Game shows are pretty much synonymous with cheap television, especially in the UK where they’re practically a national institution. Game shows, which is the more general term for any studio-based programme revolving around contestants competing for a reward, are inexpensive, easy to make and endlessly variable, whereas quiz shows are merely a subset of game shows which test general knowledge and the power of the mind. The popularity of TV quizzes has never been more acute, with shows such as Pointless, The Chase, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, University Challenge and Tenable still pumping out extraordinarily solid ratings. Say what you want about the British public, we absolutely love a quiz.
In this list we’re looking at predominantly UK-based game shows. Some of them are quizzes, such as Tipping Point, some of them are game shows like Don’t Scare the Hare, and some of there are utterly unfathomable and defy categorisation, like the first entry.
1. Apocalypse Wow
At the time of writing, Apocalypse Wow has only been on the air for three paltry episodes, and yet in that comparatively small space of time, the show has been dubbed one of the worst to ever feature on British television. A little premature to take against a project so early on in its run you might think – until you watch about three minutes of the wretched thing and realise that the critics were probably being kind and that three minutes was more than enough to establish a pretty sound judgement of ITV’s latest scrape of an infinitely scrapeable barrel.
Presenter Aj Odudu, who does an admirable job of trying to drum up some excitement, describes Apocalypse Wow in one link as being ‘the love child between Total Wipeout and a sex shop’, but the show ends up looking like a low-end school’s production of Max Max 3: Thunderdome if the theatrical director was a bondage enthusiast with access to the entire arts and crafts stationary cupboard.
Apocalypse Wow tries about 100 things at once and fails at every single one of them. A group of four celebrities are set a series of random challenges ranging from balancing on some furniture to wrestling with a man called ‘Hot Slippy Jesus’ in a paddling pool full of gravy, each outing less exciting and cinematic than even its dismal premise can fulfil, all under the watchful eye of ‘The Mistress’ (Donna Preston), an antagonist about as menacing as a dinner lady wielding a stale baguette.
Not only are the celebs distinctly third rate, so much so that you can actually guess half the roster before going near an episode (Scarlett Moffatt? Ding!), the whole procedure is a conceptual nightmare, as lame, camp humour mixes with crappy challenges and budget-restricted trials, all watched by an audience of strategically placed students spread out in the darkness to hide their obvious scarcity.
ITV might not care about quality, or integrity, or indeed their own viewers, but they must recognise that even by their pitiful standards, Apocalypse Wow is truly woeful and won’t be mourned once its inevitable passing transpires.
2. Bullseye
As far as I’m aware, Bullseye retains the unenviable distinction of being the only British quiz/game show to feature a genuine murderer as one of its contestants, as real-life killer John Cooper failed to answer a single general knowledge question correctly before missing all of his darts. Though in the grand scheme of things, that’s perhaps not the nadir of Cooper’s disturbing catalogue of exploits.
Besides this grisly distinction, the show is an astonishing cultural artefact which, if you’re not of the generation in which it was broadcast or indeed reading this from outside the small part of the UK around which it was centred, is well worth checking out as a fascinating insight into how people in the north of England in the 1980s apparently chose to spend their time: playing darts, answering quiz questions and trying to win an automatic knitting machine or attractive faux-gold carriage clock.
I can’t think of another show to date which has married the concept of darts with a general knowledge quiz show, which in many ways tells you all you need to know about how “of its time” Bullseye was. Despite the startlingly sparse set, low budget, poor format, naff prizes and the occasional appearance of a notorious felon, Bullseye aired for 14 years before its original run ended, only to be resurrected in the mid-noughties with comedian Dave Spikey as host.
3. Deal Or No Deal
What even is Deal Or No Deal? It’s not a quiz, there are no questions, and it’s not a game show, as there are no games. It is, to quote Charlie Brooker, a ‘cosmic ordering what’s in the box guess-athon’ which crosses Schrödinger’s infamous dead cat hypothesis with what is essentially a form of televised gambling as contestants attempt to outwit a fictitious banker to determine which unknown sum is contained within their designated box.
Everyone knows Deal Or No Deal and remembers seeing it, but I can’t think of a single person I know who has sat through a single episode, even on the rainiest of rainy days when all other repeats on Dave have run dry. Who can dedicate 45 minutes of their life to watching people elongate a process which could be concluded within about five? Deal or No Deal is not only a bad concept for a show devoid of skill or ability, it is also a massive, gratuitous and cynical waste of your time.
Edmonds was the show’s biggest problem, strutting and prowling around the studio as an ‘ambient presenter’, constantly trying to infuse a ludicrous sense of cosmic drama into the dullest of premises, encouraging contestants to get in touch with their ‘inner selves’, indulging their nonsensical ramblings as he nods earnestly whenever a contestant claims that their estranged son is telling them to pick box number 7, gurning and crying as a the £100,000 falls by the wayside. Edmonds has made a fortune from encouraging the dullest form of gambling ever shown on British television.
