Nobody's Fool - The Landing

So I suppose the question I need to consider is this – did the final of “Nobody’s Fool” stick the landing?

Well, in one way at least, it did. In the previous couple of shows I had started to feel that events on the show were being manipulated in favour of one particular contestant. The shock of one player being eliminated through breaking rules about revealing cards in the elimination vote, which meant that the two players up for elimination were saved, initially made me feel that special efforts were being made to get the weakest player in terms of General Knowledge through to win the jackpot. But then in last night’s final, she was happy to accept the offer to take a couple of grand and leave. Sensible person. It’s more than 3 of the other finalists got.

Then we saw the final four playing for an advantage. They had to listen to a small chamber orchestra playing versions of well-known popular tunes, ( I wonder if they ‘stole’ the idea from my son-in-law, Dan) accompanied by an operatic tenor singing the lyrics via the medium of another language. You got one point if you could buzz in and identify the song and artist (the most famous version, I guess). Then the music began again. When it stopped, you had to buzz in and sing the next line. The prize for the contestant with most points? To pick the next player to be eliminated.

From this it was straight to the quiz pods. Isolated from each other, the three had to pick which one of the other two to eliminate. The person with two votes would have to leave. Now, you have to consider that at this point the three did not know what the final game would be like.

As for the final game, well, the two players sat on opposite sides of the elimination table. On the desk were a set of cards. Each card had a category on the back. The other side of the cards had two statements. One of them was true, and the other false. Each contestant had to take turns to pick one statement and read it to the other. The recipient then had to say whether the statement was true of false. Get it right, you win a point. Most points won the moolah.

How do I feel about it then? Actually, fairly satisfied as it happens. While the pure quizzer in me might think that it should all have been settled by a strenuous two minute round of hard general knowledge questions against the clock, the show was never really about the quiz aspects. Not really. For me, the quiz rounds were not about showing the opposition how smart you were, as much as they were a way of generating a cash total that could be admitted or lied about. And that’s okay.

You know, when you get right down to it, making a show to appeal to fans of The Traitors – and I’m sorry, but you will not convince me that this is not what Nobody’s Fool set out to do – isn’t easy. After all, you can’t just remake The Traitors. You have to change the ingredients, or mix the same ingredients in a different way, or both. And of course, if you do that you can end up with something that just doesn’t quite work. I do think that the show avoided some of the pitfalls that can mar a show like this. Personally I think that there’s no need for a presenter tag team and one person can do it just as well, but the key thing is that neither of them grated on the nerves. A little of Danny Dyer can go a long way and the fact that he was pretty restrained throughout proceedings helped the show. The dilemma faced by the contestants was interesting. For all they knew they would have to face the most knowledgeable and/or intelligent member(s) of the opposition in the final. So the incentive was there to vote them out. However, if they didn’t vote out the person who had contributed least to the pot in the previous quiz, then the prize money would be halved. So the incentive was there to keep the strongest players in. That dichotomy made it interesting.

One of the things which helped Destination X work last summer was that I genuinely liked some of the contestants – Jackie P’s husband, I’m looking at you. And I found that I rather liked most of the Nobody’s Fool contestants too. Because, I think, that the makers realised that if they kept the amount of quizzing shown in each programme to a minimum, there would be more time for personalities to come through. If you compare it with Channe 4’s disappointing “The Inheritance” I couldn’t help disliking many of the participants while not really caring one way or another about the rest.

Summing up then I enjoyed “Nobody’s Fool”. It isn’t “The Traitors” (although one suspects that it rather wishes that it was) but I watched the first two shows on demand then made a point of being around to watch each show of the rest of the series as it aired. The big question, though, is whether enough viewers felt the same. I hope so. If it comes back, I will watch it.

 

Destination X Series 2 Delayed

A thought hit me this morning. I remember that after the first series of Destination X the BBC announced that they would be commissioning a second series. Good stuff. SO I wondered whether it would be on this summer at around the same time that it was broadcast last year.

No no no no. Apparently there have been some significant hold ups behind the scenes. My sources did not give any hint about what these might be. With the upshot that the show won’t be back until some time in 2027.

It’s disappointing. I’m willing to accept that the delays, whatever they might be, are unavoidable, but leaving it so long between series really doesn’t help/ Anticipation for the series, any series, will only last for so long. Oh well.

