Fact Hunt
Synopsis
A show with a strange history, this was originally a mock quiz show in Al Murray's sitcom Time Gentlemen Please. Then it expanded into a big audience-participation routine on tour, and now it's finally transmogrified into an actual proper real-life game show.
Teams representing pubs answer stupid questions put to them by Murray's "Pub Landlord". Most of part 1 is spent meeting the three members of each of three teams, which is all very jolly but extremely slow moving. In fact, only four questions are asked before the break.
The pace picks up in part 2, although - a bit like Not a Lot of People Know That - a lot of the plotted jokes seem to rely on the fact that Fact can sound a bit rude. The questions are largely proper questions although there are common twists such as an extremely long question which invites people to buzz in early for "But that's not the answer I have on the card!"-type hilarity. The bizarre scoring system is further complicated by a specialist subject round where answering both questions wrongly wipes out your score entirely.
At least the fruit machine end game (with its Hold and Nudging of multiple choice answers) has had some thought put into it. But overall this is more comedy than game show and we're not sure it's all the better for it.
Catchphrases
"They FACT it up!"
Inventor
Sitcom version: Al Murray and Richard Herring, Formatted version: Al Murray and Nick Symons
Trivia
Possibly set a new record for the game show with the shortest title sequence ever, consisting - as it did - of the words FACT HUNT exploding. And that was it.