4. Don’t Scare The Hare
Don’t Scare The Hare is what you’d see if you put a sackful of organic produce and some potent LSD in a blender and went to Mars on the mother of all trips, such is the surreal nature of the BBC’s short-lived animal-based game show-cum-farmyard simulator. Nothing about the show makes any sense, least of all why on Earth it was commissioned in the first place. Also, why a hare? Maybe they couldn’t find a synonym for ‘scare’ which rhymed with another countryside animal. Don’t start the hart? Don’t fright the termite? Don’t badger the badger?
Don’t Scare The Hare was presumably billed as a throwback to the knockabout fun of shows such as Mr. Blobby or It’s A Knockout, but the central gimmick of having a large, animatronic hare which seems to have an unhealthy relationship with Jason Bradbury is just utterly bizarre, not least because the hare has all of the personality and aesthetic interest of a hairless Furby desperately seeking to establish its own sentience.
Then there’s the games, which are billed as Wipeout-esque physical challenges but which end up looking like the sort of things that local farmers do when they get bored during the winter and start throwing carrots at each other. Rounds include ‘Alarm-a-geddon’, which involves trying to prevent a series of large alarm clocks from sounding, ‘Hot Hare Balloons’, where players have to take carrots from an allotment using hooks while avoiding laser beams like some west-country version of Mission Impossible II, and ‘Pond Memories’, which involves memorising a set of light-up lily pads for reasons too exciting to comprehend.
Unsurprisingly, the show was not only cancelled after one season, it was taken off the air after just six of its nine scheduled episodes thanks to poor ratings. As it turns out, the British public draw the line at carrot-based physical games involving oversized robotic lagomorphs when choosing their sources of entertainment.
5. Eggheads
Oh god, I hate Eggheads. I hate it for so, so many reasons. If I could erase one thing from the face of history’s bleak and dotted timeline, it wouldn’t be the rise of the Khmer Rouge or Stalin’s Gulags. It would be Eggheads. Or at the very least, I’d have to think twice as I weighed up whether to rid the world of Pol Pot or Jeremy Vine. Everything about it is a textbook on how not to execute a quiz show.
First, there’s the format of the show itself. Each round, the contestants take it in turn to answer multiple choice questions of incrementally increasing difficulty. But the difficulty curve is a complete nightmare, as the first question is ludicrously easy, the second is reasonably doable and the third is so obscure and esoteric that the contestants, and usually the Eggheads as well, are forced to just randomly guess, making it a 50:50 regarding who is eliminated from the final round. Not that this matters, because the final round, which has exactly the same formula as just described, falls foul of the same crap format.
Secondly, there’s the Eggheads themselves. Now, while The Chase might be a bit too ‘ITV’ for some people’s tastes, there’s no doubt that the Chasers are all prepped and ready to face life in front of the camera: they’re charismatic, diverse, and most importantly, likeable. The Eggheads, meanwhile, are fighting a continuing internal battle to see which of their two overriding character traits will win out of the other – their irrepressible smugness or their somniferous tediousness. Oh, how I detest these list-learning, fact-spouting, life-sucking bores. The Chase made being a quizzer fashionable, almost cool. Eggheads makes it look as sexy as playing bridge in a cable knit sweater.
And then there’s Jeremy Vine who, contrary to Bradley Walsh’s barrow boy-esque appeal, has all the easy-going charm of an Oxbridge-educated substitute teacher trying to talk about his favourite hip-hop group to some inner-city teenagers. Watching Vine attempt to banter either with the contestants, the Eggheads or strangely enough, on occasion himself, makes you want to pour water down the back of your television until it is a smouldering, fizzing wreck. Get rid of Eggheads. Fire it into the Sun.
6. Hole In The Wall
Say what you like about BBC’s human Tetris simulator Hole In The Wall, at least it gave the British public some enjoyable comedic fodder during the late noughties, as kids up and down the country (or maybe just my select group of friends) derived great pleasure from shouting host Dale Winton’s catchphrase of ‘Bring on the Wall!’ at every available opportunity.
My suspicion, however, is that like my annoying preteen self, most people enjoyed Hole In The Wall ironically, and only then for a very limited period. The real issue with watching celebs in spandex trying to avoid an approaching Styrofoam block is that the novelty very quickly wears off and tedium sets in as the format becomes stale and predictable, no matter the status of the celebs or the shape of the wall in question.
