"This week, I 'ave been mostly
presenting a muggle gameshow."
I recently learned that Only Connect teammate Hywel Carver had cheated on me with another man. I say man, I mean quiz show. But it was a connections-based quiz show and so I still felt some betrayal. The Link (weekdays at 2.15pm on BBC 1) is based on the board game Linkee and pits three pairs of contestants against each other as they try to answer questions, spot connections, and maybe take home literally hundreds of pounds. Mark Williams, familiar to you from The Fast Show or Harry Potter (but probably not both), is on hosting duties: will he be putting the 'win' in Wingardium Leviosa? Or will he be getting his coat?
Round one: Cut the rope(s)
The first round sees six money amounts held aloft by at least one (£125) and at most six (£2,000) 'links' (geddit?). To bank the cash contestants need to cut those links,which they do by answering questions and spotting what 'links' (still geddit?)
A round one question with all
the links waiting to be cut.
the answers. Questions come in groups of (up to) four, and buzzing in first with the correct answer gives the pair the opportunity to think out loud (and some of them really do) as they try and guess the connection. Work it out when only one answer has been revealed and you can cut four links, if you've seen all of them you'll just get to take out one. Cutting the last link on a money amount puts it in a team's bank. Whoever has the least money at the end of the round is eliminated from the show.
Round two: Do you feel linky, punk?
After all that effort getting the money down some rascal has strung it back up! This time the teams' respective kitties are dangling by seven threads and again they need to spot connections to cut them. The first pair to cut all seven take themselves - and their cash - through to the final.
No questions this time, except for "Who, what, or where am I?". The team is asked how many links they'd like to try and cut and are given the corresponding number of clues. Get it right and the jackpot round is a little closer, get it wrong and the remaining clues are thrown over to the opposition who can steal a single bonus cut. This round is less about 'connections' and more about clues to a specific answer - think the final round of Going for Gold - so it has a fairly distinct feel from the first.
The final: Link ladder
The final round in action.
Those six cash amounts from round one are back in the form of a fairly standard money ladder, with the £2,000 topped up by whatever the winning team brought through with them from round two. They're given 60 seconds to solve six 'super links': a set of up to 10 related clues which reveal themselves about 1.5 seconds at a time. The pair take it in turns, buzzing in as soon as they think they know the connection. Get it right and they move up the ladder, get it wrong and they'll face a new set having wasted some precious seconds. After each correct answer they're given the option to take the money and run; if they run out of time they lose everything.
The verdict: Linked in
On balance I think The Link has legs. The biggest mistake probably comes in the structure of round one where they've tried to give the illusion of strategy when really there is (virtually) none. While this isn't the most disastrous of quiz show crimes, it does start to grate when for the fifth or sixth time in a show you're subjected to contestants debating out loud which links to cut when it simply doesn't matter. We're consequently subjected to a relatively large number of questions that are irrelevant; if there aren't enough links on offer to bank some money then you may as well give your buzzer finger a rest. A token bit of cash for every correct answer or perhaps the option to 'bank' links to spend later could ameliorate at least some of this.
The show features some nice visual effects.
Here money is 'whooshing' into Hywel's bank.
Similarly, the first round feels rather bloated and slow, whereas the second feels rather threadbare and, well, slow. For instance, after banking most of the money in round one on his show, our board gaming friend Hywel was knocked out in round two after facing just three questions - he was understandably a touch frustrated. A related concern is the variation in question difficulty: sometimes the first clue will at least uniquely define the answer (you just might not know it), at others you've no hope. When you're asking people to decide how many clues they're going to see in advance it's pretty tough if the first clue could be as meagre as "I'm from Brooklyn, New York".
Despite these problems there are still enough positives to keep me watching for a few more episodes. It won't surprise many to learn I'm quite a fan of connection quizzes, and round one in particular presents a fairly novel take on it. The fact that you might know the connection thanks to others' answers means you can start trying to anticipate the questions introducing a fun element of metagame. I was pleased to see a couple of contestants demonstrate this in only the second episode of the series so I'm hopeful it will be a semi-regular feature. The final round is also perfectly competent, and seems fairly winnable (albeit with a bit of nerve). Mark Williams, meanwhile, though not entirely comfortable in a quiz host role, does at least seem to be having fun.
