It is best to leave the big questions to the clever people. They can ask why we’re here and what life is for. They can try to find the answer to the questions of existence, death and everything in between. They can philosophize about religion, war and love until long after the cows have come home, and if they can make any sense whatsoever from all the ills that are sent to try us and all the joys that pull us back from the edge then jolly well done to them. The clever people. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot of clever going on during the average weekday afternoon on television. This is where very few clever people dare to stray. It is the ocean depths and furthest reaches of space for anything that might resemble intelligent life. And yet there it is, every weekday afternoon. Without fail.
The fact is that once the lunchtime news has wrapped up there isn’t a great deal of value to watch, unless you’ve already found the collected, yet highly questionable, intellect of three loose women in some way a distraction. I suppose you could watch Alan Titchmarsh’s Gardening Club but surely that would only be of interest when it gets to the episode where Alan Titchmarsh is clubbed, roughly diced and buried in his own garden. Or you could imagine what life would be like if you weren’t making stains on the sofa, by soaking up the likes of Escape To The Country or A Place In The Sun or Sea, Sun And Selling Houses or A New Life In The Sun or Bargain-Loving Brits In The Sun (all do, but none should, exist). If that doesn’t take your fancy there will be some diet and food programmes such as Lose Weight And Get Fit With Tom Kerridge (presumably this is done by booking a table at one of his restaurants and then eating nothing because the prices are so ludicrously high), timed perfectly to coincide with your post lunch slump and the ensuing effort to recalibrate yourself with half a packet of chocolate digestives and a grab-bag of Skips. Of course, the most ambitious option of all is to sit there watching Jay Blades take a rusty heap of shit Victorian milk urn into a shiny, restored Victorian milk urn – a finished product that will still serve little purpose, except perhaps as a place to store umbrellas, and is more importantly completely irrelevant as you don’t have a Victorian milk urn and if you did you are highly unlikely to want to get off your arse and find it at the back of the garage. Afternoon television spends half its time selling dreams that are close enough to touch but somehow still too far away to bother trying; which is why they have to fill the other half with a different sort of shit.
Television knows this and so it just scatters the airwaves with cheap and cheerful, third-rate game shows. I’m not talking about The Chase or Pointless, because in their own strange way they represent the Sistine Chapel and Pantheon of daytime quiz shows. Instead, I peek through the crack in the care home lounge door and see before me a television talent graveyard where clinically obese monsters and swivel-eyed morons called Kev or Bev take each other on in a battle that could feasibly be called a battle of wits if there was more than a single wit to share between them. These are programmes made by people with too much time on their hands, contested by people with too much time on their hands and watched by people, you’ve got it, with too much time on their hands. Demographically speaking these programmes cater for anyone who has slipped through the gap and now occupy empty spaces you’d be better off not knowing about. This is where Tenable exists: a pretty shoddy quiz hosted by a charming, er, small person, and which is about as gripping as a chimpanzee with no thumbs. This where you can find Bridge Of Lies, which is paying for Ross Kemp’s extension and if anything only serves to ask the question: would Ross Kemp be a good quiz show host, and then answer it, firmly: no. And is you have reached your darkest hour you may want to sample Winning Combination with Omid Djalili, a painful waste of anyone’s time and a programme that performs some sort of miracle in actually wishing Omid Djalili would give comedy another try (hint: he would need to try harder). And yet, quite amazingly, I still have a zone of interest in the galaxy of mid-afternoon weekday television quiz shows; and it looks like Tipping Point.
Tipping Point has all the ingredients normally needed to convince oneself that emigrating to North Korea is the only rational response. The theme tune is crap. The contestants are, more often than not, spectacularly stupid and appallingly dressed. The set is ridiculous and the small talk like a persistent rash. Worst of all it is hosted by one of televisions wettest fish – Ben Shephard – who may make the elderly leak in some pretty private places but to everyone else is as close to sexless as you could imagine a TV host capable of being. He annoys me to the extent that I can’t even bear the way he says ‘another fifty pounds’, and yet for all that Tipping Point is an absurdly narcotic confection and I just can’t get enough of it. Perhaps is will serve as my entry drug into one possible intravenous heavy second half of my middle age. Or perhaps I’ve just lowered my standards and need some form of pathetic escapism that is different from all the other avenues of pathetic escapism I’ve strolled along at one time or another. Why bother with Breaking Bad when you could just watch Tipping Point on repeat?
Here, in Tipping Point, is a game which requires a rough idea of what general knowledge is, but is equally happy for you to pass your question over in case you deem your opponent to be even more clueless than yourself. Here is a show in which the host talks as if he has recently finished a gruelling five year course at Cambridge on the exact science of how a slowly moving platform can push inanimate objects over the edge of another platform. Here is a show in which choosing the wrong drop zone has me howling with derision. And here is a show that climaxes on nothing more that whether a contestant can get a big shiny counter through the system before they run out of goes; and if they can’t they still get more goes, just because well, it’s just a bit of fun. And perhaps that’s why Tipping Point is so not-so-destructively addictive – it’s not just questions, it’s whether you can perform with a sufficient level of success on a great big, sparkly version of an arcade game you used to play when you were a kid, gambling coppers for coppers until your pockets ran empty. Coppers you could still taste on your fingers hours later. There’s a charm in that which just doesn’t appear in any other quiz show. If I had my way ITV would be forced to bump up the prize money and make it a Saturday night flagship. They could even keep Ben Shephard, for the old ladies, provided he promised not to say a word when I was listening. It is often he alone and his place in this odd little zone of interest of mine that pushes me towards a personal tipping point of a very different nature.
G B Burton. 10.04.2024
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 