THE SECRETS BEHIND TV QUIZ SHOWS (AND MEN’S HAIR TRANSPLANTS)

I'm not as thick as I used to be

We did get more points than that, honest

My hair is a colour known in the trade as “Suspiciously Brown”. You’d think that someone of my age might be showing a bit more silverware on top, but - mysteriously - I’m still roughly the same colour I was twenty years ago.

The reason I finally gave in and started dyeing my hair was because I started to see other male presenters on-screen who were clearly older than me, but had absolutely no grey at all. “Well, if they’re doing it,” I thought, “I may as well join the club,” and I’ve been tinting ever since.

But, last month, as I sat there in the makeup artist’s chair at Celebrity University Challenge, I received another piece of head-line news.

Hair Apparent

I was having the most thorough makeover I can remember - my eyebrows were being filled in (I didn’t actually think they were thin, but now I can’t stop checking them in the mirror), my face was being creamed and powdered (the two worst things about trying to whiten your tea in the US, coincidentally), and then the makeup guy started spraying my hair. Not with hairspray, but with dry shampoo.

I’d heard about this product, but I’d never actually seen it in action. I’d assumed it was something you rubbed in if you didn’t have time for a shower, but what it actually does, he told me, is soak up some of the natural oils, stopping the hair clumping together and EXPOSING THE SCALP.

Yes, what he was trying not to tell me, while still telling me, was that I might be getting a little thin on top.

By coincidence I’d recently heard Marina Hyde and Richard Osman (in my podcast of 2024 The Rest Is Entertainment) discussing the same issue, and the fact that, supposedly, “all men on TV” are having hair transplants. They, too, agreed that it was the makeup artists who would first notice a thinning thatch. And although they apparently have lots of tricks up their sleeves to (shall we say) fill in the gaps, after a while they might drop something into conversation which basically translates as “I’m doing my best here buddy, but this lawn might need reseeding”. Because this lawn is, in fact, receding.

And now I can’t stop looking at other male TV presenters and wondering if their beautiful bouffants have had the Miracle-Gro treatment.

To be honest I’ve been really lucky with my hair - my dad’s had “blown away in a strong wind”, as he tells my kids, by his mid-twenties. And I kinda feel like the dry shampoo trick will buy me a fair bit of time before I need to go down the re-root route.

Makeup artists are ace though - as well as being great conversationalists, unflappable and incredibly calming, they can make my face and hair do things I can never achieve at home. On this occasion I had my fringe crimped, resulting in the best micro-quiff I’ve ever sported. And I once had my neck shaved for Celebrity Mastermind, to make sure the backlight didn’t give me a hairy halo. Just one side of my neck, mind you, as that was the only side the camera would see.

Your Starter For Ten

For those who haven’t seen it, University Challenge is a long-running BBC quiz show in which teams of four students from different colleges and universities compete against each other to answer random academic questions.

And they really are random:

“Which 14th century monk was known for inventing the method of mead-brewing known as Gallupuliting?”

“Brian of Shardlow”

“Correct - your three follow-up questions are on the mating habits of the Andalusian mayfly”.

The Christmas Celebrity version is, as far as I can tell, no easier. The only advantage the “distinguished alumni” from each university have is that we’ve been alive longer, and have probably learned more things. Not about 14th century monks, mind you.

Our team, consisting of two accomplished scientists, a noted historian, and some chancer off the telly, bonded brilliantly, and spirits were high. Until, that is, we met our opposition, at which point everything got a lot more tense. As it turned out, everyone on my side had some kind of beef with the home city of our opponents, so this was going to be a grudge match of sorts.

I think it’s widely known that TV quiz show questions are much easier to answer when you’re at home on your sofa than when you’re actually in the studio, under the lights and the pressure of a real-time recording. And that pressure can manifest itself in weird ways.

I actually found myself drifting off in the middle of some of the questions, distracted by thoughts of what might be going on in the gallery, and trying not to do weird things with my face.

It didn’t help that UC questions seem to go on forever, are split into nested sub clauses that require recursive processing to understand, and which, if you buzz in before host Amol Rajan has finished asking them, lose you 5 points if you get them wrong.

In fact I was so terrified of buzzing in early, I missed the chance to win the very first question.

I knew it was “Bullet Train” - I just didn’t know know. Y’know?

