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shewhomust...That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge
I've been aware of Pointless for some time as one of those afternoon quiz shows that you see occasionally when visiting someone: I'd have described it as mildly entertaining, more interested in chatting to the contestants than in the quiz. Which is not entirely wrong. But while we were on Westray last summer we fell into the habit of watching it, a pleasant end to a holiday afternoon before preparing an evening meal; and I must have become accustomed to its idiosyncracies, because lately it has become my distraction of choice when I am looking for something undemanding on the iPlayer, to watch before bedtime.
Article about Pointless which explains how the show works, gives some interesting (to me: ymmv) details about how the formula was tweaked from the original version, and resolves some of the things I wondered about it.
There is, I admit, an inordinate amount of chat. Apparently presenter Alexander Armstrong was shocked, after the first series was broadcast, to discover how much of the banter had been cut, and the number of contestants was actually reduced to make this unnecessary. Since the dialogue between Armstrong and Richard Osman is more entertaining than that between Armstrong and the contestants, I don't dispute this decision. Much of the first round consists of Armstrong asking each (of eight) contestants in turn "And what do you do in [wherever they come from]?" or, if they are returning for their second bite at the cherry, "Remind us what you do in [wherever they come from]?" His stilted responses to this were initially irritating (why is he telling them "that's right", this is information about themselves, they know it's right), but I have become accustomed to them, and even charmed by his recent efforts to avoid saying "that's right", and not to say "that's nice" unless he can follow on with some reason why it's nice. And the sheer inanity of this is at least evidence that it isn't all scripted, so I'm not being conned when the two hosts talk through the unanswered questions at the end of each round, much as if Armstrong himself were participating as a strong but not infallible contestant. There are moments, too, when the conversation takes off into the surreal. But I am making the show sound niche and slightly amateurish, neither of which is the case. Richard Osman is the creator of a string of successful panel shows, and Alexander Armstrong has been in everything from Doctor Who to Danger Mouse, and turned down the job of hosting Countdown: that I only knew him as a patron of the Lit & Phil tells you less about his career than about the limitations of my knowledge. Fortunately, the internet is just bursting with information and commentary on both hosts and the show itself, so, now that I have extricated myself from that rabbit hole, we can move on.
Part - the part I can rationalise - of the appeal of Pointless is that it demonstrates what is, and what isn't, common knowledge, and this is a subject I find endlessly fascinating. It isn't about being cleverer than other people by knowing things that they don't; the success of the quiz team of which we are members demonstrates not that we are brilliant but that we have found a quiz which is a very good match for the things we know. Pointless is a less good match: although the show promises to reward obscure knowledge, what it is looking for is obscure details of not-so-obscure subjects. Recent superhero blockbusters yes, French nouvelle vague no. The lyrics of Robbie Williams' Angels yes, The lyrics of Bob Dylan's Tombstone Blues, oh, no. Football, very much yes, literature, not really. A recent set of questions titled 'literature' asked contestants to name the authors of novel series: they were offered two titles, and the initials of the author for each of seven authors. Options on the board included Harry Potter, Narnia, Jilly Cooper; the best score was for knowing the author of the Poldark books (the recent TV series clearly hasn't impressed Winston Graham on the nations' consciousness). I'm not complaining that the quiz is too easy: the more mainstream popular the questions, the harder I find them. It's more fun when I have some idea of the answer, and this is the case often enough to keep me hooked. But there is plenty to remind me how much I don't know about things that are assumed to be common knowledge, starting with everything to do with sport but not stopping there.
The Pointless formula takes the exploration of what people know beyond the individual contestants, because questions are put to a panel ahead of the show. The challenge is to choose an answer which is correct, but has been given by as few as possible of that panel, and it isn't always easy to tell which answer that will be. In rounds where contestants must choose which of a set of questions to answer, sixties pop music tends to score high (i.e. the contestant may not know about it, but the panel probably did). Then there is the format where contestants are asked to name a US president or a chemical element or a country - though there is usually a second requirement: a US state with an even number of letters, a UK city north of Birmingham (this one niggles at me, because Kirkwall wasn't mentioned, so I shall never know whether it would have been a good choice) ... I am caught in a web of parentheses. Clearly, if you plan to be a contestant on Pointless, it would be worth your while swotting up on these things, and clearly, some of the contestants do, either consciously or by watching the programme often enough to absorb the information. There was one magnificent occasion on which the first-round challenge was to name a planet or constellation with an A in the name: Mars scored high, but then a brave contestant offered 'Ursa Major', and was rewarded with a triumphantly low score. Emboldened, the next contestant offered 'Orion's Belt', which was declared wrong as neither being a constellation in its own right, nor having an A in it. Then someone realised that signs of the Zodiac were constellations, and we had a couple of those, before more incorrect answers resulted in the round ending in a tie because two pairs of contestants had score 200 (that is, each member had earned the 100 point penalty for an incorrect answer) and the initial tie-breaker failing because, invited to confer and try again, each couple once again offered an incorrect ansswer.
I wondered how the panels are chosen: by a market research company, says the internet, and that makes sense: you couldn't recruit them through any sort of fan network without setting up a feedback effect (I discount a remark of Richard Osman's to the effect that 'X used to be a pointless answer, but now carries [small number of] points' as reading too much into statistically insignificant variation. This may be optimistic.) Equally, though, you don't want a panel of people with zero interest in this sort of trivia. It is a mystery to me.
Equally mysterious is the process by which answers are generated for the final round, in which the successful duo try to win the jackpot by giving a pointless answer about something quite specific (on a subject over which they have a degree of choice). Is there some sort of filter, so that only people who know something about football are on the panel which names clubs which have played in particular competitions, or movie buffs for the stars of ten year old films? Bearing in mind that scores on these questions are generally very low, and often enough pointless to give contestants a decent chance of winning, perhaps they do reflect the level of common knowledge - and when I draw a complete blank, I've simply hit a topic about which I am exceptionally ignorant.
One last example, because this one did surprise me. The title "'Northern' Transport" led to the requirement to give three names which were either stations on the Tyneside Metro, stops on the Northern Line of London's underground, or something else which I have forgotten. My immediate thoughts were Tufnell Park on the Underground (because it's not a major station but one I use frequently) and Percy Main on the Metro (because when we talked about a local equivalent of the game Mornington Crescent, we always called it Percy Main). Then, feeling that we had two strong answers there, I suggested Mornington Crescent itself as a third answer, for the self-indulgent pleasure of saying (with a flourish) "Mornington Crescent!" As it turned out, the contestants found their pointless answer on the Metro with Stadium of Light (which, I suppose, if you think of it as the Tyneside Metro isn't the first name that comes to mind) and Mornington Crescent was a pointless answer. Wait, what? I thought I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue had driven the name Mornington Crescent far enough into the limelight that someone on that hundred-strong panel would have thought of it (I don't quite credit the show with reopening the station, but close).
Apparently not, which shows how much I know about what is - and isn't - common knowledge. And that's where I came in.