One Zone to rule them all

Well, I have to say that I did rather enjoy yesterday evening’s quiz. If I sound surprised, well, it doesn’t reflect very well on me, but it’s because I really wasn’t expecting to. The setter only does a quiz once or twice a year. The setter seems to be strictly a social quizzer. Now, there’s no natural law which says that if you are not a good quizzer you cannot make a good quiz. In practice, though, I would say that you’re less likely to make a good quiz.

Put the rotten fruit down and hear me out on this.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, let me state the purpose of making a quiz for the rugby club. It’s to give everyone playing in it or listening to it a good evening’s entertainment. If you do that, people will come again and come regularly, and provide the pub/club with a steady income on an otherwise slack week night. Everybody wins.

Well, doing this does require following some basic principles and not falling into some of the basic errors a question master can fall. Now, the best thing you can do to provide this entertainment is a wide variety of questions, of a variety of difficulties. Something for everyone.

Okay, so last night’s QM gave us themed rounds in 3 of the 8 rounds last night. The themes were Germany, China and, well, I forget what the other one was. Now for a themed round to work, you really have to have a feel for the level of the questions that you ask, because the nature of the beast is that you can end up asking questions that are far more difficult than you really want to be asking if you don’t want to turn off a lot of the players. Which I think our setter did last night. But hang on, Dave. Didn’t you say that you actually enjoyed it? Well, yes, because I liked being given the chance to show off knowing the answers to some of the really difficult stuff. Look, I’m not proud of this, but it’s true.

Not all of the questions were hard though. He asked the old chestnut about how many time zones there are in China. Well, I doubt there’s many people reading this who don’t know that it’s just the one. What he didn’t ask (which is just as well because I didn’t know the answer) was when the one time zone was instituted and why? Well I would have guessed the why, but the when was in 1949. Prior to that there were 5 time zones in China. Why the change? Well, as I would have guesed, it was about Chairman Mao’s desire to impose and maintain political, economic and cultural control over the country. There you go.

By the hairs on my chinny chin chin

I grew a beard during lockdown and my nearest and dearest rather liked it so I’ve kept it ever since. It’s a pure, snowy white, which is fine by me. But on odd occasions when I let my facial hair grow when I was younger, it was ginger. My hair, when I had any, was light brown, but the beard and ‘tache were ginger. Okay, that’s fine, again, no problem with that. We’ll have no gingerism on my blog, thank you very much.

Yesterday I was watching a TV show on one of the History Channels about the attempt to build a recreation of a traditional Viking longship big enough to cross the Atlantic with. Sadly, when I visited Oslo in 2025, the Viking Ship museum on the Bygdoy Peninsula was closed for renovation and redevelopment. One interesting feature in the show was about a buried ship – possibly viking – under part of a pub in Meols on the Wirral. Apparently, it was first seen when the Railway pub was being constructed in the late 1930s and the builders were told to rebury it and hush it up so as not to delay the building of the pub. One of the men made a sketch of the boat and its location which came to light again in the 1990s. Now, featured on the show about the ocean going Viking ship, we saw archaeologists, having used ground penetrating radar to pinpoint the boat’ use an auger to bring up wood samples from it. That was as far as the show showed us.

Well, I googled it today, and found out that this actually happened in 2023 and the wood samples turned out to be just brushwood. I’ve been unable to find out what progress, if any, has been made since.

Which may lead you to ask what has any of this got to do with my once-red facial hair? Not that much, if truth be told. It goes back to 1984, and the top deck of a 20 hour ferry from Rhodes to Piraeus (calling at many islands in between). In 1982 I’d island-hopped from Piraeus down to Crete and back and in 1984 I island hopped down to Crete, then across to Rhodes. What it’s like to do such things now more than 40 years later I have no idea, but back then backpackers used to camp out on the upper decks and I’ll be honest, it was pretty much a party scene. I loved these ferry trips. Well, it was on the last one of all, the ferry back to Piraeus from Rhodes that I got talking to a Danish guy. I hadn’t shaved for 2 weeks, and while it wasn’t enough to give me the full Brian Blessed, it was enough for you to see that my facial hair was ginger. I don’t recall what it was that prompted my Danish friend to make this observation, but he said “You have red hair! You are a viking!” Then he grabbed me round the shoulders, handed me a bottle of Amstel and insisted we serenaded a couple of girls with “Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen” from the Danny Kaye movie Hans Christian Anderson. I didn’t know that this was a particular viking favourite but what the hell, go with the flow.

