Watching Telly: Pointless

Just a few things first, I’ll put up a Saturday Night’s Alright for Writing post up in a bit for tonight’s televisual spectaculars, and don’t forget also it’s the first main event of the Bother Series of Poker tomorrow night at 8pm – £5.50 to enter, all welcome.

Anyway, yesterday I went and saw some Pointless being filmed. It is important to remember that Pointless is basically the only show in the last five years I’ve seen live more than once, and is also the only show I’ve been to see simply because I really like seeing it filmed. I wrote some stuff on Twitter, here is all that stuff again expanded upon a little:

• Xander and Richard were in decent form, although there wasn’t as much to spark off as there was last time I saw it being filmed, which was a shame. However we learned that people who pronounce Monaco as Mon-ARC-o are “wankers,” and that Richard is a big fan of Max from The Wanted, because Twitter goes into overdrive everytime The Wanted get mentioned. Also he can’t pronounce Namibia without a run-up. I can’t remember if Xander suggested he was more of a One Direction fan.
• The new variety bucket head to head (my title) works OK – it’s good for a quiz round but will irk the purists (although I understand why they did it – lists are finite, quiz is forever). It’s a best of three quiz round, each question testing something different.
• The first question is a picture question – yesterday we got naming the boy band from a picutre of one of the members, and name the home secretaries. There are a choice of five in each case, and obviously the idea is to pick the one that you know that the fewest of the 100 people got. The reveal of the pictures in each case felt rather ponderous – they flash on screen whilst Xander says “A…B…C…” – it feels like it needs at least a backing bed, my preferred choice is the Tony Hart Gallery music.
• Question two is the “fact” question. A subject is revealed (for example, Cornwall) and five clues to facts are given (such as “the only county that borders it” or “main character from the Winston Graham series of books set there”). The aim is to fulfill the fact that the fewest people got.
• Question three sounds like it could be anything, we got naming the artists of paintings, I know another recording that got filling in famous quotations.
• They sometimes have the Quiz Round in round one, with seven options to choose from. This set my alarm bells ringing a bit but Round 2 turned out to be Classic Pointless, so. Why they did it this way round I don’t know.
• When the quiz turned up in round one I was a bit worried it was going to turn into a three quiz round show which I can learn to live with but I’m not convinced it lends itself to comedy and certainly don’t lend themselves to Pointless answers as much as Classic Pointless rounds do. In fairness, there wasn’t a ‘pick items from a list’ round in any of the shows I saw.
• Not quite sure how to get round the lack of inerent pointlesses other than ensuring a Pointless answer in each list of questions. I don’t know.
• The end game is the same, although now teams get a choice of five categories, and the category names are less broad than they might have been in the past. They also change on a daily basis – unused ones are not automatically coming back on the next show.
• Can’t remember who the warm-up was, I think he did the Control pilot last year. Not especially funny but very likable.
• If Pointless runs out of puff (Puffless), we still want Xander and Richard to front a UK version of De Slimste. It would be amazing.

It’s always a nice way to spend an afternoon.