Madstunts Reviews

Whittle (1997)

Cheap but cheerful

[9/10 · 22 February 2007]

This quiz show may have been produced on a very very low budget, but the makers seemed to gleefully embrace the "cheap and cheerful" quality. Getting Tim Vine to host it was a masterstroke. His stand-up routine consists almost entirely of "groaner" gags - dreadful puns and visual jokes, which he somehow elevates from naff to genius. This trick worked for Whittle as well - somehow he managed to make something which by all accounts should have been dreadful, into something which was ironically brilliant. The nature of the show meant that if too many of the audience got "whittled away" by an early question, Tim would have to stall for time to make the rest of the show fit the time slot - asking the finalist desperately uninteresting personal questions, and cracking hilariously rubbish gags.

He didn't seem to care that the total prize money was a pitiful £500 (Just one year later "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" would offer £1,000,000), and neither did we.

I was really sad to see it go.

100% (1997–2001)

Perfect

[10/10 · 22 February 2007]

It's strange, but Channel 5's lack of money when they first started broadcasting could - in this instance - have worked in their favour, in the sense that by creating "100%", they managed to boil the quiz-show format down to the purest essentials - No smarmy host, no studio audience, no novelty rounds with awkward rules, no flashy graphics, no personal info (does anyone really care how many kids Andy from Cleckheaton has?), no gimmicks of any kind. Just 3 contestants, 100 questions, and whoever gets most right wins £100. Do you want to play again - yes/no. Thank you, goodnight.

The perfect quiz show.