Saturday 9:30pm,
BBC1
Rob Brydon hosts a new quiz that’s a bit like Blankety Blank but without the format fee except not.
We don’t have an awful lot to go on, but it’s certainly a show with a bit of history – it was set to be Mrs Brown’s Celebrities, then when Brendan O’ Carroll decided it wasn’t in the brand’s interests to do it (although also suggested it was funny) it was reversioned with Rob Brydon to become Rob Brydon’s Celebrities, and now we have The Guess List. Tellyspy went and saw the pilot last August and said:
It was a bit like Blankety Blank. Two contestants answering questions, with five celebs (Gary Lineker, Hary Judd, Larry Lamb, Deborah Meaden, Sally Lindsay). One contestant then booted and the remaining plays for crap prizes like a breadmaker, chicken strimmer etc. Round one questions are like ‘In a survey, what is the most annoying thing on a plane…’ And in Round Two, the answers are numerical- celebrities answer and then an average is taken and the contestant has to decide whether its higher or lower. I.e how many arguments do the average couple have a week. It was funny and is a lot better than the BBC’s current Saturday night output. Would be very surprised if it wasn’t commissioned. The entire audience were in hysterics.
We’ll see if many other changes have been made.
Watching The Guess List the words that spring to mind, slow, boring and cringey.
Can’t see me watching this again
I taped both this and Amazing Greys, so I’ll give my verdicts on both of them at some point
As a quiz, it’s pretty awful. Barely any questions got through, and not much care taken with decent catch-up mechanics.
However: I laughed *hard*. Very hard. Massively entertained. Although that might in part be the delirium brought on by watching it up to 2AM!
It’s very Match Game in that the format is appallingly bad but I simply didn’t care cos I was too busy laughing maniacally throughout the entire show.
Me family loved it as well and they normally loathe slow game shows, so mission accomplished, I guess?
-Is this basically a duplicate? WordPress is being a pill-
It’s very Match Game in that the format is appallingly bad but I simply didn’t care cos I was too busy laughing maniacally throughout the entire show.
Me family loved it as well and they normally loathe slow game shows, so mission accomplished?
Oh dear, oh dear. I suddenly find myself longing for the halcyon days of quality shows such as, um, Reflex.
This stuff was baaaaaad.
That looked amazingly old-fashioned… Wauw. Way too slow for my liking.
Although I know the DNA for this show – it really did smack of appearing because the BBC wanting to bring back ‘Rob Brydon’s Blankety Blank’, but then bulking at the format licence costs that Freemantle were going to ask for – so, ended up with a similar idea, but far enough away not to get involved in any format pushing and shoving squables with the lawyers.
Watched the first 15 mins. Nice set, but format, meh..
The Guess List isn’t so much a quiz show as a celebrity chat show. Really not my thing, I’m afraid.
Rob did a brilliant job, and was very funny. But it felt like 5 questions in a 40 min show was to few – by far.
Funny questions and more of them combined with Rob’s wit = winner!
The Guess List is not a show about the prize. It’s about the discussion, about Rob Brydon jeering at the celebrities and upstaging the celebrities. There are enough differences from ver Blank to keep the lawyers at bay; there are enough similarities to keep viewers watching.
Could certainly have trimmed five minutes from the programme, move it from “ponderous” to “slow”. And the 9.30 slot isn’t the greatest, I think it’s a better fit just after 10pm. Or in the Friday night comedy zone, there’s no compelling reason why this couldn’t be a pre-watershed show.
Likely to be watching this again.
Largely agree with this but falls into ‘if i’m in and it’s on’ category, largely suspect the really funny stuff is on the cutting room floor. Pretty decent celebs considering.