I literally just told you
I literally just told you
My journey into the world of TV game shows
Over the summer I spent a week of my holiday at the old BBC studios in White City recording a TV show for Channel 4. I’d been invited to feature as a scientific expert on Jimmy' Carr’s comedy quiz show I literally just told you. I will admit to feeling rude when I walked up to the security guard on the front gate and he asked me what I was here for. “I literally just told you” I replied, having not spoken a word to this chap before in my life, but fortunately he seemed to understand.
This wasn’t my first foray into comedy TV shows or indeed to the BBC studios - having been the question setter for the comedy/maths cross-over TV show “Dara O’Briain’s School of Hard Sums” over a decade earlier - but it was to be my first time in front of the camera.
The game itself is all about memory. The main gimmick with the show (devised by Richard Bacon – of Blue Peter fame) is that all the answers to the questions have appeared in the show. There are multiple choice questions along the lines of
“Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:”
with answers like
“Apologised for kissing”, “Apologised for slapping”, “Apologised for genocide”
where the answers are laid out squarely in front of the contestants1. Alternatively there are questions about specific things that have happened in the show.
Consequently, to spice things up and to provide more fodder for later questions, lots of surreal stuff happens in the show. There are fake ad-breaks in which Jimmy pretends to record an advert for some imaginary product or, as in episode two, a spoof French version of the show in which my position as expert was replaced by a French mime artist.
In another section, in episode one, Jimmy heads to the loo during a break, but forgets to take his mic off. The show is funny - it had me laughing out loud in the studio - but high-brow it aint.
Part of my role, as well as providing interesting facts based around the multiple choice questions (which might later be turned into questions themselves), is to come up with the questions that the contestants will later be asked in the show. I was pleased to see that many of the questions I provided made their way into the show.
We recorded 10 episodes in total over a five-day period. Unsurprisingly, given that all the questions we wrote had to be meticulously fact-checked, record-times for the hour-long show sometimes stretched to 5 or even 6 hours. As is the way with TV, only a small proportion of what transpired in the record actually made it into the final edit, with the rest left lying on the cutting-room floor. I’d naively expected that the facts I’d delivered would be peppered throughout every episode whereas, in reality, there are some episodes where I don’t speak at all.
I watched episode two back at the weekend and was pleased to see I’d managed to make an appearance, giving a fact about the Great Potoo. If you don’t already know you’ll have to watch the clip below to find out what that is. You can’t hear it in the clip, but the audience genuinely did give the fact an “Ooooo”!
I had a great time filming the show with my fellow experts and I’ve enjoyed watching it back with friends and family over the last few weeks. There are 10 episodes in total in series three (including two celebrity specials) and we’re only three episodes in so far, so there’s still plenty of time to catch up with the show if you feel so inclined. And if, in the next few days, you do find yourself wondering why you’re thinking of the bird that can sense movement with its eyes even when they’re closed, remember it’s because I literally just told you.
The answer, by the way, is that Justin Trudeau acknowledged the findings of an inquiry that Canada committed genocide against Indigenous people.