Quiz Special
Battle Of The Brains
BBC2, 6pm daily
Eggheads
BBC2, 6.30pm daily
They're no match for TV's greatest quiz show (Corpus Christi, TRIMBLE!), but at least they haven't been hit by an ineligibility scandal like The UC has. (You'd have thought Gail Trimble would have pulled a Fergie and ruthlessly booted out the offending team member before the squad was affected...)
Both these quizzes are based on the idea of head-to-head challenges reducing the teams before a final round. Brains has the benefit of fairly well-matched teams playing each other; but Eggheads' gimmick is that an average (sometimes well below average) pub quiz team takes on former winners of Mastermind, Brain Of Britain and Tarrant's million (Judith Keppell, not the cheating Major with the coughing mate).
The Eggheads are like that annoying team in the pub which only ever seems to be in there on quiz night and always bloody wins, so you're rooting for the challengers. There's even a Cowell hate figure (since, remarkably, most of them manage to suppress the smugness) in "CJ", a sort of Latin lothario-nerd hybrid who acts as if a question is beneath him if he doesn't know the answer.
Battle Of The Brains does the usual drama build-up, with portentous music and Nicky Campbell speaking... with... tension-building... pauses. In contrast, Dermot Murnaghan runs Eggheads like a game of Trivial Pursuit after Christmas dinner, laconically revealing answers as if the only delay were because he was finishing a Quality Street. But both avoid the self-parody of Ann Robinson in the teatime quiz that precedes them, Thwkstlnk (I think that's what it's called; that's how she says it). If she spent a little less time working on insults for each contestant before the show, she might have time to glance through the question cards and check on the pronunciations of the trickier words – she gets one wrong almost every round these days. Of the three remaining quizzes, she is... thwkstlnk, goodbye.
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