Maybe 90 minutes of quiz shows is not your idea of a good time. Maybe it’s not anybody’s idea of a good time. As you settle down in front of BBC Two on a Monday night for the launch of its quiz night — Mastermind followed by Only Connect followed by University Challenge — you can’t help wondering what kind of weirdo would volunteer to watch this much quizzing, and feeling rather sorry for those sad saps. By the time the 90 minutes is over, you’re worried that you are just such a weirdo yourself.
Because quizzes are addictive, just like pornography and crisps. The ruthless rhythm of the questions, the insatiable human desire to be correct about everything, and above all, the music and sound effects combine to raise your heartbeat and your hopes for your own small self. Perhaps you might be cleverer than all the contestants, or maybe just get one question right.
All that stress is not a coincidence.
The grandaddy of them all is University Challenge. It started in 1962, died and was resurrected. And one of the teams was Queen’s University Belfast, who haven’t done so well in the competition previously, winning only once, we were tactfully informed, versus Liverpool University, who haven’t done so well either.
Amol Rajan, who took over as host from Jeremy Paxman last year, tried to get us excited by saying that this was the opening of a series which would contain 28 teams who had survived “our exacting application process”, about 3,000 questions and 37 matches.
But we didn’t care because we just wanted to see Queen’s University Belfast absolutely cream Liverpool. Luckily, we weren’t told until the very end that the QUB mascot was a potato, for which one of the contestants had knitted a scarf. If we’d known that at the start, we would have turned off in a temper.
Queen’s captain Daniel Rankin was an absolute star. QUB made Amol laugh. And then Rankin correctly identified The Real Slim Shady as having been released in the year 2000.
“Were you born in 2000?” asked Amol.
“No,” said Rankin.
It was pretty good.
And the thing was that Queen’s University Belfast did absolutely cream Liverpool, which had been pretty dependent on its two female contestants (QUB had one).The final score was Queen’s 240 to Liverpool 125. Amol said it was an amazing performance, and almost predicted a rosy future for the Queen’s team.
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The creator of Mastermind, Bill Wright, is said to have been partly inspired by his experience of being interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II. Certainly the opening minutes are absolutely terrifying. Threatening music, spooky lighting; the only programme with a similarly frightening introduction is Doctor Who.
In the opinion of many, there are professions that should be banned from entering Mastermind. The first of these is actuary, and Claire Reynolds is an actuary. The job of an actuary is to be safe and to calculate risk. Claire’s specialist subject was Dad’s Army, for feck’s sake. She knew that the title of the vicar’s bellringing newsletter, the publication of which was suspended during the war, was Ring-A-Ding Monthly. It’ is quite disturbing.
Also, teachers should be banned from entering. They cause enough suffering. But Nancy Braithwaite is a teacher, and her specialist subject was the life and work of Jane Austen. Jane Austen should be banned as well.
Claire Reynolds, Aaron Casanova, Nancy Braithwaite, Danny Lardner in Monday’s Mastermind. Photo via BBC
It was terrible to see Danny Lardner (a bakery assistant, specialist subject Shania Twain, a top guy) realise, in the general knowledge round, that he had lost. Of course, Nancy won. She gave a really boring winner’s interview at the end (the winner’s interview is such a bad idea). The relatively new presenter Clive Myrie said “I’ve started so I’ll finish” a couple of times, which was nice. He also said that Mastermind is “the steepest of quizzing mountains” which is both nonsense and shameless. But you can’t stop watching.
Only Connect is seriously weird. It’s the kind of programme you watch five minutes of before turning over to something intelligible. Its questions are categorised under hieroglyphs. Seriously.
And the hieroglyphs are hard to recognise. I thought the two reeds were knives, for example. There is a snake, and some other stuff. So you have the team captains saying things like “Twisted flax, please” and it’s all quite mental, in both senses of the word.
Victoria Coren Mitchell is a terrific anchor to this – laughing at herself and the programme while being impressively strict. I also like her because she is, following an observation first made by Susannah Constantine, the only woman with large breasts working in front of a television camera.
The teams are kind of weird too. The Midlanders were people from the British midlands who live in Leeds and the Al Frescans looked like they all drank at the same pub in some unspecified location. Here’s one of the connections that the Al Frescans succeeded in making: elephants; Mario in development; a rugby union player about to be tackled; white men.
The answer was: Can’t jump.
How can this be good television ? Yet it is.