Years before Peaky Blinders turned Stephen Knight into the closest a screenwriter gets to being a superstar, he’d already enjoyed huge success in a different field: quiz shows.
Dreaming up a hit quiz or game show can be like discovering oil or a goldmine in your back garden if the format sells internationally. But it isn’t as easy as it might seem, otherwise we’d all be doing it.
For every Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Jeopardy, The Price is Right or The Chase there are countless other formats that don’t make it beyond the initial pitch.
Plenty do, though, and while they might not enjoy the global success of the shows mentioned above, they still become staples of a channel’s output and often run for years.
Watching people win things on TV has been popular with viewers since the very earliest days of television.
In it’s first full year on air, in 1962, RTÉ had Jackpot, hosted by Gay Byrne and later Terry Wogan. When that ended in 1965, along came Quicksilver, the famously low-stakes (top prize, £5) quiz hosted by Bunny Carr. Incredibly, it ran until 1981.
Ever since these early — and let’s be honest, primitive — examples, Irish television has struggled with the quiz/game show genre. Like comedy, it’s one nut broadcasters here have never really satisfactorily cracked.
There have been intermittent successes. Blackboard Jungle, hosted by Ray D’Arcy and devised by Paul Cleary of The Blades and my old friend George Byrne (a formidable pub quizzer, whether answering or setting the questions), was, like Channel 4’s Blockbusters, a schools quiz that had crossover popularity with adult viewers — until RTÉ suddenly axed it.
I suppose you’d have to call The Lyrics Board, as awful as it was, a success too, in that the format was sold to 14 countries.
In terms of a domestic audience, the most successful quiz show was Where in the World?, initially hosted by Marty Whelan and, after he left RTÉ to join the ill-fated Century Radio, Theresa Lowe for the remainder of its run.
Fiendishly convoluted and far tougher than it needed to be (just 25 seconds in which to win the top prize), it was nonetheless a ratings winner that ran for nine years.
Personally, I’d rather have been anywhere in the world — and I do mean anywhere — on a Sunday night than sat in front of Where in the World?
The problem seems to be that, while the Irish channels know how to put together a basic quiz-show format, they don’t seem to know how to inject any sense of fun into it.
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Cross-Country Quiz, Murphy’s Micro Quiz-M, Challenging Times (a University Challenge clone hosted by Kevin Myers and sponsored by a national newspaper that isn’t this one), even the long-running Know Your Sport, modelled on the BBC’s A Question of Sport, were lifeless affairs, more likely to induce narcolepsy than excitement. There’s more to a quiz show than just questions and answers. Noel Edmonds may be one of the oddest men alive, yet his weird, intense presence was the magic ingredient in Channel 4’s Deal or No Deal.
When TV3 did its own version with Keith Barry, however, it died on its feet.
The same went for TV3’s short-lived take on The Weakest Link. Poor old Eamon Dunphy, as he later admitted, was simply too soft-hearted to be as rude to the contestants as Anne Robinson — who could sometimes overstep the mark.
In a way, getting the right host for the job is the key to successful quiz and game shows.
Try to imagine The Chase without Bradley Walsh, a brilliant host.
RTÉ dips its toe into the quiz show waters again this weekend with Ireland’s Smartest (RTÉ One, Sunday, 7.30pm), on which the country’s biggest brain-boxes go head to head in a test of knowledge and nerve.
The host is Claire Byrne, the favourite to take over The Late Late Show.
We know how good she is on the serious stuff, but will she be able to bring a light touch, or will this be yet another Irish quiz show to forget? That is the top-prize question.