Quizmania

I am a raving insomniac and have been since I can remember. I would therefore classify myself as an expert at judging the quality of late night television. I have seen it all from prison dramas based around Aussie farm girls to documentaries about illicit sex.

I came home from Dublin late one night exhausted. It had been a great day, much beer had been consumed and I was feeling rather merry. I decided to chance my arm with the television in the hope that something passable would be on. I changed the channel to ITV. And there it was in all of its tacky glory.

Quizmania is like nothing you have ever seen before. It is a “quiz show” where viewers get to play by phoning up a premium rate number in an attempt to get through live on air to have a chance at winning a cash prize.

The games are brain meltingly simple. The most common form is a quiz where you have to give the name of a famous person with the first name they present you with. The other night it was “David”. Of course none of the really famous David’s were on the list, so even if you got through to the studio you still have about a 500000/1 chance of winning.

Most of the people who phone up are pissed/drugged off their heads and continually name the same names over and over again. Its quite comedic the first few times but if you watch it for any length of time it starts to become as pleasurable as pulling out your teeth with needle nosed pliers.

And as for the presenters. Jesus. The main host is a rather camp character who refers to himself simply as “Greggles”. It is Greggles job to attempt to disguise the fact that the show is just a really cheap way for someone to make money out there.

Greggles does a fantastic good job at distracting attention away from this idea. You can’t help but focus your atttention entirely upon the poor sod. It’s quite evident that he is the type of person who sniffs his own dirty underwear before putting them into the washing machine. He is the type of person who goes to 70’s disco’s and pogoes alone on the dancefloor to Alice Cooper tracks.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the show is that Greggles continually informs the public that they should set themselves a call limit, whether it be 5, 10, 50 or 100 calls. You can tell that there are some people out there on jobseekers allowance repeatedly hitting redial whilst the repo men are busy organising another dawn raid to take back the sofa and washing machine.

All of this goes on for 5 hours straight. It starts at 12 and ends on 5. Trippers across Britain beware! One look of the garishly designed set is enough to make you think that God hates you and is gonna start making the walls close in on you.

I’d far rather just have the teletext screens up on closing. They are no-where near as repetitive as an average showing from Greggles.