the first thing that comes into their head. Because we were live, we just had to keep going.’
Two more favourites from Ben are the answers from contestants to:
What’s traditionally grown in paddy fields? ‘Potatoes’, and, Swap is an anagram of which winged stinging insect? ‘Bee’. ‘It’s hard to keep a straight face sometimes, but the contestants know I’m really on their side,’ he says. ‘I’m not Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. And if they do say something bonkers I can laugh at them without appearing cruel.’ John Humphrys still laughs at the celebrity edition of Mastermind on which Paul Bradley, who played Nigel Bates in EastEnders, was asked what breakfast cereal he associated with prison. The answer, of course is porridge, but what did he say? Cheerios.
Nick Knowles says there’s a real distinction between how British and American quiz show contestants react. ‘Being British, we don’t tend to hug each other very much. We don’t tend to run around. In America everyone runs around like a headless chicken, and screams and shouts, and waves their knickers in the air, and leaves their dignity at home. But the Brits just aren’t that way inclined.’
Judith agrees. ‘When I won Millionaire I wasn’t shrieking or crying because I was so nervous and rather numb actually. It just was incredibly exciting, it really was.’
Do contestants ever attempt to hug John Humphrys? Of course they don’t. ‘The truth is that, as soon as most of them take their seat, you can see them asking themselves, “Why the bloody hell did I come on this show with this miserable old sod behind the desk?”’ he says. ‘And they’re usually so relieved to get through the programme, the only emotion they feel is relief.’
John says he thinks he’ll be at the helm of Mastermind for the foreseeable future (‘I’ll probably pack it in when I’m 110,’ he says), and has a wonderful idea for the ultimate celebrity edition – one that features all the political party leaders. ‘But there’s probably a stronger chance of Mrs May making Mr Corbyn her Chancellor,’ he admits, pointing out that most politicians regret coming on his show. Take Tottenham MP David Lammy, who scored only five in the general knowledge round. ‘I don’t think he’s stupid. He’s obviously not, but when you go on the show something happens to the brain.’
Back to Judith Keppel. Are there questions that stump even her? ‘We’ve had one or two incredibly difficult ones. One was: Who invented the collapsible opera hat? Another: What kind of creature is a sarcastic fringehead – fish, monkey or bird?’*
Thank goodness her million wasn’t depending on one of those. Countdown, weekdays, 2.10pm, Channel 4; Tipping Point, Monday, 4pm, ITV. If you’d like to appear on the next series of Mastermind, visit bbc.co.uk/showsandtours to apply.
‘It’s hard to keep a straight face sometimes’ BEN SHEPHARD ‘We don’t run around shouting like in the US’ NICK KNOWLES