I've seen plenty of people comment that this is "Only Connect for idiots" (and that's one of the kinder remarks), and while I appreciate it's an obvious comparison to draw, I'm not sure it's a particularly fair one. It has good playalongability and not (too) much chatter, and while the question difficulty (and quality) may seem a touch low it's fairly standard for a lightweight daytime quiz. Not a must-see by any stretch, but definitely one for an iPlayer rainy day.
It was ubiquitous team-mate and (almost) everyone's favourite quiz show team captain Jamie 'UCL Karran' Karran's birthday this week, and shockingly we didn't do a pub quiz to celebrate. (I did, however, write a quiz for his birthday, which will hopefully be appearing on these pages in the near future.) Fortunately, previous comrade-in-quiz and blog contributor The Programmer has put together a set of ones that got away from his latest endeavours back in blighty. What's more, the team features Hywel 'the normal one' Carver from our Only Connect team, so you can still feel super-smug if you get any right.
Your targets this week:
The doctor and I took this set on ourselves and managed a satisfying 4/8, so that's your top target this week.
1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat the team! 5+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us!
The attendees
1) The programmer
2) The saxophonist
3) The misandrist
4) The publisher
The ones that got away
1) What song wakes Bill Murray up every morning in Groundhog Day? (Only the title required.)
2) Name the song and artist from the lyrics: "Strike the match, play it loud, giving love to the world / We'll be raising our hands, shining up to the sky / Cause we got the fire, fire, fire. Yeah, we got the fire fire fire."
3) By what nickname were aubergines known when they were first brought to Europe?
4) In what decade did Alexander Graham Bell make the first phone call?
5) Literally speaking, what does "croissant" mean?
6) In the US Postal System, what does ZIP stand for?
7) What is the last book of the Old Testament?
8) True or false: a person will shed about 10 pounds of skin through their life.
The answers
1) I Got You Babe (by Sonny and Cher)
2) Burn by Ellie Goulding
3) Mad apples
4) 1870s (10 March 1876 to be precise.)
5) Crescent-shaped
6) Zone Improvement Plan
7) Malachi
8) False
Poll results: 25 votes. 22 of you beat the guest team of which 2 would
have beaten us! The average voter scored just under 3/8.
The excuses
The excuses (and alternate questions) are all courtesy of the programmer, but I've added one or two of my own comments in italics.
1) Despite all having seen this film many times, we somehow couldn't bring this to mind. This exact question came up on the blog way back in July - reassuringly I managed to remember the answer.
2) None of us are familiar with Ms Goulding's oeuvre so we were nowhere near this. For once my habit of listening to BBC Radio 1 to keep abreast of what the kids of today listen to paid off for me here.
3) Not sure how anyone would know this, although the etymology is intriguing (according to Wikipedia): the Italian term "melanzana" was reinterpreted as "mela insana", and then translated into English as "mad apple".
4) We narrowed it down to 1880s or 1890s, which (as usual) meant we'd eliminated the right answer even before guessing.
5) Some foolish member of the team immediately said "cross-shaped" and, as we knew it was something to do with the Crusades, that slipped through our collective nonsense filter unchecked.
6) A fun question to concoct guesses for (we went rather nerdily with Zonal Information Protocol), but pretty impossible to get right unless you know it. The name was a prompt to the public that mail addressed with a correct ZIP code would arrive more quickly.
7) We knew it was one of Micah and Malachi and zagged with the first. There are various differences between the books included in the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Old Testaments, but luckily (or skilfully) for the quizmaster, Malachi is the last in all three traditions.
8) This seemed like a strangely specific amount so we went with true without enough consideration. It's considerably more than 10 pounds.
The alternative questions
1) The 1995 film Babe is an adaptation of whose 1983 novel The Sheep Pig?
2) Another (unrelated) song called Burn was a worldwide hit for which R&B superstar in 2004, from his album Confessions?
3) The English word "lynx" was translated into French, misinterpreted, and then adopted back into English to give which alternative name for the same animal? (To further confuse matters, the term now more often refers to the snow leopard instead.)
4) Another debut of the 1870s was the three-act play A Doll's House, probably the best-known work by which dramatist?
5) The Fertile Crescent, an important region in the early development of human civilization, is usually taken to encompass the Nile and which other two major rivers?
6) The first and last character of a UK post code must always be a letter; which other character must also always be a letter?
7) Malachite, or copper carbonate hydroxide, is a mineral of which colour?
8) In invertebrates, shedding of the outer layer is known as ecdysis, but amongst humans what is an ecdysiast?
