Happy birthday, Pointless — but please keep Richard in his place
Well, that was strange. like waking up on the wrong side of the bed, or wearing someone else’s spectacles, the 1,000th edition of Pointless (BBC1) felt spookily odd.
We heard the familiar theme music, a big band playing boogie-woogie, and then the presenter said: ‘Hello, I am Richard Osman.’
If you’ve never seen Pointless, it’s hard to convey how bizarre this was. Richard has been on the teatime quiz show since it began in 2009. Why shouldn’t he say ‘hello’?
To aficionados, though, it was as weird as walking through the front door to be greeted by the cat: ‘Hello, I’m Tibbles.’
To celebrate their milestone, Richard and his co-presenter Alexander Armstrong had swapped places. One thing was instantly apparent, though it had never struck me before — the set must have been designed to fit them, like a tailored suit.
At 6ft 7in, Richard was almost as tall as the scoreboard. And at his giant desk, Xander looked like a schoolboy in his dad’s office chair.
They followed the usual script, taking the rounds in the usual order and parroting the familiar phrases of the game. Pointless is like a church service, reliant on its rubric: the same words must be repeated every time or the whole business feels invalid.
Xander was taking no chances: he had turned Richard’s favourite (and long-winded) catchphrase into a jaunty jingle. ‘And by country,’ sang a pop choir, ‘I mean a sovereign state which is a member of the UN in its own right.’ Very catchy.
But even though they got all their lines in the right order, it didn’t really work. Of course, this was a one-off, a jape, but not one that any Pointless fan would be anxious to see repeated.
Richard is no gameshow host. He’s too schoolmasterly, too authoritative. Whatever he says, even just ‘hello’, there’s a note of reproof in his voice as though he’s mildly disappointed in you.
And for a man who has made so many TV shows, both in front of the camera and as a producer, he is oddly ill at ease when he’s the focus of attention. He was constantly glancing down, and rocking from foot to foot.
We’ve seen it too on his BBC2 quiz Two Tribes: centre stage is not his natural habitat. He operates best from the wings.
Xander, on the other hand, loves the spotlight. It’s his home. Immensely self-assured, with an easy smile and a real need to be liked, he can’t flourish on the sidelines.
This celebratory episode featured party-themed questions, with the £4,500 jackpot going to charity. Three of the teams were past champions, including a duo of hardcore quizzers who set a record by clocking up five perfect, ‘pointless’ answers in a row.
But the winners were Trevor and Simon, a pair of children’s presenters from the Nineties. They used to front a knockabout children’s show on Saturday mornings called Going live!.
We don’t see much of them on telly these days, and you might have wondered idly why they don’t try their hand at a gameshow. On this evidence, that’s not nearly as easy as it looks.
The contestants on Coach Trip: Road To Marbs (e4), a different kind of gameshow, would make terrible quizzers. One of them, a stylist called Dhillan, claimed he helped David Cameron achieve a younger look, though at the time he hadn’t realised the politician was Prime Minister — ‘I thought that was Barack Obama,’ he said.
Coach Trip has the most basic rules possible. Seven young couples are ferried from one holiday resort to the next for 30 days, ending up in Marbella. each day, they decide which of their fellow travellers they like least, and put it to a vote. Anyone who loses the vote twice is booted off the bus.
The conversation is moronic — on the first day, it was mostly spiteful whispers because one of their number had appeared on another reality show, Made In Chelsea.
This is television for people who find Big Brother too intellectually demanding. And it’s the answer to the question: ‘What happens if we just keep dumbing down?’
In its own way, it’s perfectly pointless.