CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend's TV: An ingenious quiz - but where's the fun if we can't play along at home?
Channel 4's most enduring show, and still one of its most popular, is its very first — Countdown. Why the broadcasting geniuses in the backroom never try to make anything similar is a mystery.
While BBC2 treasures its quiz classics Mastermind and University Challenge, and has successfully developed newer formats such as Only Connect, Ch4 seems disdainful of straightforward general knowledge games.
Instead, it goes for games with a psychological twist — which makes it difficult for viewers to play along at home.
Secret Genius is a typical example. A great deal of ingenuity has gone into inventing IQ mindbenders that would be lots of fun, if only we got a fair chance to join in.
If you wanted to try the games yourself, the trick was to hit the pause button when the boards flashed up on screen. That's a serious design flaw — fumbling with the remote control, you're just as likely to change channel by accident.
Some tests, such as a pattern of steps across a chessboard, were impossible to follow, because we didn't see all the clues.
Pictured: Alan Carr and Susie Dent on Channel 4's Secret Genius
The show celebrates people whose IQ wasn’t recognised or capitalised on when they were younger - including a lorry driver, a pastry chef and a waitress
A dozen players were pitted against each other, from a hotel receptionist to a shepherd, a dance teacher and a tree surgeon.
At first, it seemed they had nothing in common but their love of puzzles. Gradually, though, it became clear that most of them lacked self-confidence or had struggled at school, despite being patently bright.
Single mum Ollie, a 32-year-old on an ambulance crew, was typical. Presented with a number grid, into which she had to arrange digits to complete sums, like a sudoku jigsaw, she solved it at a glance.
But, prone to bouts of self-doubt and nerves, she flunked a much easier wordsearch.
Inevitably, there were pep talks and tears, which is the realpoint of the show. It's based on a Ch4 predecessor called Child Genius, which proved a hit until it went off-air seven years ago amid backlash and scandal.
Child Genius was a high-intensity competition for junior brainboxes, which challenged tweenie contestants to memorise swathes of facts, perform agile feats of mental arithmetic, and spell out seven-syllable medical terms, in front of an audience of their baying parents.
A whiff of mockery hung over presenter Alan Carr's patter, writes our TV critic Christopher Stevens
The games aren’t fact-based and so can’t be passed through revision; they assess diagrammatic reasoning – focusing on identifying patterns, rules and using logic
As a method of inflicting psychological damage on adolescents, it would be hard to beat, short of reintroducing the Victorian prep school.
Channel 4 insisted Child Genius was not a freak show. But it was certainly a geek show, which was almost as unsavoury.
Secret Genius avoids that pitfall, because the players are adults, but nevertheless a whiff of mockery hung over presenter Alan Carr's patter.
'Some of you looked like you were doing your tax returns in a wind tunnel,' he crowed.
It was obvious he recorded this series before his triumph in The Celebrity Traitors. You won't catch him fronting pin-money game shows again.
From now on, he's strictly A-list. Clever boy.
