Proof that when it comes to mind games, it’s teenagers who triumph

The Family Brain Games HHHHI War On Plastic With Hugh And Anita HHHII

Dara O Briain knows why, if you can’t work the TV remote or set the recorder, the quickest solution is to find a teenager. ‘Different types of intelligence feature at different ages,’ he tells me, ‘and it’s actually quite worrying how quickly it tails off.’

Talking at his usual 1,000-words-a-minute when i interviewed him last month, he added that we oldies ought never ask how quickly age makes us stupid. ‘Finding out where you are on the graph, that is a thing you don’t want to have a conversation with a brain doctor about,’ he said earnestly.

There speaks a man who has just spent several days in a psychology lab, watching super-bright adolescent children and their parents tackling intelligence tests in The Family Brain Games (BBC2).

The challenges have been designed by scientists at imperial College London, to measure communication skills and the ability to co-operate as well as raw reasoning power.

This isn’t a conventional quiz. ‘i’m not asking them to name the capital of France,’ says Dara, who introduces each game and then analyses the results with neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow.

in most of the games, each member of the family has part of the information they all need.

The winners will be the ones who listen to each other and pool their knowledge.

For instance (and this is one of the easy ones), identify the missing letter: ar?Y, ?arE, Gra?, O?En.

Each word is visible to just one contestant and has several possible solutions. Only by combining their answers can the family find the correct answer: the letter ‘M’.

it’s an ingenious format, and one that quickly proved Dara’s theory about intellectual agility and age. in most rounds, the children would have been better off if Mum and Dad had simply put bags over their own heads and stayed schtum.

Valuable seconds were wasted as the teens explained to their parents for the third time why the answer was obvious.

in the end, though, the winning team had one unstoppable advantage — 14-year-old amelia, a girl so clever that in her spare time she’s composing a violin concerto about the last days of Henry Viii.

all the co- operation and collaboration in the world is no substitute for the single inspired i n d i v i d u a l . . . which i s why nothing useful was ever invented by a committee.

Whoever invented the wet wipe has a lot to answer for. Gone are the days of the threadbare flannel wrung out under a tap: now we use billions of perfumed, slightly damp, virtually indestructible and eye-wateringly expensive wipes. The reason they’re so tough, discovered anita rani in War On Plastic With Hugh And Anita (BBC1), is that unlike toilet paper they are not made of wood pulp. They’re not even made of cloth. Wet wipes are up to 84 per cent plastic. no wonder they don’t dissolve when flushed away.

Co-presenter Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall, who gets all the smelliest jobs, visited a waste processing plant in Bristol to be told the city fishes 32 tons of wipes from its sewers every week. The show is a mass of bits, like an overstuffed plastic bag.

One minute anita was marching into the offices of wet wipe manufacturers and getting no further than the reception desk, the next Hugh was washing his polyester fleece to count how many fibres it shed.

We were bombarded with shocking facts but not many solutions. as one poor bloke at a car boot sale said, when anita told him about the plastic content: ‘What am i supposed to do now? Can i not use wet wipes?’ Good question.