The answers
1) Dick King-Smith
2) Usher (We would of course accept his full name, Usher Raymond IV!)
3) Ounce (via the French approximation "lonce", misinterpreted as "l'once").
4) Henrik Ibsen
5) The Tigris and the Euphrates
6) The second-to-last
7) Green
8) A strip-tease performer
1+ out of 9: Well done, you beat us! 5+ out of 9: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
The ones that got away
Question 1
1) Name the young leader pictured. 2) In which country would you be if you were watching the white bearded wilderbeest in Serengeti National Park?
3) Which of these is associated with Teddy Roosevelt's legacy? United Nations, Medicaid, Panama Canal, Alaska Purchase, Creation of Israel, Atomic Bomb
4) Which of these actors had a breakout role in the TV series Rawhide? William Shatner, David Hasselhoff, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Anthony Hopkins, James Garner
5) At which of these events is the presence of the Greek God Hymenaeus required for good luck? Wars, Sacrifices, Weddings, Births, Harvests, Funerals
6) Which of these was Marlon Brando's final completed film? The Delta Force, The Score, The Insider, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Shootist, The Misfits
Question 9
7) Which of these female world leaders was the first to come to power? Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto
8) Which Caribbean nation is the only country to have been founded following a successful slave revolt?
9) Name the artist behind the work pictured.
The answers
1) Saddam Hussein
2) Tanzania
3) Panama Canal
4) Clint Eastwood
5) Weddings
6) The Score (2000). A reader on Twitter pointed out to me that most of the options was someone's last film: Lee Marvin in Delta Force, Jack Lemmon in Bagger Vance, John Wayne in The Shootist, and Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.
7) Indira Gandhi (1966). The others were: Meir (1969), Thatcher (1979) Aquino (1986), Bhutto (1988), Merkel (2005)
8) Haiti
9) Matisse (The Dance)
Poll results: 38 votes. 36 of you did better than us of which 11 would
have helped us win! The average voter scored 3.4/9.
The excuses
1) Looking for an Arabic world leader, we knew we were in shaky territory, going for Yasser Arafat (who, Wikipedia tells me, is not to be confused with a Pakistani cricketer).
2) "Where's the Serengeti?" "Um...Africa?" "Helpful." "Actually, isn't that where the Lion King is set" "Oh yeah, so it's like, Kenya or Tanzania-ish?" "Let's put Kenya." (In our defence, while the Serengeti National Park is in Tanzania, the Serengeti itself does stretch into Kenya.)
3) The cardinal sin here - we forgot to answer. Almost immediately we narrowed it down to the Panama Canal, only for me to get a niggling idea about it maybe possibly being Medicaid, even though you'd think that was a super recent thing. After a bit of discussion we decided I was being silly and we should go with our initial answer, and then I forgot to actually tick the box. Sad times.
4) The doctor thought this rang a bell in the Shatner department. I had no idea as it involved movies. On retrospect it's perhaps the most 'obvious' one to guess if (as was clearly the case with us) you had no idea.
5) The 'hymen' stem pointed us towards weddings or births, but the doctor (correctly) pointed out that Hera is the goddess of marriage. An irritating miss.
6) The doctor told me that Marlon Brando played the main guy in The Legend of Bagger Vance. I've only just found out that this was supposed to be a joke.
7) One of the reasons I've never got on with multiple choice is because if you eliminate some, but not all, of the options you can still be outscored by someone guessing at random. Here we narrowed it down to Meir and Gandhi, but went the wrong way.
8) Good fact this, we were nowhere, eventually sticking down Grenada as our new 'go-to' Caribbean nation.
9) Poor work from the doctor here who very quickly and fairly confidently told me it was Picasso. I really wasn't convinced, but couldn't offer an alternative. This particular picture was on a poster at Archway Tube station for a while when I lived there, so it was horribly frustrating to not remember the answer.
1) 2003 - so the war started on 20/03/2003
2) Zulu (must-know trivia: 'Simba' is Swahili for lion)
3) Ecuador
4) Michael Knight and Mitch Buchannon
5) Rhea (which, helpfully, is also an anagram of Hera!)
6) Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
7) Christian Democratic Union
8) The Dominican Republic
9) Fauvism
1+ out of 10: Well done, you beat us! We were (joint) winners this week, so no 'winninger than you' target! (Sorry.)
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The oceanographer
The ones that got away
Question 5
1) Which planet in our solar system has the largest number of known moons?
