Wordle addicts will love Celebrity Quizzing ...Middle East

Why do people watch TV quiz shows? It can’t simply be for the pleasure of having our general knowledge or lateral thinking tested; I’ll happily sit through University Challenge or Only Connect without even understanding many of the questions, let alone answering them. What to make, then, of 5’s new quiz series, Celebrity Puzzling?

Host Jeremy Vine introduces the programme as “an hour of the most relentless puzzling television ever”. It’s an over-sell, of course, but not preposterously so. The questions are on the right side of difficult – taxing but not impossible or requiring specialist knowledge.

Mind you, a lexicographer or crossword setter would be at an advantage because Celebrity Puzzling is a word game. Wordle and anagram addicts will feel at home, as will fans of Richard Osman’s House of Games – it can be no coincidence that the 5 pretender makes its debut when the BBC Two quiz show leviathan is off air.

As in Osman’s series, rounds are supposedly randomly generated, bearing names like “In Other Words”, “Thirdle”, “Funundrum”, and “Cinema Cypher”.

Also, similarly with House of Games, there’s a climactic final round, here a fiendish quickfire memory test.

But Osman’s show has been on air for years and has an almost endless back-catalogue of games to call upon… I wonder whether Vine’s question-setters will be able to dream up enough new ideas to compete.

Another similarity is of course, the celebrity contestants, although unlike House of Games, where the celebs compete for a whole week, here they change nightly. Choirmaster Gareth Malone and Strictly winner Ore Oduba are the opening guests, joining regular team captains Carol Vorderman and Sally Lindsay.

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Vine and the team captains have obviously been told to smile and laugh often because there’s a lot of exposed tooth enamel on display, which does lend a good-humoured vibe to this confident start. Vine, Radio 2 broadcaster and erstwhile cycling video-vigilante, makes for a genial but quick-witted host. He’s far more natural at this sort of gig than the verbose Stephen Fry (Jeopardy!) and Graham Norton, who seems out of his comfort zone on Wheel of Fortune. All those years hosting Eggheads have stood Jezza in good stead.

But what of the opening round itself? “Team Vorders” (as Vine puts it) against Sally Lindsay and Gareth Malone (Vine offering no similarly truncated pet name for Lindsay’s team) are each given two initials and three synonyms and have to guess the words behind the initials. This proves relatively simple, although one question stumps Team Vorders while I am mentally screaming the answer: “Abbey Road!!!”

The rounds then become progressively harder (in my estimation), culminating in that memory round where Vorderman suddenly comes into her own. But despite Vine’s best efforts to make the contest sound exciting, does anyone really care who wins these quiz shows? The only one I can ever get remotely invested in is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as I congratulate myself on hypothetically having just banked another £250,000. Anyway, here Team Vorders crept home by 41 points to 40.

That 5 have so brazenly parked their tanks on BBC Two’s quizzer lawn is further proof of the broadcaster’s growing confidence. Little wonder they had a rebrand earlier this year, shaking off the tainted Channel 5 moniker.

A quiz show like Celebrity Puzzling will happily bridge the gap between their daytime fodder and all those divertingly trashy thrillers and documentaries about Yorkshire, royalty and the 1970s. Will it prove as popular as House of Games? That’s a question nobody can yet answer.

‘Celebrity Puzzling’ continues tomorrow at 7pm on 5

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