Review - Celebrity Puzzling

You know, somehow Celebrity Puzzling passed me by when it debuted last summer and it was only yesterday that I even knew it existed.

Only last week I reviewed “Do You Know Your Place?” and couldn’t help observing that it seemed to be an attempt to make something similar in some ways to House of Games (although nowhere near as good.) Well, although anyone associated with the show is welcome to deny this, the original non-sleb version of Puzzling seemed to me to be very much an attempt to make a similar show to Only Connect. The great Richard Osman himself once made the point that it is much easier to get a show commissioned if you can say that it’s like an existing show.

Celebrity Puzzling seems to have taken a step further away from Only Connect and given it more of a vibe of . . . House of Games! For one thing the show is shown across the week. For another the Maths games from the original show are gone, and on the show I watched last night the games were conspicuously wordy. The highly intelligent blond female host – Lucy Worsley – is gone, replaced by the male, experienced quiz show host in the shape of Jeremy Vine. I’ll be honest, we all like who we like and don’t like who we don’t and when it comes to hosting TV there’s just something about him I find ever so slightly irritating. I say slightly because I’m not completely sure what it is, but he wouldn’t be my host of choice. The pace is more leisurely than I remember the original version of the show too, but it’s amiable and diverting enough that I didn’t turn over the channel until it was finished.

Lika a lot of shows, this one would benefit from moving a bit more quickly and being a bit shorter. But let’s put it this way. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than “Do You Know Your Place?”.