The Stupidest TV Quiz Show Concepts

Designing a TV quiz show is a sacred art. Get it right and your format can live through the decades and become a part of the cultural landscape. Think Mastermind’s black chair or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’s ‘phone a friend’. Get it wrong though, and you leave audiences baffled, bored and forced to entertain themselves by wondering Vernon Kay is any relation of ‘Allo ‘Allo’s Gordon Kaye. (He’s not.)

Below are the TV quiz shows (not just game shows, there has to be a trivia question element) that make Joey from Friends’ Bamboozled, and Mitchell and Webb’s Numberwang look coherent and well thought-out. Approach this list in the knowledge that Tipping Point and Rolling In It – two shows based around those seaside amusement arcade machines where you push 2p coins onto little shelves – didn’t make it. They were just too sensible and good.

1000 Heartbeats

“One contestant, hooked up to a heart monitor. Seven challenges, £25,000, and a thousand of your own heartbeats counting down. Hold your nerve, breathe deeply, and keep calm because the quicker your heart beats, the faster your time runs out. Can you handle the pressure?”

Nobody expects to be confronted with the unmovable fact of their own mortality at 4pm on a weekday on ITV, but that was 1000 Heartbeats. It was the show in which human shop mannequin Vernon Kay asked contestants (and therefore, also us at home): “Will you run out of heartbeats?” Yes, Vernon, I will. And so will you, your wife TV’s Tess Daly, and every starry-eyed child and pink-nosed puppy on this planet. One day, we will all run out of heartbeats and, as you so callously put it, “leave with nothing.” Cheers for the reminder.

Probably the only TV quiz show that health insurers could use to set their premiums, it set a macabre tone. It’s strangely intrusive to know how fast a player’s heart is beating, like being allowed to watch them use the dressing room toilet. Sinisterly, you’d find yourself hoping for their heart rates to climb, if only to know whether or not a medic would be brought in at the 200-and-over mark. Even more sinister was Kay extracting the wrong-answer punishment of deducting heartbeats like an evil Fitbit in an episode of Black Mirror. Adding to the strangeness was the gimmick of a live string quartet playing along to the heart rates and conducted by a man dressed, confusingly, in a bowler hat (maybe they were thinking of bus conductors?).

The Wave

“Where there’s only one thing that stands in the way of victory: a whopping great ocean. Pairs of daring contestants will brave the almighty Atlantic to win a shedload of cash. The further they make it out, the more they rake it in, but they’d better be back on dry land before my klaxon, or risk losing everything. Get ready to take on The Wave”

‘So, fellow game show creators, what twist can we put on the old ask-contestants-trivia-questions format?’
‘Drown them.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Put them out at sea, a proper sea with huge waves and dangerous currents, and for every question they get wrong, attach a 1kg weight to them before making them try to swim back to shore.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. That’s insanely stupid and risky.’
‘Have two contestants and just do that to one of them? The other one can stay on the beach with, say, Rylan from Big Brother’s Bit on the Side.’
‘We’re going to win a Bafta.’

Readers, they did not.

Freeze Out

“Only one player can make it to our final and a chance to win that £10,000 jackpot. The rest will be frozen out and eliminated. Players will take turns to try to clear all seven blue sliders from the white circle. Answer a question correctly and players can earn an orange slider which they’ll use to knock the blue ones out. The four players who clear the white circle in the fastest time go through to the next round, the slowest player will be frozen out and eliminated.”

Too dull, too repetitive, too many rules, too little tension, and too much like the sport of curling but without the fun running-with-a-broom bits. From a marriage to a shiny-floored TV show, there’s nothing more melancholic than the face of someone trying to make something that just doesn’t work, work. And despite the valiant attempts of host Mark Durden-Smith, ice-sliding trivia quiz The Freeze did not work. The forced interactions with “The Ice Judge” Uriah Rennie were painful, the attempt to coin the catchphrase “Slide on” was woeful, the badinage with the contestants – all of whom looked confused as to why they were there – and the slightly too-long pauses all combined to make your teeth itch.

Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance

“Over the next three weeks, players from across the nation will pit their wits against the Bank Balance board. A jackpot of £100,000 quite literally hangs in the balance. To beat the board will take teamwork, steady hands and cool heads. With so much at stake, it’s easy to reach boiling point. There is no room to hide, and no cashing out. You either win or crash out. This is Bank Balance.”

Have you ever overheard your neighbours in the garden next door weighing up the pros and cons of where to install the concrete base for their shed? Then you’ve experienced the thrill of Bank Balance. This short-lived BBC quiz show involved pairs answering trivia while trying to place heavy blocks of ‘gold’ on a wobbly board without tipping it over. Hosted by TV’s angriest chef Gordon Ramsay, the pace of this hour-long show was glacially slow. With 10-minute gaps between questions, the spare time was filled with restatement of the rules and mindless chat in which the poor contestants were forced to find nine different ways to say “We’d spend it on a holiday, Gordon.” In accordance with tradition, the set looked like a lost TARDIS console, but all the illuminated lighting in the world couldn’t rescue this one.

Babushka

“Imagine a giant Babushka doll, and another one, and another one. 10 giant Babushka dolls. Some hide smaller dolls that are worth money, a lot of money, but some hold… nothing. Which doll will you open, how far will you go to see what’s inside? Introducing: Babushka.”

Just to be clear, nobody’s blaming Rylan. The presenter was far and above the best thing about the short-lived 2017 UK Babushka whose premise (see above) reads like a poorly translated takeaway menu. Leaving aside the fact that babushka dolls aren’t a thing  and those stacking painted ornaments are called Matryoshka dolls, the gameplay here was bewilderingly cruel. Contestants would go through the game answering insult-to-the-intelligence questions, opening dolls and winning money, and then, because of how probability works, they’d eventually lose the lot and all the atmosphere would be sucked out of the studio like they’d opened an airlock in space. “This new high-risk game show is an exciting rollercoaster ride where anything can happen,” they said. It wasn’t.

Honourable Mention: Vorderman’s Sudoku Live

Not strictly a quiz show as, unlike the Eamonn Holmes-hosted Sudo-Q, there wasn’t a trivia question element, but it would be remiss not to salute this fallen format in recognition of its efforts to jazz up the act of some people very slowly and inaccurately filling in a sudoku.

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