A glance at the Radio Times schedules at the time of writing demonstrates the hegemony: a daily array of mostly quiz-based formats, running from lunchtime onwards: Countdown, The Finish Line, Tipping Point, The Chase, Pointless, Richard Osman’s House of Games, Popmaster TV. Of these, only House of Games is celebrity-only. TV quizzes are apparently democratic: civilians get to appear on the screen. We can all access our 15 minutes on a quiz show. They are a spectacularised form of open combat for the age of the knowledge economy. And the apogee of the form is that great British export, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 25 years young this month and the quiz-show-format-colossus. Bestriding the globe, it is made in 107 different territories and in more languages besides (there have been nine different language versions for Indian audiences alone).

I must confess an interest: over two episodes broadcast on 31 July and 7 August 2021, I appeared in series 36 of Millionaire, winning £64,000 — 20% above the average, which is £50,200, but that doesn’t account for those who don’t make it into the chair. Much too late for an evening with Chris Tarrant, I was instead interrogated by Jeremy Clarkson, who seems self-referentially informed by this sense of zero-sum competition. Who better to test contestants than a presenter who has nurtured a pugnacious, gloves-off public image, a Seventies denim dream of unleashed masculine libido? In deference to the high-capitalist information economy that governs its mechanism, he’s encased in a suit for this gig. Plus, it helps that he increasingly resembles an Easter Island statue reimagined as a totem to Mammon.

But, for those who have experienced Millionaire, the Clarkson face-off is the last round in a long process. And perhaps one of the most under-sung aspects of the show, and certainly its most ruthlessly competitive, is the fastest-finger-first round, in which contestants compete for the opportunity to play for money by being the fastest to correctly order four options, hitting buttons on a keypad. Of six contestants per episode, only a maximum of three make it into the chair. The most likely outcome is that you go home with your travel expenses in a brown paper envelope. Millionaire is, like most TV quizzes, a game of chance, jeopardy structural to its success.

It represents the perfect distillation of the quiz form that was honed over the 20th century. The whistle-stop history is that it transferred from radio to TV in the early 20th century, with the first quizzes being BBC spelling contests for school children. Unconstrained by such Reithian ideals, the commercial US market rapidly developed new formats geared towards prizes which, with the creation of ITV in 1955, were copied over here. The $64,000 Question, adapted for the British as The 64,000 Question, crossed the Atlantic in the Fifties, awarding a carefully rationed top prize of 64,000 sixpences.

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Non-places are robbing us of life

By Mark Blacklock

Postwar consumerism, of course, is the economic base to this cultural superstructure. Goods and cash have not only formed prizes, but also the content of the knowledge required. Think of the memorisation conveyor-belt round in The Generation Game or the explicit consumer-good valuation games Sale of the Century and The Price is Right. As this indicates, one key to the success of the quiz format is its ability to hybridise, most obviously by combining the requirement for knowledge with elements of chance, but also with other, more atavistic forms of competition. Take The Krypton Factor, which required contestants to be able to complete assault courses and challenges of co-ordination as well as answering questions. Or Blind Date which, despite its entertainment window-dressing, was a competition for a partner. Should we ignore the evolutionary resonance? I think not.

As has been argued since Joseph Huizinga’s influential thesis Homo Ludens (1938), play is a constitutive aspect of human society. “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Competitive play is, in short, an essential human activity, predating civilisation. Despite the fact that its rewards, in strictly economic terms, are minimal, we take time off from more materially-rewarding activities to play, and always have. But what is curious about TV quiz shows in their contemporary manifestation is that they don’t completely satisfy Huizinga’s description. They are materially rewarding. Indeed, they’ve given rise to an entire professional class of “quizzers”, people like the cool-as-ice Judith Keppel, the first million-pound-winner on British Millionaire, who subsequently enjoyed an extensive career as a chaser on The Chase. Far from idle play, perhaps we should recognise appearance on quiz shows as a form of labour. Certainly in the context of the TV quiz, trivial knowledge is not simply cultural capital — a form of capital which values knowledge accrued in categories admired by bourgeois society — but the key to delivering actual capital.

It’s no coincidence that the quiz show format has grown in parallel to the development of tertiary economies in the developed world, as post-industrial nations have increasingly traded in and valued information as opposed to goods. The skills required by quiz shows are information-economy skills — quite literally hitting keypads fast, being able to calculate approximate probabilities on the fly, a working knowledge of game theory, co-operating with others. Until co-operation is no longer required, of course, at which point clear decision-making and/or ruthlessness might be required. The Weakest Link made this process structural to its gameplay, as contestants were required to identify the poorest performer for expulsion and use the elimination mechanism for pruning the competition. Millionaire is similarly a perfect reflection of its time: a game for the individual, with some concessions made to co-operation in its lifelines.

