With less at stake, Alexander Armstrong’s tea-time quizshow is now just a leisurely 45 minutes of tensionless pleasantries
They say celebrities die twice: once when they stop breathing, and a second time when their name becomes a winning answer on Pointless. It is a mark of the gameshow’s ubiquity. First appearing on
BBC Two in 2009, Pointless reverse-engineered the Family Fortunes formula, polling the public in 100-second bursts to see how many examples of a subject they could provide (“People who married into the royal family” etc). Pairs of contestants then compete to provide the least obvious answers, like greedy pigs sniffing out obscure knowledge truffles, in exchange for £250 being added to the jackpot for each pointless one. A loving tribute, then, to how poorly we can recall types of tree, or remember the periodic table.
Presided over affably by the comedian and part-time opera
Singer Alexander Armstrong with Richard “brother of one of Suede” Osman impressively avoiding haughty condescension as the know-it-all sidekick, Pointless appeals to our inner pedant, amplifying quiz-based dopamine surges by cherishing rarer (and, by extension, better) knowledge. In an age when we spend hours Googling and then immediately forgetting things, the Pointless jackpot incentivises the retention of irrelevant info. Half-remembering Scorsese films, European capitals and Things Rick Astley Is Never Gonna Do suddenly became worth if not big, then respectable, bucks.