I’ll be honest, there’s any number of places my once-red facial hair could have come from. My father had the same – light brown hair and ginger facial hair, and I’m told that his father was the same. So it’s a decent chance I get it from my Scottish ancestors, but what the hell, who knows. There’s Irish in the mix with me, and also French Huguenot on my mother’s side and Gawd knows what else that I don’t have an inkling about. Viking? Who knows, but I won’t be burying a boat in the back garden any time soon.

 

Thank You for that fact, Mr. Green

It’s ironic that I ended up spending nearly 40 years teaching in Wales because I suppose it was almost a case of taking coals to Newcastle. In the 1970s many of my teachers in Elthorne High School in Hanwell, Ealing were originally from Wales. Some of them I remember very fondly, like the late Gwilym Morris who saw me safely through my Maths O Level and some of them not at all fondly but I shan’t mention their names in order to protect the guilty. Most though were somewhere in between these two poles. Such a teacher was Mr. Green.

Mr. Green was one of those teachers who you absolutely loved to have covering your class, but he wasn’t to my mind quite as good when you had him as a regular teacher. When you had him covering your class he could and would go off on a tangent and would tell you about some really interesting things. When he was teaching a regular Physics class he tended to go by the book and that was nowhere near as interesting.

I remember him starting off one such cover class by explaining that the romans used to clean their teeth with urine. Quite a barnstormer of a fact to begin a History class with, that one. This led him onto the use of urine in dyeing and then the use of mercury by hatmakers which explained, he said, why Lewis Carroll included a Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland”.

I think I’ve explained before just how the book captivated me at an impressionable age, so I shan’t go on all about that again now. I’ve just said that Lewis Carroll included a Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” but that is not strictly speaking true. Lewis Carroll included a mad hatter (check out the lack of capitals) in “Alice in Wonderland”. For Carroll himself never uses the epithet The Mad Hatter in the narrative. He calls him the Hatter and leaves you to make your own mind up about his sanity or otherwise.

Here’s something you may already be aware of, in which case, apologies. The first person to illustrate any version of “Alice in Wonderland” was (drumroll please ) Lewis Carroll. He wrote the stories he had made up on an 1862 boat trip with the Liddell girls and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth in manuscript form calling it “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. He showed it to a friend called George Macdonald who had children and sought advice on publishing it. They were all very enthusiastic but advised Carroll that it might be a good idea to get a professional artist to illustrate them.

Carroll gave the manuscript to Alice Liddell in November 1864 as a Christmas present. It’s now one of the treasures of the British Library. So how did Carroll draw the Hatter? Well, the answer is that he didn’t. “Alice’s Adventures Underground” is considerably shorter than “Alice in Wonderland” and the Hatter was added to the story later for the published version. So the first person to illustrate the Hatter was actually (Sir) John Tenniel and it’s his conception of the Hatter that is probably what comes to mind whenever you hear the phrase “The Mad Hatter”. I’m not an expert but it seems to me that everyone who illustrates the Alice books now is faced with a difficult choice when it comes to the Hatter – to either take inspiration from Tenniel, or to react against Tenniel and go for something drastically different.

Personally although when it comes to a whole set of illustrations I’m very much in the Tenniel camp, I do also like the way that Mervyn Peake depicted the character too.

Well, I can’t finish with a song so I’ll have to finish with a question. Most people know that the price ticket inside Tenniel’s Hatter’s topper says 10/6. But what else does it say? Highlight below this line to check your answer.

In this style.

I Can't Believe It's Not The Traitors (and I have no problem with that)

The great Richard Osman once said that the best way to pitch a TV show to commissioning executives is to say that it is like something else that they know. And in terms of reality/game shows, what is the huge success that other channels would like a slice of? The Traitors of course. We’ve already seen BBC’s Destination X last year, which only had a slight hint of The Traitors, and Channel Four’s disappointing “The Inheritance” last Autumn, which I found to be somewhat mean spirited. “Nobody’s Fool”, or - I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Traitors - sees ITV having a go, and to be honest, a rather more convincing go than either of the other two shows.

