Weaver's Week 2026-08-02

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Radio 4 has had a short run of quiz pilots. Here's our thoughts on all the formats.

The host is Clare Balding, from shows as diverse as Britain's Brightest, The Traitors, and The 4.15 from Goodwood. She's joined by two pairs of players, who are given the prosaic titles Team A and Team B. It's a literary programme, drawing inspiration from fact and fiction, from handbooks and children's literature and whatever it is The Book Shop are plugging today.

First round is quite intriguing: our players are asked five questions from across the world of books. Right answers earn a point; wrong answers earn nothing. After all five questions, the correct answers will provide a series of hints towards a mystery book; name that book for three extra marks. Nice and easy if you've got all of the answers, quite taxing if you've only got a couple right. And, to make it more difficult, Clare won't give the correct answers till the end of the round.

A pair of specialist rounds follows, one for a player from each team. Each contestant has nominated a book (or short series) and tries to get five questions right. One mark for a correct answer on your own question, two if the other team can pick up an error and prove they know more about your specialist subject than you do! Works covered in this round are particularly diverse, ranging from Charlie "Fingers" Dickens, through the Adrian Mole chronicles, to Murder on the Orient Express, and Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course.

Next is a lift from Who Dares Wins: name as many correct answers as you can in a category. Stephen King wrote 93 novels, but how many can the team name? Each team bids their best effort back and forth; whoever ends up bidding the highest tries to complete the list. Three points if they match the bid, three away if they miss, and there's a bonus three points if the teams match one of the entries from a clue.

In both of the pilot episodes, this turned out to be the swing round: whoever won it would have a massive advantage in the rest of the show. If there's a series, we'd like to see this made less swingy. (And if there's a series, can they have more than one piece of Canned Applause? The same claps get very recognisable.)

Another pair of specialist rounds, and then it's the quickfire buzzer round - anagrams on a particular subject. Sets of four are a bit like the end to Only Connect (2), and the anagrams themselves are on the more entertaining side of things.

Clare is an enthusiastic and learned presenter, it always sounds like she's discussing something that she knows, and we're able to see that the players are also working with things they know. Is the series worth a recommission? Yes, the literary quiz has a long and noble heritage on Radio 4, and this is a worthy successor.

Lucy Porter is our host, from shows as diverse as Mock the Week, Pointless, and Pro-Celebrity Face/Off. She's joined by two pairs of players, who are given the prosaic titles Team 1 and Team 2. It's a quiz about recent history, news events illustrated from the BBC's vast sound library and audio archives.

Round one is the obvious round: play a clip from the archives, and teams race to buzz in to name the event. Two points if they can do so, and a bonus mark if the team can identify the year. Right answers unlock three bonus questions, just for that team, they're not thrown across to the other side.

Already, they've got the swingy round: with three clips and three sets of bonuses, one team can be out of sight in the first five minutes and that doesn't make for a competitive quiz. We'd suggest one clip for each side and a third that's entirely on the buzzers.

Vox pops form the setting for the second round, little contributions from the public who are talking about something topical. But what are they talking about? Our players can guess after each clip: three points if the team are right after one clip, two after two, one after all three clips.

Round three asks teams to order events within a decade, illustrated by short clips. Whoever's in the lead gets a choice of two decades prepared by the producers. One for naming each news story, three for getting all three clips in the right order.

Next up is a Well Done If You've Sent This In From Home round, using voice notes contributed by listeners. All the Déjà News listeners do is describe some news events from their lifetime; the teams are told the listener's age and asked to name the event. Nifty idea, and using some young children evokes the classic show Child's Play.

Most difficult round is next: three clips are played, each associated with a number. Do some arithmetic on the numbers to produce a final total. This is a fiendish way to earn five points, the operations are small, there's no tolerance for being one year out. We never knew Lucy Porter was quite so harsh with her contestants.

The show ends with a "complete the quotations" round, three words are left off the end of a clip, buzz in and name them for a mark.

Lots of quiz in this show, though we do wonder how long they can keep up with well-known three-word quotations, and maybe a generic Missing Words round would be more sustainable. We also wonder if there's scope for re-using bits of old Radio 4 topical comedy programmes: questions from The News Quiz, or the subject of a rant from Marcus Brigstoke on The Now Show.

