Gone are the days when you could win money for knowing things or being good in a field such as retaining knowledge/ intelligently matching answers with answers popular with the public/ intelligently deciphering a clue or puzzle or catchphrase. This sort of actual skill, brain power, concentration and logic has, unfortunately, been sidelined to National Lottery spin off shows, normally on air while people leave the TV alone to have dinner, the gap preempted by Doctor Who and any number of talent shows and closed by Saturday night dramas and the film at nine.
Now you have to rely on, without fail, luck, a completely useless skill, or fitness and endurance in Total Wipeout or other shows. And there are already competitions for those sorts of people. It's called sport.
Some quiz-style shows still exist but have to based around a ridiculous gimmick, such as the recent show in which an automoton leporid tries to collect plastic carrots (because you are what you eat) while you try not to startle it, called Don't Scare the Hare. It's on before Doctor Who most weeks, if you don't know it, although you would be forgiven for thinking it actually was a seasonal episode of Doctor Who featuring a reinvented chocolate-bearing BunnyBot bounding around Berkshire bludgeoning bewildered broods of innocent children. It would fit a lot of Moffat motifs.
To get back on track, though, some such 'skill is luck' shows are the perrenial favourite Golden Balls (winner of the ITV pitch of the century on the name alone) and world-dominating Deal Or No Deal. The important thing about both games is that they are extended lotteries which the presenters, a lot of moody music and a pretend man on a red phone stretch out for their duration. You do not win correlating to the game that has been played. There is no game. There is the toddler-achievable goal of picking one. Lou and Andy could play as convincingly as the Rain-man, simply sitting and saying 'I want that one.'
In days of yore, with the much remembered Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, you were guaranteed to win 32,000 in just ten goes. In Deal Or No Deal or Golden Balls you can play the whole game and walk away with 1p (next to nothing) or, literally, nothing. Through no fault of your own.
Why has this happened? There were cars (sorry, family four-wheel-drive/ saloon vehicles) on offer for Catchphrase and Family Fortunes. Holidays, cruises laid on by the channel. Millions on offer each year for feats such as answering a question correctly. Where are they now? Were they paying out too many times? Why now, when my generation are old enough to take part, are we offered only a televised scratch-card rubbing with a bearded man in a shirt made from a curtain telling us that we need to 'feel' the boxes?
We genuinely stand a chance, as the most higher-educated generation in years, perhaps ever, at getting through to the million pound question with Tarrant. So why stop it? Could we have bankrupted ITV by all taking part?
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