The Book Quiz

Revision as of 11:58, 23 January 2008

Synopsis

David Baddiel, gawd bless him. His name is mentioned in practically every development meeting for any intelligence-meets-comedy format, alongside Clive Anderson, Michael Palin, Griff Rhys-Jones, Tony Robinson and Stephen Fry. While not the first choice for a quiz show necessarily, he famously has a double-first in English from Cambridge. Lord love a duck, finally someone's come up with a format that makes Baddiel's game show debut possible.

The rounds are various, usually for 2 points per correct answer. The first is "Of which book is this the opening line?", plus bonus points for spotting the link between the books in the round. One round is "Which of these book titles is made-up?" in which the most banal is always the correct answer. There's "What book are these people talking about?" in the Child's Play style. A bluffing round invites the teams to talk about a book only one of the pair has in fact read, and the other team have to spot who's bluffing.

The questions themselves revolve around the high-brow bestsellers you usually go past when walking into Waterstone's, and whether they entertain or even encourage you to read a bit more is highly debateable.

Unfortunately, the entire format comes right off the rails at the very end with a quickfire round of 90 seconds to each team, again for 2 points per correct answer. While fine in principle, it means that for 25 minutes of the show the teams will have scored around 10 points, then all of a sudden they can end up with 36. It's so unbalanced it's the Perpetual Motion Engine of formats. This is very disappointing given that the show is made by much the same production team as University Challenge.

The winners get - yes! - a book token each.

Theme music

David Ayres and Felix Tod

Trivia

Recorded at The London Studios, in spite of the fact it's a Granada Manchester production.

See also

Weaver's Week review

Web link

Apply for audience tickets from Standing Room Only

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