My Number 1 Choice

At least with University Challenge, and with Celebrity Eggheads, I was on a team. In Celeb Mastermind, I was in the famous black chair, in the spotlight, all alone. In case you need reminding of the format, contestants face one round of questions on their chosen specialist subject, and one on general knowledge. So that’s one round you could in theory swot up on, and one that you just have to hand over to life experience.

I accepted a provisional invitation to appear on the show one September, but then forgot all about it after a few weeks.

When I eventually got the call confirming they’d like me to appear in the end of year Christmas series, there were a couple of problems. First, they were only giving me two weeks’ notice, and second, I was currently filming in China.

Any hope that I’d be able to spend a few cosy weeks online revising my specialist subject had been blown by the fact that I and my laptop were stuck behind the Great Firewall of China, which rather does cramp one’s browsing.

So what subject could I choose that I could read up on with limited facts at my fingertips? With no access to BBC iPlayer, I couldn’t watch any previous Mastermind episodes to get any ideas for specialist subject options. So that left me with three things I knew a fair bit about, but each came with some proper downsides:

1. Technology. Downsides:

   a) Boring, since that was my job

   b) Way too broad

   c) If I got anything wrong at all, I’d never live it down

2. Doctor Who. Downsides:

   a) I’m a fan, but not a superfan

   b) There were over 50 years of episodes that I had no hope of - ahem - Mastering in time

   c) I’d seen the Doctor Who Mastermind special a few years earlier, so I knew how hard the questions could be

3. Pop music. Downsides:

   a) There’s a lot of it

   b) There’s tons of it

   c) There’s just, like, loads

Maybe I could narrow down the music category a bit? Well, yes, it turned out I could. The main BBC streaming platform was blocked in China, but the internal BBC staff content system wasn’t, which meant I could browse descriptions of previous episodes. And I just so happened to scroll past one featuring Gail Porter, whose chosen specialist subject was - dum da da daaaah - UK number one singles of the 90s.

A lightbulb binged. A penny dropped. “Well, if you’re allowed to be that specific…”.

In any ten year period there couldn’t have been that many number ones, could there? And given the precise nature of Mastermind questions, surely the majority would be either “who sung the song X” or “what was the name of the song sung by Y”? I’d just need to choose my favourite decade, and read up on any other unusual facts about each chart-topper.

So for the next week I spent the days filming electronics hypermarkets and factories in Shenzhen, and the evenings locked in my hotel room learning everything I could about all 172 number ones from 1983 to 1992 inclusive.

And if ever you need them for your local pub quiz, the following answers will give you a good chance at getting a point. If a question starts:

“Who produced…”, go with Quincy Jones.

“Who played harmonica on…”, chances are it’s Stevie Wonder

“Who played piano on…”, it’s probably Elton John.

The day of recording arrived, I sat in the green room with a bunch of other nervous looking people I vaguely knew off the telly, and had my shirt professionally ironed and half my neck shaved.

Bizarrely the most famous celebrity I met backstage was Hacker The Dog, who was there to support a fellow CBBC colleague.

TV legend meets guy in a fancy shirt

Even more bizarrely, Hacker was a previous Mastermind contestant, in an episode that was conducted under the same rules, and with the same level of seriousness, as every other, and is absolutely worth a watch.

When you see the complex operation that Hacker’s operator runs in order to bring the puppet to life, you really have to doff your cap to someone who is laying flat on the floor, watching a monitor, working at least three sticks, and answering pretty hard questions about The Pet Shop Boys.

I took the chair for the first round, with a couple of bits of advice in my mind:

First, don’t look the host John Humphrys in the eyes - look slightly to one side. Like the Medusa, he’s slightly less dangerous that way.

Second, if at the end of the show, two contestants have the same score, the one with the least number of passes will win.

So if I had the same number of points as someone else after the first round, my plan was to not pass at all in the second. Better to guess a wrong answer, as long as I could think of one quckly. Just for info, that’s actually quite hard when you’re against the clock.

So, if you’d like to watch what turned out to be an exciting, and unexpectedly hilarious episode, at least you now know what was going through my head.

As for University Challenge, the 2024 Christmas season is available on iPlayer for those who are interested in seeing me mainly make weird faces and bang my head on the desk a few times.

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

It’s lovely to be asked to appear on these programmes. I do seem to have been pigeon-holed into the brainiac category of contestant, which is flattering, but leaves me facing the possibility that Only Connect may come calling at some point. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in that show.

I do love a good quiz though, and my target now is Richard Osman’s House of Games, mainly because it’s silly, I understand it, and - well - I love Richard Osman.

I wonder what he does with his hair?