Anyone seen my marbles?

11 April 2012

Did I ever tell you about my old tutor at university? He was sixtysomething at the time, and blessed with a firstclass intellect, when he cornered me one afternoon and began expressing his innermost fears about the effects of old age.

"I've noticed that my body is starting to make the same noises as my coffee maker, and it's frightening," he confided, "but what I'm really worried about is losing my mind. So if you ever notice that I'm starting to go senile, do please tell me frankly, so I can quietly end it all while I still have my dignity."

I promised that I would, then forgot all about it until a few months ago, when I met him at a bus stop and realised to my chagrin that his lift was no longer stopping at all floors. In short, he was ga-ga. So, true to my vow, I told him bluntly that his mind was going, only to discover that there was a fundamental flaw in his original plan.

Being in the full grip of senility, he could no longer remember our agreement, and anyway had forgotten everything I told him within a nanosecond. A blessing I suppose. And now, I'd like to tell you about my old tutor at university who was sixtysomething at the time...

I've often suspected that the elderly viewers who tune into Channel 4's stairlift slot every afternoon do so primarily not for entertainment, but as a means of monitoring their own intellectual decline.

In between those ads exhorting them to start saving now for their own funeral expenses, and offers for baths with "walk-in sides" (that seem to invite Zeebrugge-style inundations in the bathroom), they can check the speed of their mental deterioration by trying to solve the anagrams on Countdown, or guessing at the answers on Beat the Nation (C4).

Otherwise, it's hard to see why anyone would voluntarily tune into this lacklustre daily general knowledge quiz (I could barely stay awake, and Veronica is paying me good money to watch), and one wonders at the way that Endemol UK (whose directors include Mr Peter Bazalgette) can apparently get almost anything commissioned nowadays at Horseferry Road.

Perhaps one of the members of the C4 board (Mr Peter Bazalgette, for example) should be sent to investigate why this should be?

Yesterday's edition had been moved to a lunchtime slot, to make way for the racing from Cheltenham, but the earlier time made little difference to the feeling of lethargy that soon engulfed this viewer.

That was due partly to the lack of a studio audience (and consequent lack of studio atmosphere), but mainly to the format of the quiz itself, which despite claims of being "highly innovative", is simply the standard "how high is Eric Blair and what's Ben Nevis's pen name?" stuff, with a dash of Family Fortunes-style "we asked the public" polling thrown in.

Not even the presence of Graeme Garden as presenter could lift the proceedings, because although he's one of the sharpest and funniest writers in the country, he's inexplicably been told to play it straight, and not for laughs. Worse, his co-host is Tim Brooke-Taylor, a man who requires no such instruction.

The four contestants included a self-confessed "adrenaline junkie", who presumably spent the next halfhour going cold turkey, as this cold turkey of a show lumbered sleepily from one tedious question to the next. "

What a cracking contest ... it's tense right up to the wire ... now they're really under pressure," cried the presenters lamely, but neither they, the heartbeat soundtrack, nor the prospect of seeing somebody win £100 made the news that 99 per cent of people don't know that James Clerk Maxwell established the link between light and electromagnetism in 1873 seem one whit more interesting.

Inviting Zandra Rhodes (complete with a stuffed tarantula on each eyelid) to be the "celebrity guest" simply increased the feeling of ennui, and caused me to recall a huge argument I once had with her in a lousy TV studio green room, after I'd suggested that the reason people react more violently against fur than leather is because it's safer to harass rich women than a gang of Hell's Angels.

AS for the news that almost half the population don't realise that Prince Andrew is the Duke of York, that's hardly surprising. I mean, the Duke of York had 10,000 men, so they probably confused Andrew with his brother Edward.

Nowadays, vacuous opinion polls regularly set the news agenda. Indeed, one quoted with delight yesterday by Peter Hain apparently showed that most Iraqis feel life is better now than it was a year ago (although he inexplicably forgot to mention that, a year ago, those same Iraqis were waiting to be bombed), so one shouldn't be surprised that they're infiltrating the quiz show genre too.

But surely YouGov has better things to do with its time than establish that 30 per cent of margarine eaters know how many sides a hexagon has, against only 25 per cent of butter eaters.

And while I'm grateful to Endemol that it didn't also book Bill Oddie for a triple-headed Goodie-fest, why didn't it just hire Garden as sole presenter, and give him time to riff on the questions?

Think of the fun he could have had with a question like "what instrument did Bill Clinton play?" because it's a gag writer's dream enquiry. As I recall, he used to play the sexophone (a little-known instrument that runs on batteries and KY Jelly), but was also keen on the whoremonica. Or was it all a dream? Well, you try to stay awake watching daytime television.

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Anyone seen my marbles?

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