What times these are for the late-afternoon and early-evening terrestrial TV quiz. On any given weekday you can feast your eyes on the rather excellent Warwick Davis-fronted Tenable; the unabashed imbecility of Tipping Point; the surprisingly white-knuckle The Chase; the intriguingly gimmicky Hardball; and, of course, the peerless Pointless. Such riches.
Eggheads predates all of these – it is now in year 15 of its life – and its longevity is a testament to its simplicity. In a nutshell: could you prevail against the most formidable pub quiz team in the UK: one populated by former contestants from Mastermind and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The current Eggheads even look like the kind of people who carpet-bomb quiz nights every night for the prize money. They are damn near unassailable, which seems to be the point.
So what, I hear you cry, could possibly be Eggheads’ hammerhead-hopping moment? I mentioned earlier – you may even remember this – that the assembled Eggheads look like a pub quiz team. This is in no way meant to belittle pub quiz teams. The current lineup just has the look of people who would get excited by a “free chips for all teams” offer. It was not always thus.
Once upon a time, there was another Egghead. Cut from entirely different cloth, he was an Egghead defined by his otherness. His name was Joe Connagh, AKA CJ de Mooi (his male-modelling pseudonym, “de Mooi” being Dutch for “the pretty”). You can already see how CJ might stick out on Eggheads – chiselled; self-adoring pseudonym – and on the Eggheads team. CJ was like Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: the alpha male to his team of quiz velociraptors. Eggheads should have moved heaven and Earth to hang on to CJ; instead it let him go. What CJ represented was the last bastion of true personality on the show, and it helped that he was not as insanely knowledgeable as his fellow Eggheads and, in fact, usually looked quite uncomfortable in their presence.
Since his departure, Eggheads has acquired a coterie of nine uber-smartarses, who are a) Seemingly unburdened by anything even remotely resembling a personality, and b) More or less unbeatable in quizzes. They are too clever to entertain any more. Eggheads is now less a quizshow, more a Harlem Globetrotters-style exercise in toying with, and ultimately humiliating, lesser opposition. It is like watching Christians being fed to particularly tedious and unattractive lions in cardigans.
The Chase makes for an interesting comparison. On ITV’s substantially more dynamic show, they actively try to make their “Chasers” personalities in their own right: stone-faced, fearsome-but-wisecracking general-knowledge cyborgs. Indeed, one of them, Anne “The Governess” Hegarty, has reached such heights of fame that she has been deemed worthy of a place in the current series of I’m a Celebrity. You would not, it’s fair to say, ever want to see an Egghead eating grubs or bathing in a waterfall. And sadly, we don’t especially want to see them glumly winning a quizshow every day, either.