2) In which year was the first woman inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
3) Which South American country has had the two deadliest known avalanches?
4) In the Second World War, which allied nation helped the USA in developing a weapon intended to produce man-made tsunamis?
5) Who is this chap (pictured)?
6) In which year did an Icelandic volcano erupt causing huge disruption to air travel across Europe?
7) ...and what was the name of that volcano?
And finally, this quiz (to our utter delight) also featured a special round based on the Only Connect sequences round, after we mentioned to the quizmaster that "there's this really cool British show you should check out...". Here are the three(!) we got wrong, but I'll be putting up the rest at a future date for the particularly curious.
8) Pictures!
Question 8: what comes fourth?
9) Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad
10) LeBlanc, Clarkson, Jean
The answers
1) Saturn (but see Excuses, below)
2) 1987 (Aretha Franklin)
3) Peru
4) New Zealand
5) Punjabi MC
6) 2010
7) Eyjafjallajökull
8) (A picture representing) Easter Sunday [The pictures represent Maundy Thursday, 'Good' (Friday), and the Holi Festival (Holy Saturday)]
9) Dangerous [Michael Jackson albums in chronological order]
10) (David) Johnston [Governors General of Canada]
Poll results: 27 votes. All of you did better than us! The average voter scored about 2.3/10.
The excuses
1) Mild controversy, although we did suspect our answer of 'Jupiter, because it's the most massive' seemed too obvious. On reviewing my extensive quizzing library (i.e. Wikipedia) it seems that this question should perhaps have been phrased as asking for which planet has the most named moons. The figure quoted by the quizmaster for Saturn (53 moons) matches this description, whereas Jupiter has more, it's just a bunch of them haven't been named yet. This is of course before you get into a debate about what a 'moon' actually is (after all, they only decided what a planet was in 2006). However, I am open to advice from any astronomically-inclined readers.
2) Having been asked for the person's name at a quiz several months ago, I had a very faint gut instinct for the correct answer, but the team reasoned it really must have been earlier. It made sense at the time, but it was nevertheless frustrating.
3) I don't know enough about avalanches to know whether this is obvious, but we hypothesized that Chile had a lot of mountains so was probably a reasonable shout.
4) We reasoned that such tactics would be useful for attacks against Japan, suggesting Australia or New Zealand as likely candidates, and went for the former. Still, a very cool bit of trivia.
5) After briefly toying with Noel Gallagher (don't ask) we eventually put down Ian Brown (of The Stone Roses, in case you're unfamiliar). I have literally nothing to add.
6) The guess the year question rule of 'it's always earlier than you think' backfired spectacularly here, with our answer of 2007 almost twice as long ago.
7) Well done if, like me, you realized four years ago that this was going to come up as a 'joke' question on pub quizzes but, unlike me, actually remembered how to spell it.
8) An intriguing approach here, as while we knew that the feet washing was a Maundy Thursday tradition, we couldn't remember the name 'Holi' festival to put the two together.
9) The sequence was fairly obvious, but the answer evaded us as we could only think of HIStory, which came out a few years later.
10) One of the perils of moving abroad is that their quizzes ask some fairly country-specific questions from time to time. Still, if they ever commission a Canadian version of Only Connect we've now got at least one potential question in the bag.
The alternative questions
1) In Holst's The Planets suite, each movement is associated with its corresponding astrological character. Jupiter, for example, is the Bringer of Jollity. What is Saturn the bringer of?
2) Which British band, inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, refused to attend their induction ceremony, instead sending a letter describing the museum as "urine in wine" before adding "We're not coming. We're not your monkeys.".
3) If you visit the Wikipedia page for the Icelandic króna, you are helpfully informed that ""ISK" redirects here". This is because apparently some confused people might be looking for Interstellar Kredit, a currency from which online video game whose developers are also Icelandic?
4) Quizzing chestnut time: what does the Japanese word 'tsunami' literally translate to?
5) Quizzing chestnut time number 2: The Indian region of Punjab takes its name from the convergence of how many rivers?
6) Excluding those featuring the Union Jack, only three national flags incorporate a solid red cross. One is Iceland, name one of the others.
7) Another spelling test: spell Iceland's capital city.
8) An important part of the Easter story, what is a sepulchre?
9) With which condition was Michael Jackson diagnosed in 1986, causing depigmentation of parts of the skin?
10) Between 1904 and 1911 the Governor General of Canada was a grandson of which former British Prime Minister, after whom a particular blend of tea is thought to be named?
