What a bunch. Mrs Brown’s crude quiz show is absolutely bananas!
You must have asked yourself, while absorbed in BBC1’ s addictive teatime quiz Pointless, who these people are. not the contestants — host Alexander Armstrong always cross-examines them about their jobs and sounds breathlessly envious, whatever they do for a living. ‘Polishing the telephones in a call centre,’ he gasps, ‘that must be fascinating!’
no, the faceless people that puzzle me are in the Pointless focus group, the ones who give each question a test-run.
‘We asked 100 people before the show,’ says Xander, before challenging players to find the answers that eluded everyone else.
Some of those focus groupees are truly clueless. Where did Xander discover them — on the moon? Last week, he asked them to name the river that flows through London. twenty of them didn’t know it was the thames.
Brendan o’Carroll tried to harness this supercharged stupidity for laughs on his new panel game, For Facts Sake (BBC1). he sent the cameras out to ask people why bananas are curved.
one woman suggested they were bent by the wind. Another said it was to make them easier for monkeys to hold. one chap got it right: they grow downwards but curl up towards the sun. All of them sounded as if they were reading their quips off a card, which is only to be expected.
Brendan, better known as the matriarch of Mrs Brown’s Boys, is the king of the scripted ad lib.
Every flub and stumble on his sitcom is carefully rehearsed. When an actor collapses with helpless laughter or the scenery falls over, as always happens, it’s no accident.
this quiz show is the same. It looks like chaos but Brendan, with his son Danny and actor Paddy houlihan (both regulars on Mrs Brown’s Boys) as team captains, is in complete control.
he plucks members from the studio audience to answer questions, but even their responses seem preplanned . . . as did the arm-wrestling match that settled the game.
there’s nothing very original about the format, either. It’s a string of improbable facts — you can walk on the surface of custard, for example. ‘We will take subjects that we all know something about,’ promised Brendan, ‘ and then amaze ourselves with some new facts that we didn’t know we never knew we didn’t know about in the first place.’
that’s no different from BBC2’s QI, except that Sandi toksvig’s show prides itself on its intellectual credentials while For Facts Sake is shamelessly crude.
Both use their initials as a logo: QI is a clever pun on IQ . . . and FFS isn’t.
Returning with two new judges and a dozen fresh competitors, Family Cooking Showdown (BBC2) tried to introduce us to about 100 people while making time for two foodie challenges.
the summaries were meaningless. one family were described as ‘all about creativity,’ another were ‘all about soul food’.
the drama was over-egged too: ‘ I honestly felt like my soul had left my body,’ gasped a woman who had just dropped a salad bowl.
her team-mate sobbed: ‘It’s too much stress, I can’t cope with such stress.’
Before the winners and losers were named, we sat through the usual long pauses, which don’t work if we barely know or care who the contestants are.
But the real problem with this format is that families don’t actually cook like that.
Cordon bleu presentation isn’t important on the kitchen table, not when you’ve got to get the kids to school and then beat the rush hour. this showdown is all a bit . . . Pointless.
RESCUE PARTY OF THE NIGHT: Trying to find her way around a maze on Old People’s Home For Four-Year-Olds (C4), Lavinia, 81, got well and truly lost. She was saved by Mason, four, and Ken, 87 . . . eventually. Lord knows how they ever got out again.