Alan Carr's Picture Slam

Right, I have a problem with this show. Can you guess what it is yet? That’s right. It’s about pictures. That’s not the whole problem. Many quizzes have picture rounds, even University Challenge. Only Connect makes copious and clever use of pictures. The problem with Alan Carr’s Picture Slam is that it’s only about pictures. Yes, Dave – did you not work that out from the title? Well, yes, I did, and only watched it I the interests of writing about it. But I mention all this faff just so I can say that this quiz show is based on the pub quiz round that I like the least – the picture round.

No, sorry, not finished yet. I guess that my issue with picture rounds is that I’m not very good at them. Now, if I was of a mind, I could pick on another weaker area of mine – let’s call this purely hypothetical round food and drink – and work on it, learn stuff, and make myself less weak. In fact I once did with food and drink, but let that go for a minute. Now a picture round doesn’t allow you that luxury. Quizzes call for recall, and sometimes give you the opportunity to work out an answer by using what you do know to help you work out what you don’t know. Picture rounds don’t. They are about recognition, and it pains me to say it but this is a skill I have very little of. And it wouldn’t make a difference how much I worked on it, I still would have difficulty telling my Ryan Goslings from my Ryan Reynolds and my young blond actress from any other young blond actress.

So how well does Alan Carr’s Picture Slam do something that I don’t really like? Well, look, it’s basically just about recognising pictures, right? The pictures are linked by category, so we have the flag of Chile, a bottle of Sunny Delight and various other things being connected by types of weather. You see how it works. The show moves quite quickly, which is in its favour. But then it does something a bit odd. The competition is between teams of two. However in one round the individuals within the teams face off against individuals from another team. One of them is shown the pictures and has to name them. Then the opposing player is shown exactly the same pictures. Fair on the players, yes, but not very fair on the poor viewers.

Alan Carr? Look, he’s a funny guy, but on a show like this it’s difficult to let that come out naturally, and he was a bit shouty for my liking. But then this isn’t a show for me anyway, so that doesn’t really matter. It does what it does pretty well, but . . . you know what I’m going to say, I do’t like what it does.