Weaver's Week 2025-05-11

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Ah, the familiar sax-based theme tune, teal diamonds bounce across a red backdrop, concluding with the host raising a metaphorical eyebrow. Welcome to

Contents 1 Claire Hooper's House of Games (3) 1.1 Remarkable Entertainment (part of Banijay) for ABC (Australia), from 21 April 2 Genius Game 2.1 Sidebar: what's the word? 2.2 The telly show was nothing like this 3 In other news

Claire Hooper's House of Games (3)

Remarkable Entertainment (part of Banijay) for ABC (Australia), from 21 April

Yes, the show is so successful it's gained an Australian version. Our review is based on the first week's episodes, which very much felt like a first week.

The opening shot tells us this is a very close facsimile to the BBC2 show we know and love. Blocky rectangles line the walls, those little overhead lights give off a glow. The colour scheme is red and white, with blue as an accent. A big screen dominates the left of the set, with five people sat on large armchairs to the right. Very little has changed.

Okay, apart from the host. Richard Osman hasn't been able to make the trip down under, not after the incident with the wallaby and the barbecue tongs. Instead, the show is hosted by Claire Hooper, a stand-up comedian who is sitting down for the entire show. Claire used to host The Great Australian Bake Off, which probably makes her the Mel Giedroyc of the show.

Good news! This is better than Pictionary and Letterbox combined. Better news! Other format points have been retained: the trophy on which absolutely no expense has been spent, and the daily prizes all featuring a little cut-out diamond picture of Claire. Prizes in Claire's Boutique include the sliders, the scented candle, the watering can; and new ideas like the piggy bank.

Guests for the first week were Zan Rowe (a presenter on ABC's Double J radio station, which is close in spirit to BBC 6 Music); Geraldine Hickey (another stand-up comedian); Bob Murphy (retired captain of the Western Bulldogs AFL team); and Pete Helliar (former host of daily current affairs show The Project). We guess that a similar line-up from over here would be Lauren Laverne, David Seaman, someone from Loose Women, and a stand-up comedian because House of Games never has trouble booking stand-up comedians.

As is traditional, the show begins with Rhyme Time, two words that rhyme with each other. House Rules is a great game, and a good choice for the opening show – it demonstrates the energy players need to succeed.

Later in the week, they got to "Pony Collette", the round we know as "Spaniel Craig", replace the first word of the answer with the rhyme in the picture. One Out Of Four Ain't Bad, players try to complete a four-word answer so it reads correctly along the row. There's No "I" In Hooper, name things in a category without a certain letter. Highbrow-Lowbrow, Sounds Like, you're familiar with.

Name Tag was played, the one where you replace a name in the answer with the name of an opponent to give them first dibs on the next question. Not sure this was a great choice as a daily opener, as it's best with some chance to peg back both the daily and the weekly leader. And there was The Elephant In The Room, It's All In the Name, and Internet History – the one where we're asked to identify historical figures from hashtags.

Pairs games are present: You Complete Me, Partners in Time (name a thing from your assigned decade), My Perfect Match, and Distinctly Average.

Two rounds crop up every day. Answer Smash, of course. Don't Believe a Word is played as the second round every time, it's the round we know as Correction Centre – take a preposterous statement, change one word, make it true.

Every game is introduced by an example. Don't think the BBC has ever displayed an example to the viewers, we're just expected to pick up the rules by osmosis while they're playing.

The main point about Claire Hooper's House of Games (3) is that it's clearly slower than Richard Osman's version. Pretty much from the start, Richard has established a rhythm: read out the question, no interrupting, a brief pause for the viewers at home to shout out their answers, and then the players in the studio buzz in. On this edition, Claire will sometimes repeat the answer the contestant's just given: "is it trifle?" before going to the screen for a ping or a buzz. Claire is also prepared to tolerate a lot of faffing about in Answer Smash, when we know Richard would have buzzed the player out if they weren't answering as soon as they pressed.

Perhaps because of the slower pace and the examples, there are fewer questions in the show – just one per player in It's All In the Name, and a particularly short stack for Elephant In The Room. This column is not the target market, and if these changes are going to help ABC viewers to love the show, we'll defend them.