We're also a bit down on Déjà News because it didn't really mine the depths of the BBC Archive. Vernon Kay has a lovely little section on his Radio 2 show, about the minutiae of daily life; this sort of thing might yield interesting questions.

Overall, Déjà News is a work in progress, which is fine and what we'd expect from a pilot run. A full series is possible, and expect the programme to evolve like Have I Got News for You did in its early years.

Max Fosh is the host here, a new name for this column. He's bright and enthusiastic, knows his show inside out and has lots of fun with it – and all that spreads through the radio like a smile through butter. Like on all the shows in this pilot run, contestants are introduced by forename only; this seems to be the way most shows are going, and we don't begrudge the change.

Round one is a nice and simple start: a bunch of maths questions based on trivia. For example, the number of teams in the English Super League minus the number of teams in the Scottish Premier League. Buzz in with the correct answer and the correct working to score the point (so fourteen in England, ten in Scotland, the answer's four). This'll be Dim Sums from House of Games (3) brought back.

Estimate Guestimate is another House of Games (3) favourite with a twist: there are three players in this Distinctly Average round. One team is sent backstage, the other is asked a long and complicated maths question, accompanied by a music hit. An example question: "Lou Bega decides to send a Valentine's Day card to all the women mentioned in his hit song 'Mambo number 5' and, to save money, decides to do so second class. How much money does Lou Bega spend on stamps?"

The first team has a think and a cogitate, explains their working, and then keep a poker face while the other side have a go. After both teams have answered, they are both brought in to hear the correct answer; closer team gets two points. But we said there's a third player: the studio audience. If the winning team's answer is closer than the average guess of the audience, the players get a bonus two points.

Both teams have a go at answering a question first. This takes up a good chunk of the programme's running time, but we don't feel that it dragged badly. Lou Bega needed to spend 91p on each of his nine loves, so spent £8.19.

There were a couple of Rounds 3. One was a version of pontoon, asking for flags that had won the Senior Eurovision Song Contest in an effort to get close to 21 without going over. When both teams said "Swindon" and "Ireland", we knew they'd bust, and the round was more Pointless than Gambit.

The other Round 3 was a burst of Ash the Bash's Relativity: given a number, are there more, less, or the same number of things in a category. Ten: series of Red Dwarf broadcast on the BBC. Ten: coin values to have featured Queen Elizabeth II's head. This is a timed event, one minute for each side to answer as many questions as possible.

The final round is a mixture of trivia and hard maths: year in which the first space walk took place OR 15 times 131. Both answers should lead you to 1965. Buzz in for a point.

Great news for us listeners is that the show is never quite a foregone conclusion, although the Distinctly Average round can be rather swingy, there's enough points available elsewhere to counteract that. And, of all the hosts, Max is the one who has gone furthest up in our estimations.

Simon Reeve is the host; he's a travel guy, apparently he's done some programmes on the Dave channel though these have passed us by. Simon is certainly a good communicator, clear in what he wants to say and able to add a little humour and character to proceedings. Two teams of two travellers are introduced, in a way that makes us think they're padding the show a little.

The opening question: where are we? Simon reads clues to a country; they're discrete clues, statements with a clear ending, not like the stream of prose from University Challenge starters. Buzz in and get it wrong, and the team's frozen out from the next clue.

Buzz in and get it right and the team get to choose their route. For the first episode, the journey was from Moldova to Paris, either via a northern route (through Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Luxembourg), or a southern route (through Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and Italy). Do you think you know more about Luxembourg or Croatia?

To move on the journey, teams answer questions about their proposed destination. If you want to go to end up in Italy, you're answering a question about Italy.

Usually, teams are required to move from one country to the next, but there are shortcuts. A "train" will allow the team to take two steps along the track, and a "plane" gives them three steps. Part-performance is rewarded, so if you try to fly to Italy and only get two questions right, you're still moving to Croatia. Each team only gets one "train" and one "plane" for each show.

There's a further help, "tourist information" from Simon is a hint about the question, which we think is improvised on the spot. Each team gets two "tourist information" hints for the programme.

Arrival in France gets a team to the border, they need to answer four more questions about France to get to the destination and win the game. Get one wrong and the other team have their chance to move; the final could and should boil down to knowledge of the destination country.

Boiled down to its basics, it's a first-to-nine race about European geography (and, in the second show, West African geography). The programme came across as a bit light, it was safely contained in the half-hour when the other shows threatened to ooze out of the slot's edges. The production was cluttered, a lot of sound effects and noises took us out of the flow. There's nothing wrong with the idea, but we're not convinced the details are quite right.