The most exciting of these is the phone-a-friend lifeline. Believe me from experience when I say that this is also the most fraught — who of your network of acquaintances would you trust not just to know an answer you don’t, but not to over-estimate their knowledge? Who would you forgive if they lost you half a million pounds? Since the advent of the internet, the phone-a-friend lifeline has also become a significant logistical undertaking for the show. Typically, each contestant has two phone-a-friends. With two shows filmed a day, six contestants for each, at any one time there are 24 security guards at residential addresses around the UK watching assorted acquaintances and soon-to-be-disowned friends who may or may not receive a 30-second phone call. And the possibility of cheating is in fact the single-most co-operative aspect of Millionaire history. Ruthless competition for large sums has prompted a number of collaborative efforts to win, most famously Major Charles Ingram, convicted in 2003 of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception”. But there are also syndicates that have formed to provide professional quizzers with phone-a-friends in return for a share of profits.

Millionaire is, then, the exemplary manifestation of late-capitalist economic ethics, a product of the deregulation of prizes in the late-Nineties, which had previously been limited by the Independent Broadcasting Association to the “value of a small car”. As the number of millionaires in Britain exploded, making money quick on the markets or online, every pub-intellectual wanted a shot. And Millionaire displays an aesthetic that perfectly reflects this new political economy. Think gladiatorial arena for the computer age: the circus maximus via Tron. The contestant and quizmaster sit on three-foot-high Pietranera Arco All chairs, an LG computer monitor before each, in the pit of an amphitheatre which houses the audience in seating high above. The colours are black and neon blue, with shards of blinding silver and gold. Contestants have to wear bright colours so that they don’t disappear into the background, and zany patterns fritz the cameras.

This aesthetic is now ubiquitous across prime-time TV, having been imported into the high-octane Syco world of talent shows and idols by British-born set designer Andrew Walmsley, who designed sets for the illusionist Paul Daniels when he was 15. Walmsley, who now lives in Vegas, wanted to shake up the staid appearance of previous quizzes: “They were still using video walls made out of plain glass TV screens, instead of the flat plasma screens. It was so Eighties-looking.” A doff of the cap also to the composers of the music beds, father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. The sound is designed so that its rhythm mimics a heartbeat, while the pitch increases by a semitone for each subsequent question, the music getting higher in line with the stakes. A pyramid scheme of sound and fury and trivia.

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Where does the viewer sit in all of this? They are a voyeur. For an essential element in the playing of the quiz — the jeopardy of getting an answer wrong — has its obverse in the voyeuristic mockery of failure. We experience this most keenly in the reality hybrid game shows that have flourished post-Big Brother. But it was a phenomenon noted as early as 1962 in the Pilkington Committee Report which described watching a quiz as like “watching one man in a large arena being baited”. It’s something we like to watch, just as the Romans liked to watch the circus.

However, the baying mob at the contemporary circus are not in some Colosseum, but safely ensconced in their isolated homes, the spectacle a media-networked communion between siloed viewers gathered at an online water-cooler. As Guy Debord’s fourth thesis informs us: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Those images — chains of ones and zeros — become the units of exchange in a spectacularised society. The producers duly pump them out as gifs on social media, and I treasure mine. I read the Twitter comments responding to my appearance with wry amusement (“the poundshop John Barrowman” is a moniker I’ll happily have etched on my gravestone). And is there a German compound word for being nevertheless flattered by obvious catfishing?

The quiz show viewer can mock the contestant, participate in the quiz with none of the jeopardy, or even roll the dice themselves. Without even leaving the comfort of their sofa, they can text to enter one of the many prize lotteries that proliferate around ITV quizzes. Because what is being a participant in late-capitalism other than taking part in an astronomically high-odds lottery? Perhaps they might even sign up for a 3000:1 chance of participating in the spectacle of Millionaire, momentarily seizing for themselves the means of information.

But for me, there was one great televised competition still in play. And if in the end, inevitably, the final was not quite the match of the series, nor the defining clash of two great individual goal scorers everyone was hoping for, so what? That has never stopped the FA Cup from commanding the nation’s affection. And at least University Challenge has never had to have a rematch at Old Trafford on a rainy Tuesday night.

The greatest TV quiz show of all time is, like me, over 50 years old now. Unlike me, it has never looked fitter.