You always got the sense that Hole in the Wall, campy as it might have been, was happy for the audience to be laughing at it as well as laughing with it, but ten minutes into any given episode, and you’d have to have an IQ in the single digits to still find mirth in cricketer Darren Gough failing to contort his body into the shape of the Eiffel Tower.
7. Red Or Black?
The signs were all good for 2011’s Red Or Black? Simon Cowell, for all his faults, knows how to make compelling television, and Ant and Dec are pretty dependable when you want loveable, lightweight affability, operating at pretty much the peak of their powers by the turn of the decade. Sometimes all of the pieces are in place, they simply don’t necessarily come together to form a particularly attractive picture.
Red Or Black? was just a binary sort, a 50:50 choice which could have been as simple as picking from a pair of differently coloured cards, as each week contestants carefully selected (guessed) from the pair of contrasting colours and faced elimination if they chose incorrectly. The problem with Red Or Black? is similar to that which often perturbed me about Deal Or No Deal, in that ninety percent of the show was just window dressing for something which could’ve been done with endless simplicity. The show was just ‘which hand is the coin in?’ on a massive, extremely expensive scale.
Audience numbers soon began to decline by the time the second season limped around, and the critics were pretty scathing, deriding the show as ‘dull’ ‘bland’ and ‘moronic’. It was soon scrapped in 2012 by a thoroughly indifferent general public.
8. Shafted
Like him or not, Richard Osman knows his way around making watchable, popular television, so when he says ‘Don’t pick a massively unsuitable host’ to front your latest quiz/game show to air on prime time on ITV, don’t for the love of cream cake go and hire Robert Kilroy-fucking-Silk, because a) nobody likes him and b) he’s Robert-Kilroy-Silk. You could’ve gone with anyone; comedians, professional presenters, the man who works at the local Argos. Pretty much anyone would’ve been better than the perennially unpopular former MP and talk show host.
I don’t even know what the rules are. I don’t care. Nobody cares, because nobody watched the show without thinking ‘Why Robert Kilroy-Silk? Why is Robert Kilroy-Silk presenting a quiz show? Why is this happening?’ Shafted was, unsurprisingly, axed without so much as a hint of protest.
9. Tipping Point
Or to give it its alternative title, ‘Is the Chase on Yet?’
They did it, they actually went and did it, they made a game show about an arcade machine. Maybe Time Crisis II as a quiz show was too much of a conceptual stretch, although the fact they made one about coins dropping from a shelf would perhaps render that statement moot. Tipping Point is pretty unavoidably awful: the questions are dull and far too easy, the contestants often have the personalities of slices of processed cheese, and the set is so garish and shiny it could induce a migraine from fifty paces.
Poor old Ben Shephard does his best to infuse some drama and strategy into proceedings, spouting nonsensical jargon about ‘hangers’ or ‘climbers’ or ‘tossers’ (maybe not that last one) to try to distract the audience from the fact that they are literally watching an oversized coin machine disguised as a prime-time ITV quiz show.
Just remember that in the UK, you have to have a license fee to watch anything on television, commercial or otherwise, so some of your tax has gone towards constructing that machine, maintaining that machine, the electricity it costs to run that machine, the coins on that machine, everything. As it’s their money, the British public would be perfectly entitled to band together into a small army and, wielding an assortment of clubs, pitchforks and flaming torches, destroy the Tipping Point machine like angry Luddites destroying 19th-century stocking frames.
10. Touch The Truck
Dale Winton. The Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock, Essex. A 2001 Toyota Land Cruiser Amazon. All of the hallmarks of a truly titanic televisual experience, worthy only of featuring on Channel 5.
The rules were incredibly simple: whoever can maintain hand-to-truck contact for the longest length of unbroken time would win the truck in question, with contestants facing disqualification for excessive break length (why not go the whole hog and just have contestants soil themselves where they stand?), removal of hands from the truck or falling asleep. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you mix a wartime internment simulator with the world’s least exciting episode of Top Gear fronted by the fellow from Supermarket Sweep, here’s your answer.
Touch the Truck was eventually won by 39-year-old Jerry Middleton, who sold the vehicle to fund a General Election campaign for Kingston and Surbiton. He didn’t win, presumably because every time he went around canvassing for votes he was met with the reply of ‘hey, aren’t you the bloke who touched a Toyota for four days straight? I’m not sure that makes you qualified to oversee rubbish collection and road maintenance.’
The show inspired a few copycats but never quite managed to spawn the raft of spin-off game shows it deserved. ‘Touch the Hotpoint Washer and Dryer Combo’. ‘Touch the four-night stay at Disneyland Paris’. A dating version could’ve been compelling, if deeply troubling, television: ‘Keep one hand on him for longer than anyone else and win a date with Michael Ball’.
READ MORE: 10 Most Ridiculously Arbitrary Elimination Shows
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