Overall, we're impressed with all four series. All were worth a listen, and we can see all four becoming regulars on the Radio 4 schedule after a few changes. If we were the Radio 4 commissioner, we'd get out our quill pen and make the following notes:

• Bookmarks – commission, with tweaks to make the result less reliant on the list round. Consider an eight-team double-elimination tournament like the University Challenge final phase.
• Déjà News – commission, with tweaks to make the result less predictable after one round. Standalone episodes would work best.
• Your Number's Up – commission as is. Consider a tournament; consider celebrity episodes involving the More Or Less crew.
• Around the World in 80 Ways – take away and tweak, there's something not quite right. If commissioned, as standalone episodes.

And this presents the Radio 4 commissioner with a delicious problem. All of these shows could go to a full series, and could combine with existing shows to make a year-round strand. Add in Paul Sinha's Perfect Pub Quiz (back for a new run in a few weeks), and The Museum of Curiosity, consider quizzes on subjects like food and film, to make a complete circle of entertaining panel quizzes with an intellectual backbone.

We're sorry to report the death of Bill Oddie. A fuller obituary follows next week.

Every pass counts on Mastermind. Piers Marchant, a student, won this week's edition. Ten points on the films of Wes Anderson, nine on general knowledge; it's a fine score – good enough to win! – but never felt like a winner tonight. But then Lorraine Behrens returned; she had been perfect on the geologist James Hutton, but stumbled to six and a pass in the general pass. And that allowed Piers to win by the one pass. Also competing: Hen Ket Li (the band Madness) and Dom Mottram (history of the Paris Métro).

Sinistrals beat the Merseyside Eyes 28-20 on Only Connect. Sinistrals – the group of left-handed players – took a one-point lead in the Connections round, getting pairs who support rival football teams for two points in a round where almost everything went for one. Lots of scores in Sequences, including the Eyes guessing a link of vowels at the end of Italian adjectives. It was Missing Vowels that won it, 10-3, and it all means the Merseyside Eyes will bring their wonderful dress sense to a Second Chance match in a few weeks.

Quite the rattler on University Challenge, where University Oxford beat St John's Cambridge by 200-170. Univ had the best of the opening questions, racking up 65 by the picture round, only for St John's to peg them back and briefly take the lead after the music round. Univ then went on a purple patch,14 of the next 20 correct gave them a near-impregnable lead, only for St John's to come roaring back with 12 in a row – but bookended by a penalty. We'd be amazed if St John's aren't back for the repêchage, and quite possibly more.

Univ were right on 30/52 questions, and 19/31 bonuses, both above average for last series. St John's scores on 28/44 questions, and 19/27 bonuses, that's a bonus rate of 70% and overall accuracy of 64%. Three penalties for St John's, compared to one for Univ, whose captain Delia Cropper hit a personal score of 108. Everyone got at least one starter right. A lot of Art and Geography this week, with not a huge amount of Literature, perhaps reflecting the team's sciencey studies.

In other points:

• A young group of contestants on Only Connect surprised the question editors by recognising Patricia Routledge. They didn't know which football team traditionally opposes Arsenal.
• "Team on University Challenge" was an answer on Only Connect. "What is that?" asked a confused Victoria Coren Mitchell; lest we forget, she prefers to watch Level Crossing With Michael Portillo.
• The prisoners' dilemma was invented in 1950 by Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood of the Rand Corporation in 1950. We rather wish they hadn't.

The BBC have confirmed that Blankety Blank will not be renewed, as host Bradley Walsh wishes to concentrate on his acting. They've also said that this winter's series of Celebrity Mastermind will be the last; the show will be remembered for "Sharon" Thunberg.

This weekend is Strongest Man weekend (C5), live from salubrious Milton Keynes. Celebrity Am Dro! (S4C, Sat) marks the Eisteddfod. In daytimes, The Answer Run has a new series (BBC1 weekdays); in primetime, Celebrity Hunted returns (C4, from Mon). Sally Magnusson remembers her father Magnus's brilliance on Mastermind (BBC4, Mon). Lots of new shows from Australia: Masterchef Down Under is back (W, from Mon), joined by Survivor Down Under (BBC3, Tue) and Guy Mont Spelling Bee (BBC3, Wed).

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