Reaction in Australia has been positive, and viewing figures have been decent – overnights up to 700,000 total viewers, when the most popular programmes barely break 2 million. It's on a par with the show it replaced, the much snarkier Hard Quiz.

Will we get a few episodes of Claire Hooper's House of Games over here? Perhaps not; the slower pace is not what we're used to, and there would be calls of "Blimey, Richard's changed!" But it's great to see another successful export, proof that good quizzes will find their audience worldwide.

Genius Game

Right, massive spoilers in this section, so go to the ITV Hub and catch up prontissimo.

As a bit of spoiler space, here's a completely irrelevant picture that has nothing to do with the episode and we certainly won't make reference to again.

So, if David Tennant is the star attraction, why does he only appear on the screen and in voiceover? Two reasons spring to mind. One is stylistic, Genius Game is based on a Korean format, where "The Creator" of the games never interacts with the contenders. The other is mundane: if they'd paid David Tennant to be on set for the whole recording block, they would have had somewhat less budget to spend on other parts of the show. At least he does the whole narration, bringing all the energy we'd expect from his performances.

We left Genius Game a quarter of the way through the series. If this was the first series of The Traitors, it's the point where we've finished that revolving wheel challenge that might have told us something about the players but probably didn't. And we're still to get that breakfast. Have faith, have confidence.

Sad to see that ITV has returned to its rotten habits. Rather than stick to the published schedule, they've decided to reduce Genius Game to one episode per week. This is wholly discourteous to viewers, who cannot rely on what's published in the listings magazines, or even in the daily freesheets that morning. To replace Genius Game with Celebrity Millionaire hosted by the oafish Jeremy Clarkson is just rubbing salt in the wounds. (Can you tell that we're really, really hopping mad with ITV and have heavily edited this paragraph to say we think they're a bunch of earl's sons? That.)

So, what did happen in the one episode ITV deigned to let us see this week?

Codewords. There's a ten-letter word, and everybody gets a clue to the word. Three rounds of discussion, after which players give three letters in the position they think the letters feature in the word; a point if your letter is somewhere in the word, a further point if your letter is in the right place. Except you only know your score, not the individual values.

The idea is that contestants will pool their clues and their guesses, to work out what the word is. After a fourth round of discussion, players give their guess as to the word.

But! One of the players is the Secret Agent, and their job is to stop anyone from guessing the word. Should someone guess the word, the Agent goes to the Death Match. If nobody guesses it, the Agent is the winner and the lowest score goes to the Death Match.

Here are the clues the players were given.

• The second half of the code word contains more consonants than vowels
• The code word contains two letters that appear in the word GAME
• The first two letters feature one letter from the first half of the alphabet and one letter from the second half
• At least one letter appears twice
• The sixth and tenth letters are adjacent in the alphabet
• The two middle letters are seven letters apart in the alphabet
• The last two vowels are in reverse alphabetical order
• The code word contains at least two vowels

Sidebar: what's the word?

Can we find the code word just from these clues? Very nearly. Let's start with these clues.

• The second half of the code word contains more consonants than vowels
• The code word contains two letters that appear in the word GAME
• The first two letters feature one letter from the first half of the alphabet and one letter from the second half

We asked our favourite online searcher for words meeting these criteria, and took the top 1500 candidate words. If it's a reasonably common word, it'll be on that list. (Our searcher is somewhat biased towards proper nouns; nothing in the rubric said whether it was a proper noun or something else.)

• At least one letter appears twice
• The sixth and tenth letters are adjacent in the alphabet

First of those clues wasn't terribly helpful – there are few ten-letter words with ten different letters – but the second clue allowed us to prune the list to 163 words.

• The two middle letters are seven letters apart in the alphabet

At this point, we're reduced to three candidate words: ingolstadt (a place in Bavaria), extinguish, and nickelback (ask yer dad). All of these meet the last two clues

• The last two vowels are in reverse alphabetical order
• The code word contains at least two vowels

Given a perfect and encyclopaedic knowledge of the language, we'd probably play ISH in the last three spaces. Six points would be lovely, any other result would help narrow down the word – or show we'd missed something.