The answers
1) Old Age
2) The Sex Pistols
3) EVE Online
4) Harbour wave
5) 5 (the Greeks referred to Punjab as Pentapotamia)
6) Georgia and Tonga
7) ReykjavÃk (although you can probably get away with missing the accent on the i)
8) A tomb, cut in rock or built of stone, such as that where Jesus was supposedly buried
9) Vitiligo
10) (The 2nd) Earl Grey
Special note: Usually at The Ones That Got Away we don't like to mention which quizzes stumped us. This is mainly because a) we don't want to be mobbed by the thousands of Montreal-based Only Connect fans, and b) the questions are often a bit, well, questionable.I'm making an exception this week however, with these questions coming from an excellent quiz run by this guy. If you are a Twitterer, he's well worth a follow, and if you're a Facebooker, you can do that 'Like' thing here. And of course, if you're ever in Montreal you should come on down and take us on in our natural environment!
Your targets this week:
1+ out of 11: Well done, you beat us! 7+ out of 11: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The engineer
The ones that got away
1) Which was the first animated movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?
2) According to research carried out last year, the article about which man is the most contested on Wikipedia?
3) Which 1974 David Bowie single's title is made up of the same word repeated twice?
4) Which pet product's active ingredient is the chemical nepetalactone?
5) Name the song and artist behind these lyrics:
I've got stiffness in my bones
Ain't no beauty queens in this locality
I tell you
Oh but I still get my pleasure
Still got my greatest treasure
6) In the surfer phrase 'hang ten', to what does the word 'ten' refer?
7) One of the world's hottest peppers is named after which Caribbean city?
8) Of the six famous numbers in the TV series Lost, which one is the only prime?
9) What three-name fictional law or accounting firm has been used in several parody settings by (among others) Johnny Carson, Groucho Marx and Daffy Duck?
10) Sort these boxing weight categories from heaviest to lightest: bantam, cruiser and welter.
11) The six Australian states are New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia and which other?
The answers
1) Beauty and the Beast
2) George W Bush
3) Rebel Rebel
4) Catnip
5) Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen (you need both for the point)
6) Toes
7) Havana (the chilli in question is the habanero)
8) 23 (the other numbers are 4, 8, 15, 16 and 42)
9) Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
10) Cruiser, welter, bantam
11) South Australia (no leeway here, just in case you said 'Southern Australia')
Poll results: 26 votes. 25 of you did better than us but just 2 would
have helped us win! The average voter scored just under 4/8.
The excuses
1) A time where I knew I knew it but couldn't drag it out. We did at least manage to remember the first Disney animated feature: Snow White.
2) After some debate that revolved around Hitler and Jesus, we eventually went with the wildcard John F Kennedy hoping the conspiracy theories surrounding his death might have helped push him up the leaderboard.
3) One of those songs where I didn't think I'd ever heard of it until listening to it just now. Apparently it's Bowie's most-covered track.
4) We probably should have thought of this, but got a bit too preoccupied with cat litter. If you're never seen what happens when big cats are given catnip, you should definitely watch this.
5) Much like Bruce Springsteen last week, another song I thought I knew quite well, but apparently never really listened to the lyrics of.
6) The engineer immediately suggested the correct answer, only to have a hint of doubt creep in near hand-in time, sparking a last-minute change to 'seconds' (which I'll admit I thought sounded far more plausible). Another point in favour of always trusting your quizzing instincts!
7) Impressively, we discussed Havana and Habanero while scrabbling around for an answer but didn't put the two together.
8) Having never watched Lost we weren't in an ideal position here. We went with 13, thinking its inauspiciousness might have appealed to the writers.
9) Another one that was floating around in our brains somewhere but none of us could reach it. We ended up going for the admittedly not quite as good 'Robs, Steals and Pillages'.
10) We all immediately agreed that bantam was the lightest, but then couldn't decide which was the heaviest, eventually zagging with the wrong option.
11) Regular readers will be becoming familiar with my superhero-like ability to fail at Australian state questions. (And you must admit that would be the best superhero.) As you might be able to infer from the answer above, we put down Southern instead of South.
The alternative questions
Question 2
1) Just two other animated movies have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, both since 2009 when the Academy expanded the number of nominees for the award. Name one of them.
2) George W Bush is now arguably better known as a world-renowned painter than as a president, but which former world leader has he attempted to paint here?
