The Better Late Than Never Puzzling Review

What do you think of the UK’s Channel Five? Be honest now. It’s a strange beast in some ways, is Channel Five. I mean, can you think of any really successful drama series from Five which haven’t been either imported, or picked up from one of the other channels when they have discarded them? You can say the same about a lot of genres. Then when it comes to documentaries, it seems to me that the huge majority are about the Royal Family, or murders – I haven’t watched one that combines the two, but if there is such a thing it will doubtless have been shown on Channel Five. As for quiz shows, well, there’s Eggheads, snapped up when the BBC seemed to have grown cold on the idea of further series. As for home grown quizzes, well. . . there was 100 Percent in the early years of the channel, and not a lot else.

Enter Puzzling.

Now, for reasons I’ve hinted at in my opening comments, Puzzling is just not the kind of quiz game show that I would ever have expected to see Channel Five showing. Which brings me to what has to be the elephant in the room when discussing Puzzling. This is the fact that the show seems to owe something to Only Connect. If we take the superficial similarities first, then both shows are hosted by highly intelligent blonde women. Both shows pit two teams of three against each other. The teams face off in several rounds of puzzles. While each show produces a winner, the goal is to reach the final and win the whole series overall.

The big differences are these. In OC the focus is, naturally on connections – what connects, what completes a sequence, which of the items on the grid are connected to each other and what connects them, and missing vowels, with sets of words and phrases all connected by themes. In Puzzling, there isn’t such a tight focus. In the two shows that I’ve watched, the teams played against each other across the same rounds. These were :-

In Other Words. This one involves being shown two words. Substitute them for other words with the same meaning and try to get a phrase connected with a theme you’ve already been given.

Pressure Points. This is a number round, not unlike the mental arithmetic tests in Child Genius a few years ago. In Pressure Points, though, the contestants ae helped by onscreen visual representations, although never in straight Arabic numerals – instead spots on a dice, roman numerals, you get the drift, I’m sure.

Rule Breakers is basically Odd One Out (for those of us old enough to remember it). So, the teams have to work out the connections between groups of four, but then also work out which one doesn’t fit.

Picture This is where the teams have to complete lyrics from Blondie top forty singles. Or in the real world, it’s basically a set of questions involving picture puzzles of several different sorts.

Memory Bank is the final round where the teams play against each other. They’re show a five by 3 grid, each rectangle containing a potential answer to a question. After a wee bit of time, the words are replaced by numbers. Questions are asked, and the teams have to answer with the number where the correct answer was.

That’s the team rounds then. Which brings me to the other big difference between Puzzling and OC. For the teams actually consist of three people who have never met before and been allocated to teams before the start of the show. So after the five teams rounds, the 3 members of the team with the lower score leave with nothing. The three remaining players now play Divide and Conquer – or put it another way, more questions like the ones we’ve already seen from he previous rounds. One player wins and will be back for the semis, the others won’t.

I can’t think of very many examples of commercial channels trying to produce their own high-brow, high difficulty – low reward quiz games in the past. However, on the few occasions I can remember, the particular demands of commercial television seem to have worked against them, with the exception of Channel Four which at least can point to Fifteen to 1 and Grand Slam on its resume. So hats off to Channel Five for even trying this. While I thought that the difficulty of some of the picture questions varied enormously, on the whole I didn’t feel that Puzzling is an example of a more challenging quiz game being dumbed down and diluted to be more accessible to the wider audience at home. And I appreciate that.

With regards to the similarities to OC, well, Only Connect, to me, now always runs like a well-oiled machine. It zips along like a brand new Porsche and there’s no fat to be trimmed off the joint. In terms of game play and playing along at home. I didn’t feel quite the same about Puzzling. It is broken up by adverts, and while you can’t blame the show itself for this, it does mean that it’s imperative to get the pacing right, and I don’t feel that Puzzling does this yet. Let’s remember that Only Connect grew up on the relatively sedate backwaters of BBC4, where one suspects that ratings would have been something of a dirty word. By the time it became a mainstay of Quizzy Mondays the show was already a seasoned campaigner, comfortable in its own skin, and with a hard core audience who would watch it whenever or wherever the BBC chose to position it in the schedules. It remains to be seen whether Channel 5 will allow 12 Yard and Wheelhouse the time to nurture Puzzling to the stage where it develops its own hardcore following.

Lucy Worsley, then. You know, time was when I wasn’t a fan. But I have to say that over the years I’ve come to like and appreciate her qualities as a presenter of interesting History documentaries on the Beeb. As a curator of the Royal Palaces, a lot of these have focused on royalty – maybe this is what attracted Channel Five to her in the first place. I didn’t appreciate her style at first but she won me over with her infectious enthusiasm, and her penchant for diving into the dressing up box for period costume whenever the opportunity arises. Seriously, if you watch a Lucy Worsley History documentary you can play a drinking game where you have to take a swig every time she changes into costume. 

As a quiz/game host though? After all, you might think it looks easy, but it requires a particular set of skills and attributes. I think of Paddy O’Connell from the first series of “Battle of the Brains”. Paddy is a fine broadcaster, with a ready wit but as a quiz show host I felt he was very much out of his comfort zone. Prior to the first edition of Puzzling being broadcast Lucy put on record her admiration for Victoria Coren-Mitchell and did nothing to play down comparisons with Only Connect. This worried me a little, because at the end of the day there’s only one Victoria Coren-Mitchell. You don’t see VCM trying to present documentaries about the 9 wives of King Louis the Randy of France, do you? Thankfully Lucy did her job well for the most part. She seemed warm and friendly, and also relaxed with the teams. Yeah, I think she spent too much time talking with them, but then you know what I’m like. I’m just not interested in that sort of thing.

Will we get just the one series of Puzzling? I hope not. I hope that Channel Five will give it the time to tweak itself a little, work out the pacing issues, and develop a following.