Players who are not Susie Dent can work on the most likely letter-position combos. If you don't know anything about anything, play E in positions 2 and 9, and S in position 10. Or the suffix -ING; these should get some points on the board and stop you from coming last.

The telly show was nothing like this

By chance, Ben was assigned the role of defender. His strategy was to be bold and blatant about this fact, and to attempt to manipulate absolutely everybody in line with his plan. Don't play the game, play the opposition. Ben knew who he wanted to put up for the Death Match, and by sheer force of personality ensured all nine players remained in line.

But at what cost? Well, friendships are beginning to sour – contestant India chafed at not being allowed to play the intellectual game, and threatened to revolt against Ben's plan. Another contestant, Amalfi, was bribed with the prospect of a garnet and had a proper moral quandary – does he declare the full word and throw Ben under the bus? No uprising today, neither India nor Amalfi followed through; but with the clear implication that Ben has burned a lot of his social credit and needs to take a back seat next time and certainly can't pull this trick again.

On the Dealer's Room podcast, Alex and friends are talking about "Sliding Doors" moments, like in the film of the same name. Small decisions, perhaps things that happen by chance, but that end up having big effects. This column reckons India's decision to stay in the group was just such a sliding doors moment. One of the game-winning bubble from the last episode chooses to defect, it's a massive vote of no confidence in Ben. We can be sure that the others who weren't so close would have welcomed her with open arms, and conspired against him.

More orthogonally, we're reminded of something from the last Labour government: people knew they would get advancement if they grovelled to Blair, so they grovelled to Blair, until it happened that people got ahead by grovelling to Brown. And when the tipping point came, it came suddenly and for reasons we've all forgotten, and it was a complete shift from Blair to Brown. But if Ben is Tony Blair, who is this room's Gordon Brown?

Anyway, Ben was running around all through the set, playing all the competitors like Alexander Rybak plays the fiddle. To be absolutely fair, Ben completed a virtuoso piece of team management, he had the confidence and charm to get the result he wanted, and carried enough of a threat so that anyone who crossed him would know they were up for the Death Match.

But as a television spectacle, this was not the greatest. It was like the show is running on rails, and everybody gently ambling towards the predetermined conclusion. Was there going to be a revolt? Not tonight, not tonight.

The editors for this series have chosen to go for the drama-serious-drama, and the middle of this show needed some more levity. Less moody synths, more quick cuts of Ben running around with something jocular playing. And it was the second episode in a row where a contestant has basically nerfed the main game – what David Tennant talked about in the opening moments had almost nothing to do with what we saw on screen.

Anyway, Ben's game-replacement rail service arrived at the terminus. Nobody else had won a garnet, Ben had (accidentally?) miscalculated; that's three grand taken out of the winners' prize fund. His chosen victim was Ken, and Ken picked Bhasha for the Death Match. Here's another road not taken: Ken could have dragged Charlotte in, making the point that working with Ben had gained nothing – no garnets, no immunity – and risked losing everything.

The Death Match turned out to be a poker game where you can see the opponent's card but not your own. Ken's a professional poker, but he hadn't told anyone this. He knew the tactic to count cards, allowed himself to get a bit behind while he sussed out his opponent's betting strategy, before moving in for the kill.

Next time, in what's probably going to be a shorter write-up, it's the Black Blocks.

In other news

No Quizzy Mondays this week, BBC2 preferred snooker.

If it's May it must be Round the Islands Quiz (Radio 4, Sun) season; questions to make us pine for the simplicity of Genius Game (VM1 and ITV, Wed and Thu). A new run of I Kissed a Boy (BBC3, Sun and Mon), and Unspeakable is back (Radio 4, Tue).

It's the grand final of University Challenge (BBC2, Mon), and the Eurovision Song Contest semi-finals (RTÉ2, BBC2, BBC Radio 2, Tue and Thu). We'll be publishing on Saturday next week, primarily to cover everything that's happened on stage in Basel, but also reports on events in Salford, Belfast, and David Tennant's secret lair.

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