3) Which 1986 film, written by Monty Python Terry Jones, saw David Bowie play a Goblin King who kidnaps a baby?
4) Which fictional heroine is known by the nickname 'Catnip' to her friend Gale?
5) An essential piece of Queen trivia is that Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on the island of Zanzibar. Of which modern-day country is Zanzibar now a semi-autonomous part?
6) Which American state lends its name to a metric of wave height measurement used by surfers, scaled so that the actual height of the wave is roughly twice the figure quoted?
7) Having asked about the Scoville Scale last week, the other essential piece of chilli-based trivia knowledge is which is the world's hottest. You might think it's the Ghost Pepper, crowned in 2007, but it has since been superseded twice, with the current holder taking the title on Boxing Day 2013.
8) Prime numbers play a vital role in many areas of online security via cryptography. One of the more widely used encryption algorithms is known as RSA, but from what is the name RSA derived? (An equivalent system was developed by the English mathematician Clifford Cocks around three years earlier, but was deemed classified information until 1997.)
9) Daffy Duck appeared in 133 cartoons during animation's so-called 'golden age' between 1928 and the late 1960s. Two Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters appeared in more. One of these is Bugs Bunny, who is the other?
10) Who was the first woman to win an Olympic boxing title?
11) Australia's national anthem Advance Australia Fair was chosen after receiving 43% of the vote as part of the 1977 referendum. Which song came in second with 28%, beating the former anthem God Save The Queen into third?
The answers
1) Up and Toy Story 3
2) Silvio Berlusconi
3) Labyrinth
4) Katniss Everdeen (from The Hunger Games)
5) Tanzania
6) Hawaii
7) The Carolina Reaper
8) The initials of its inventors: Rivest, Shamir and Adleman.
9) Porky Pig
10) Nicola Adams
11) Waltzing Matilda
Saturday saw the hotly anticipated return of Channel 4's Fifteen to One, a show that, if you're reading a blog about quizzes, really needs no introduction. Off air for over a decade, we were given a taste of things to come last September with a celebrity special hosted by Adam Hills. Now a 20-episode series with normal folk will be gracing our screens. Everyone's favourite Dane Sandi Toksvig is in charge and there's a whopping £40,000 up for grabs. Can it possibly live up to expectations?
So what's new?
In terms of basic gameplay the reboot is near-identical to its predecessor. 15 contestants, three lives each, last quizzer standing makes it onto the leaderboard. With 19 episodes before the final you just have to avoid being one of the four lowest-scoring winners if you want to come back and battle it out for the cash. The only major rule change is that anyone knocked out before the final three gets (up to) two more bites at the cherry. While this may seem like the famously ruthless show going just a tiny bit soft, it seems a sensible change for a contest that could send you packing after facing just two questions.
Floor lighting gives a snapshot of the state of play.
With Toksvig the show is in safe, experienced hands, while her intellect and warmth make her an excellent match for a quiz known for being challenging but always friendly. The set design works well enough, with some neat floor lighting that shows who's in, who's out, and who's nominating whom. Question difficulty seemed a bit low overall, but with some absolute stinkers thrown in you certainly needed a bit of luck along with solid general knowledge. While this volatility is an inevitable part of the game it strikes me as very easy for someone to come out feeling rather hard done by. The extra chances to appear do mitigate this somewhat, though.
For better or worse?
Comparisons with the original are inevitable, and much of the online discourse I've seen has focused on the show's length. Coming in (with ad breaks) at an hour the remake is twice as long and, with no extra quizzing to fill the gap, that time has to be made up elsewhere. A bit of extra chat, some bonus information after some questions, and an overall slower pace do the trick, which together leaves it without the original's trademark 'efficiency'. Understandably, this has disappointed the more devout fans, who were hoping for a return to the veritable barrage of questions that used to grace our teatime TV screens. However, if the remake is viewed on its own merits (rather than in the shadow of William G Stewart) I think it largely stands up to scrutiny.
Sandi with the latest in high-tech
question asking technology.
As a case in point I recently introduced my partner - who had never seem the show before - to some old episodes on YouTube. He is, of course, a fairly serious quizzer himself now, but viewing it with fresh eyes he found the pace too fast for comfort. While to me, Saturday's episode certainly felt slow, in the context of many of the current crop of quiz shows its questions-per-minute seemed perfectly respectable.
Fifteen to Fun?
