Eggheads

Is there a more consistently annoying programme on television than BBC 2's 'Eggheads'?

It's hard to think of one.

The basic premise of the show is that a pub team of five friends challenges a team of 'Eggheads' who are former winners of other quiz shows, such as 'Millionaire', 'Mastermind' and the like. There are five rounds altogether, the first four of which are head-to-head battles between one of the challenging team and a nominated 'Egghead'.

The loser of each head-to-head battle is eliminated from the final group head-to-head, where the two teams go against each other for three questions each, followed by sudden death. A fairly bland, generic quiz format, if ever there was one.

The presenter is either Dermot Murnaghan, a fairly capable and affable chap, or Jeremy Vine, the Radio 2 lunchtime show idiot-baiting host, with a voice that can only be described as someone who sounds like they're permanently in the middle of having a particularly difficult butternut squash-sized shit.

The Eggheads look as you'd expect human encyclopaedias to look, and far be it from me to decry others' physical characteristics, but a couple of them wouldn't look out of place with pewter tankards full of home brewed mead in their hands, one of them looks a bit like Mackenzie Crook's tanned foreign cousin, another looks like a cards-in Women's Institute member and the last was the uber-posh winner of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'.

She was the lady who invoked ire from the angry uneducated masses because she didn't really need to win a million quid, but thought that she might as well, seeing as she knew a planetload of useless information. Fair play to her really.

On to the quiz then. During the one-on-one rounds between an Egghead and challenger, either Dermot or Jeremy will ask a multiple choice poser, and here is where the problems begin. Rather than simply answer the question, I can only presume that the Eggheads are encouraged (I resisted the urge to say 'egged on') to elaborate on their answer and make themselves look like massive cunts by elucidating at great length about why the capital of Peru is not Cerro de Pasco because that's a city in the Pasco region of the country and was formerly a great exporter of silver, and at over 4,000 metres up is one of the highest cities in the world.

The challengers then carry out the same trick, but, by dint of not spending their childhood reading Encylcopaedia Britannica and Schott's Miscellany every night, generally fumble their way through by excluding Chris de Burgh on the basis that he doesn't really ring any bells and Curtis Stigers is far more likely because the random firing of a few neurons in their tattered brainbox says so.

If you took out the stultifying banality of the contestants giving their answers in this way, the show would probably only last ten minutes. Which would be good all round, as that would be exactly twenty minutes less Jeremy Vine, and a short snappy quiz where the viewers wouldn't want to hammer nails through the eyes of each and every participant.

A severely strange aspect of the show is the giant screen behind each team. During the final round, the giant disembodied heads of the eliminated appear on the screen, leading to a surrealistic scene reminiscent of having really clever BFGs sitting behind the remaining contestants. See here - http://tinyurl.com/ck2fbp

I guess this blog is a really really long-winded way of saying that nobody likes a smart-arse.