I saw about ten minutes of Sky One’s much trumpeted new gameshow “Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old” at the weekend. Based, on a format from Fox in the US, it asks contestants questions aimed at children aged 10 and under.
I gave up watching because of that malaise of all recent quiz shows… it’s just too slow. Ever since Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, we get fake “tension” in every show ever, by having long pauses between contestants giving their answers and the host (in this case, Noel Edmonds) saying whether they’re correct or not.
What’s wrong with the rapidfire nature of something like 15 to 1, University Challenge or Mastermind? It gets even worse on commercial television, where the host will often tell contestants that they’ll find out “after the break.” They might, but I won’t. I’m out of there.
This general malaise also obviously spreads to every other kind of programming, especially those that see contestants voted off. Inevitably we get a head to head between the bottom too, and ten seconds of pausing between the host saying “and the next person to be voted off is…” and the reveal.
The fake pause is now nothing more than a cliché and formats need to be amended.
An even more worrying trait displayed in the opening ten minutes of “Are You Smarter…” was a kind of precis of what we were going to see on that evening’s show. This, in effect, showed us which contestants were going to lose in advance. I hate these trailer-within-the-programme things that seem to effect many factual programmes. “Coming up we’ve got…” and then some clips is OK at the top of the programme, but at ten minutes in we’ll get “Still to come…” and the same clip again.
I do actually have enough of a concentration span to get through a full thirty minute programme – you don’t need to do it.
Anyway, I’m sure “Are You Smarter…” is a brilliant format – but I want to get through more than three questions in an hour if I’m watching a quiz show, so I don’t suppose I’ll ever know for sure.