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By Simon Evans

It has been compared not only to football’s most famous knockout competition but to everything from Wimbledon to Championship Darts. On this occasion, Imperial College London vs Corpus Christi, Cambridge was more of an intellectual Sumo match. Imperial got that first crucial cerebral shove in early, slicing Paxman’s opening question off at the ankles, then holding possession in the scrum to establish first base with a solid two out of three on the supplementaries, 20-nil up all before the second roll of the dice. It was as good as over by the first time out.

In Monday night’s final, the competitors displayed nerves of steel

After Brandon spotted the presence of Iran in the name of the Nobel laureate in less time than it took for the question itself to reach my ears, Corpus Christi began to panic. They lunged at the next question inadequately equipped with a viable answer and were briefly in negative equity. Imperial now eased into a comfortable, commanding posture and were never troubled for the remainder of the match.

To be fair, when Corpus Christi did get a toe hold, Wang’s urgency on the five pointers was electric, desperately driving pitons into the increasingly sheer rock face confronting his team — only to be shouldered aside, often as not by Imperial’s captain, who was hitting his marks in this match like Jocky Wilson on EPO. All it was missing was some fans on the pitch, who thought it was all over.

Sadly, it is now.

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All spectator sports are about watching grace and competence under pressure, and the character that reveals. University Challenge does this better than any other format, indoors or out, which is why it doesn’t need to dangle financial carrots in front of the contestants to keep them and the viewers onside.

It’s the only show I even try to watch as scheduled, and since entering lockdown has been my temporal anchor, the Pole Star by which I correct my course as we continue to oscillate around what is still quaintly known as “the week”.

I’m not alone. The show pulls in regular viewing figures in excess of three million. Not as great as its heyday in the mid-Sixties, when it delivered four times that. But in an era notorious not only for the splintered mirror, the fractured media of choice, but also for a viewing public believed to regard conspicuous displays of intelligence as vaguely offensive, three million is quite something.

And if anything University Challenge questions have got harder. Or at least, the science ones have got harder. The ones about ska and The Clash seem to have got easier. I guess it balances out.

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I should admit at this point that I have contrived to appear on not one but two of the show’s seasonal, novelty variations. Both University Challenge – The Professionals and a Christmas series that was as close to ‘Celebrity University Challenge’ as Paxman’s perma-curled upper lip would have permitted him to utter.

On the first occasion, after getting off to a good start, the Comedians team were soundly beaten by the Ministry of Justice. They went on to be series winners so we couldn’t complain, and we all said we’d had a lovely day out: but I was quietly furious. On the second occasion, I was on representing Southampton University. We edged a win, against York, but then had to wait several days while they recorded further heats to see if we had won by enough to go through to the semi-finals.

We hadn’t. It still hurts. Every time I hear the word “woke”, the Nutcracker Suite or the poetry of W. B. Yeats, I am back there in a flash, and this time, I buzz.

There are of course other TV quizzes. Mastermind is usually the one mentioned in the same breath, and I have been lucky enough to appear on its ‘celebrity’ isotope, too. Believe me, no one is more aware of the degree to which that term has been stretched beyond its natural elasticity in order to accommodate contestants like me.

But despite the Gestapo machismo of the famous Black Chair, University Challenge is the greater test, because it’s a test of steel, of resolve, as well as of knowledge.

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Sit in the black chair and either you can remember the answer or you can’t. You have to decide how long to wait while your brain shuffles frantically through its Rolodex before turning to you with an apologetic shrug — but by and large the viewer is watching a display of information retrieval.

Only in University Challenge do you have to brave your team mates’ wrath when you decide to open fire, not knowing if you have got the right scent. To lunge ahead of your own cohort — who might well be poised to answer correctly — and risk not merely getting the answer wrong but losing ground already hard won… this is the sadistic genius of the format.

This is why the show commands loyalty even when half the questions concern aspects of quantum mechanics so involved, most viewers wouldn’t even be able to give an answer that was meaningfully wrong.

There is a danger when things get too intellectualised that you could lose touch with the mainstream crowd. Philip Larkin wrote of modern jazz that it was too damn clever for its own good, that solos now only made sense to other musicians, and that consequently the tension had been broken between the performer and the crowd. In that context, he very likely has a point.

But not University Challenge. We are watching intellects beyond our ken, for sure, but we love to watch them swoop and soar. Where some quizzes — Hello, Bradley! What ho, Xander! — are like watching Sunday League football — shouting “Shoot! Shoot, you plonker!” at our muddy avatars on the pitch — University Challenge is like watching eight Rogers Federer, returning balls we can’t even believe they reached.

At least, it was. The series finished on Monday night. It is now Wednesday. And lockdown suddenly got real.