Overall then, it's a perfectly fine remake of an undisputed classic. It will be interesting, however, to see how it fares with the viewing public; ultimately I'm not entirely sure who it's trying to please. For quiz purists it will certainly feel like a rather diluted imitation of the original. The more casual viewer, on the other hand, seems liable to tire of a 'question question question' format once the nostalgia novelty wears off. A 4.30pm time slot is a curious choice, as it means an overlap with gameshow goliaths Pointless and The Chase. Perhaps the idea is to lure viewers in and hope they'll hang on to 'see what happens', but as the opening round suffers the most from the ponderous pacing I'm not so sure.
For now, though, I'm happy to have it back. Perhaps there's a touch of expat-induced homesickness creeping in from my new life in the colonies, but while they may be slightly slower on their feet, it's always nice to see an old friend again.
1+ out of 8: Well done, you beat us! 4+ out of 8: We'd have won with you on our team!
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The programmer
4) The actuary
The ones that got away
Question 8
1) Which football club won the FA Cup and had a UK number one single in the same year?
2) In music, what does 'a capella' literally mean?
3) Who is commonly attributed with the quote "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse"?
4) Identify the song from these lyrics: "Born in a dead man's town/The first kick I took was when I hit the ground/You end up like a dog that's been beat too much/Until you spend half your life just covering up"
5) Identify the actor/actress who has featured in all of these films: Winter's Bone, The Devil You Know, Silver Linings Playbook, and House at the End of the Street.
6) In what year was the Ridley Scott film Gladiator released?
7) What is the third longest river in the world?
8) Name the band whose album cover is pictured.
Poll results: 35 votes. 33 of you did better than us and 14 would
have helped us win! The average voter scored just under 3/8.
The excuses
1) The 'obvious' answer, it's one someone with almost no knowledge of football would probably guess. I thought this might have been referring to the Christmas number 1 back in 2012 by The Justice Collective (for charities associated with the Hillsborough disaster), but couldn't remember if Liverpool won the FA Cup that year. They didn't (although they were in the final), but in any case it wasn't the team per se that had the single.
2) Given the combined musical experience of the team this was a bad miss. I think ultimately we overthought it and went with 'outside chapel', which doesn't even make sense for unaccompanied singing.
3) A good line, even if it is a bit questionable whether Charles V ever actually said it - we went for the Manchester United of quotes: Winston Churchill.
4) I think I have to take the blame on this one, as the doctor suggested it sounded a bit Springsteeny, and I was fairly sure it wasn't.
5) Our inability to identify women continues to cause us quizzing trouble. Someone vaguely knew who it was, but we couldn't get the name down.
6) Yawn.
7) Another bad miss, at least from a 'serious' quizzing perspective. Knowing the top three (at the very least) of Nile-Amazon-Yangtze is a dull but necessary requirement. Although that's not to say that is definitively the correct order (but is probably the one your quizmaster will use).
8) An album half the team recognized, but none of us could remember where from. We reckoned it looked 'a bit 90s, and a bit alternative' but inexplicably this wasn't enough help to get us to the correct answer.
The alternative questions
1) Two of the official England football team World Cup songs have made it to the top of the UK singles chart. One was the 1970 hit 'Back Home', but which song accompanied the team in their inevitably unsuccessful bid to win the 1990 World Cup?
2) The enjoyably titled Pope Sixtus IV lends his name to which famous religious building?
3) If Charles V was talking to God on jueves, women on giovedi and men on jeudi, what day is it for talking to his horse?
4) Bruce Springsteen won an Oscar for a song in which 1993 movie starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington?
5) Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games film series based on the books by Suzanne Collins. Despite featuring a similar 'kids fight to the death' contest, which 1999 Koushun Takami novel (also later adapted for the screen) is The Hunger Games definitely not ripped off from?
6) Jefferson King is the real name of which original member of the Gladiators cast? He now works in a drug rehabilitation clinic.
7) Which two rivers - both named after colours - are the major tributaries of the Nile?
8) A classic trivium to finish: devised by an American pharmacist in 1912, the 'spiciness' (pungency) of foods such as chilli peppers are measured on which scale?
The answers
1) World in Motion (performed by the England squad and New Order)
2) The Sistine Chapel
3) Donnerstag (these are all words for Thursday in their respective languages)
4) Philadelphia (the song being Streets of Philadelphia)
5) Battle Royale
6) Shadow (who lost his job on the show amidst an apparent steroid abuse scandal)
7) The Blue Nile and the White Nile
8) The Scoville scale
