Thursday, October 22, 2009

Eggheads - Alternative?

The BBC2 quiz show Eggheads is currently being hosted by Jeremy Vine a presenter who makes me wish for the return of Dermot, he's that bad.

Other than his manner and bad jokes something over a couple of shows just boiled my head. For those unfamiliar with the show the contestant and an egghead of their choice answer three multiple-choice questions alternately, standard best of three wins. However if there's a draw questions are still asked, but the choices are removed.

How did Jeremy present this - "Removing the alternative answers". Gah! If you're removing the alternative answers then you're leaving only the correct one.

He didn't do it in the latest episode; perhaps someone complained :-)

2 comments:

Orphi said...

This is what you get when you throw together a cheesy show for the minimum possible budget to fill the airwaves for a while and call it “entertainment”.

It's an entirely pointless show. The contestants don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning. The questions are stuff that no living human could possibly know unless they've memorised half a library. Most of the people who apply apparently haven't made any special prepairations at all, yet they're going up against professional quizzmasters who spend all their time researching new factoids. Even aside from that, the number of rounds involved and the number of questions asked means that the final result has almost nothing to do with knowledge or skill, but rather random pot-luck. Statistically, it's noise. (This presumably explains how the contestants occasionally win.)

Since there are only a dozen questions to be asked, they have to pad it all out to fill the time. Hence the hopeless presenters that whaffle on when we really, really don't give a damn!

If I had my way, I'd take it off the airwaves and bring back Rough Science…

I'm glad I got that out of my system.

FlipC said...

Good to let it out :-)

Remember this is also a show that can't even use the contesting group's own name in the virtual scoreboard and has a roll-over win that means some contestants can just miss out by one show winning £20k and have to settle for £1k instead.

I agree the random pot-luck is a problem set-up by the randaom subjects; one game had Politics, Arts and Books, Geography, and some other subject that barely crops up.

Listening to the Eggheads you do get the odd "Well I was memorising the order of US Presidents just last night" You know normally everyday activities; then again they are being paid to do this.

Bring back Rough Science hmm so long as it's not like that BBC1 show. Couldn't get into that; it felt like Science Newsround.