Eggheads
March 31st, 2007 at 12:25
I think one of my favourite TV programmes at the moment is the Dermot Murnghan fronted quiz programme Eggheads, which airs daily on BBC Two. For the uninitiated, it pits a team of contestants (usually a pub quiz team or something) against a team of moderately well known quiz champions, like Judith Keppel from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. They go head to head in a series of sudden death rounds on a variety of topics before ending on a general knowledge round.
One of the best bits is the interaction between presenter and contestants. There’s no studio audience, and the studio is very large, dark, quiet and empty, so you get the impression the contestants are trapped in one mad-man’s sadistic game of ritual humiliation. Not only are the contestants being humiliated by their lack of trivia knowledge, but every awkward bit of banter resonates around the studio like a bad smell that won’t go away.
Because of the lack of audience, it is up to only Dermot and two pieces of library music to create the tension. This leads of Dermot saying a lot of ultimately meaningless things to try and up-the-ante a bit: “You lost the first round… won the second… then lost the third… I’m spotting a pattern here!“, as if to imply that losing the next round would be even worse for the contestants because not only would they decrease their chances of winning the money, they’d break the fabric of space-time itself. Well, probably.
There’s also some spectacularly embarrassing exchanges when Dermot tries to make some light conversation with the contestants.
“So Derek, it says here you’re a farmer…?”
“Yep.”
“See many cows?”
“Yep.”
“Alright… now lets crack on! Which country is the world’s largest exporter of tin?”
The production team have clearly told the contestants to try and “deduce” their answers to try and make the programme more exciting. It’s excruciating trying to watch an idiot apply reason to their answers:
“Well I know that the Netherlands only make tulips and drugs… and the Spanish are work-shy and lazy, so I can’t imagine them exporting anything… so I’m going to have to go with Bolivia, Dermot.
Basically Eggheads is like playing an under-clocked ItBox in a dystopian library.
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