It works like this. In the first episode we were introduced to the ten contestants enteringa huge English country house (as opposed to a huge Scottish baronial castle). The main point of the game is that every day each contestant goes on their own to a quiz pod. They are asked a number of questions. Each question correctly answered earns money for the prize pot. They may not reveal anything about what happened in the quiz pot, nor do they have to tell the truth about how they did in it. The contestants then face a round table style vote. Each one is asked how much money they contributed, but they do not have to tell the truth. Their task is to work out which of them contributed least to the prize pot, and then vote them out. If they get it right, then happy days. If they get it wrong, then the prize money is halved. The idea is to be the last one left who will get the prize pot. The show has not yet explained how the end game is going to work.

There are challenges between time in the quiz pod and the votes as well. For example, sorting out a ton of tennis balls to find out those with the letters needed to spell a nine letter word. These don’t contribute money but are meant to help the contestants work out who might actually be the weakest players. Three episodes are available on the ITV player at the moment and we’ve already seen plenty of plotting, making and breaking of alliances and shock reveals – supposedly prim and proper , 178 IQ Melissa revealing that she is a dominatrix being perhaps the most surprising.

The show is presented by Danny Dyer and Emily Atack. Mr. Dyer is probably something of an acquired taste. But you do know what you are going to get with him. He’s certainly intelligent enough to know what this is and to give you what you expect. But in a show like this, although the host is not the most important element of the show, the host can make a difference. Would the Traitors be quite as good without Claudia, for example? I like Alan Cummings the actor, but I don’t think he’s as good a host in the US version of the Traitors. I felt that the Liz Hurley character was one of the worst things about The Inheritance, but that’s just my personal opinion and feel free to disagree. So Danny Dyer, scion of royalty, doesn’t give us quite the full on gawd blimey, apples and pears diabolical liberty my old china, but just enough. Having said that, I don’t know that there’s anything he does that Emily Atack couldn’t do on her own. She asks the questions in the pod, and does just as much as Mr. Dyer does. But then she’s not (at the moment) such a ‘name’ so the presenting tag team it is.

Cards on the table. When I review new shows, I watch one and then if it hasn’t grabbed me I will rarely watch another edition of it. I have watched all three editions of “Nobody’s Fool “ currently on the ITV Player. Yes, it speaks almost exclusively in the vocabulary and syntax of “The Traitors”. You might say it does so openly, or, if it’s not your cup of tea you might say it does so blatantly.  I really don’t mind though. If you can’t have the real thing, this is a perfectly acceptable like for like alternative. Yeah, the quiz elements aren’t necessarily that great, but they are only a small part of the show. But I like it. I shall watch the next episodes as they become available, and I sincerely hope that when we get to the end game it will stick the landing.

Bit of acid 's what that needs.

Do you know what the Romans kept in an acetabulum? I would imagine that you do. The question, how is diluted acetic acid better known? - is a real old hardy perennial in quiz terms and so that acet at the start of the word has probably given you the answer – vinegar.

I mention this because yesterday it was just me at home with my grandson Ollie at lunchtime and I suggested we head down to Aberavon Beach and had some fish and chips for lunch, and a walk on the beach, which is what we did.

Okay, another quiz question. What is the derivation of the word vinegar? Anwer – it comes from vin aigre which s French for sour wine. Mmm, sounds good, doesn’t it? I think that I’m the only member of my family who doesn’t like vinegar. You know, more than once I’ve wondered – who was it who first looked at a portion of sliced, fried potatoes and thought to themselves – , it’s good, but you know what would make it better? A liberal dousing in acid.

But then I’m a fussy sod, anyway. At least most places don’t automatically assume you want vinegar and ask you in the first place. I remember 10 years ago I made what would turn out to be my first sketching trip to Ieper in Belgium. In the shadow of the magnificent (rebuilt) medieval Cloth Hall. I bought a portion of chips. I didn’t look at them as I began eating and the moment I put the first chip into my mouth, I thought – what the hell is that?!- I looked down. The chips were slathered in mayonnaise. And the stupid thing is I don’t even dislike mayonnaise. But chips? I couldn’t finish them.

Tomato ketchup? Tastes too sweet. Curry sauce? Okay, fair point.