05/06/2005

There's bad news and good news...

entry posted by Inquisitor at 24:29 (permalink).
categories: Misc , TV

Bad news: Richard Whiteley is having to take several months off Countdown because of his pneumonia.

Good news: one of the guest presenters is apparently going to be Stephen Fry. That's going to be unmissable.

For those of you unfamiliar with Countdown, it's possibly one of the strangest long-running programmes on British TV. Wikipedia has a decent article. It's one of those programmes that just shouldn't work - it is run at a completely sedentary pace, by rights the games should be mind-numbingly boring, most of the airtime is taken up by Richard Whiteley's godawful puns, the prizes are legendarily poor and there are Stannah Stairlift adverts in the commercial breaks. And yet it does: it is one of the last survivors of the classic British game shows, those where what counts is the competition rather than the prize money (Countdown doesn't even have prize money), and it survives because it just works. Everything from the bad jokes to Carol Vorderman actually makes sense when put together - in a way they wouldn't separately.

It does help that the game format is extremely simple, yet so hard to do well - it allows everyone to join in, attempting to one-up each other, and even the contestants on screen. And because it's so universal, even the contestants are interesting; recently, an eight-year-old boy managed to win two episodes, for example, even getting nine-letter words and the Conundrum. It's fantastic that at least one old-style game show survives to this day; I much prefer a game show which is actually about intellectual challenge to something like the Weakest Link where getting the questions right is actively discouraged, for example. And it, University Challenge and Mastermind are the last examples of their kind - shame, isn't it?

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