Devising the ideal show involves shamelessly plundering the best features of its competitors, just like The Chase has done
Perhaps it's because the football has ensured that there's little else on, but lately I've been thinking a lot about what makes the perfect daytime gameshow. We've got so many of them – general knowledge shows hosted by angry consumer rights dominatrixes, shows influenced by Bayes' theorem of conditional probability and, in Golden Balls, a show that literally nobody on the face of the planet is able to understand – but none of them has yet managed to achieve perfection.
Maybe if we mashed together elements from all the other daytime gameshows, the resulting Frankenstein-style atrocity would be the greatest daytime TV gameshow ever. So let's try doing that.
• Format: We'll stick to basic general knowledge questions. It works for The Weakest Link, it works for Eggheads and it'll work for us. Anything else – anything that could encourage Noel Edmonds to pop up and start droning on about universal energy like some sort of badly-dressed Jesus figure – is strictly no-go.
But where's the challenge? Who are the contestants up against? Each other? Maybe a decade ago. A faceless banker on the end of a telephone line? That's just creepy. An unbeatable foe like the Eggheads panel? Perfect.
That said, Deal Or No Deal shouldn't be a complete write-off. The bargaining aspect – letting the contestants effectively choose their own prize – is very clever, so let's steal that as well.
• Tone: Nasty. At least as nasty as The Weakest Link, obviously. Who wants to watch a gameshow where people are genial and treat each other with respect? This isn't the 1950s, for crying out loud. People want blood.
• Rules: Remember that a contemporary daytime gameshow wouldn't be a contemporary daytime quiz show unless it came with a set of rules so monumentally impenetrable that, like Golden Balls, each episode tends to comprise one part game to about 36 parts painstaking explanation. So let's make our show several times more confusing than it needs to be.
• Host: A newsreader? No. A former comedian like Duel's Nick Hancock or Jasper Carrott from Golden Balls? Possibly, but let's find someone with a little bit more gameshow experience. Bradley Walsh? He briefly hosted Wheel Of Fortune. He'll do.
And there we have it, the perfect afternoon gameshow. Except – hang on a minute – that gameshow already exists. It's ITV1's The Chase (5pm, daily), and it's a shameless amalgamation of most of its contemporaries. Hosted by Bradley Walsh, it's a nasty and complicated general knowledge show that pits contestants against a quiz expert called a Chaser, who lets them choose how much money they want to win. It also happens to be nowhere near perfect – it's too cheap looking and Walsh seems bored senseless most of the time – which sort of puts the skids on my experiment.
But The Chase does have something exceptional going for it – a Chaser named Mark Labbett. A swaggering giant of a man, Labbett is part Anne Robinson, part Banker and part Graham Linehan in a Mr Creosote outfit. He's a quiz veteran, with appearances on The National Lottery People's Quiz, Only Connect and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? twice. He calls himself Britain's 17th best quizzer, and he carries himself with all the pomp and majesty of a medieval king who's fully aware that he knows quite a lot more about several things than most people. He's a readymade cult hero like David Dickinson before him, he'll no doubt get his own show within the next couple of years, and he single-handedly elevates the whole thing to a level it wouldn't otherwise deserve. It may not be the perfect daytime gameshow but, thanks mainly to Labbett, The Chase can be horribly watchable entertainment.
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