Plunkett on TV: Puzzling

The most puzzling thing about Channel 5’s new quiz Puzzling is that its host Lucy Worsley has never fronted a game show before.

From the moment the historian and broadcaster introduces the two teams in the very first episode she is clearly to the manor born, making it practically impossible to imagine the primetime show being presented by anyone else.

It turned out that Worsley had always wanted to take part in a studio-based show, so when Channel 5 first got in touch they knew they had struck gold.

‘We wanted someone who could bring in a very broad, very intelligent audience and as soon as Lucy’s name came up it was like yes, she’d be brilliant,’ says Daniel Pearl, commissioning editor, unscripted, Channel 5 and Paramount+.

‘Lucy’s not done a quiz before but she’s got that warmth and sense of fun and she wanted to do a quiz and she wanted it to be an intelligent quiz. Once we got her on board everything just sort of fell in place.’

The 13-part series, which airs on Channel 5 at 8pm on Thursdays and began last week [22 June], will seek out Britain’s best puzzler by testing their problem solving abilities and mental agility across five very different rounds.

The roots of the show can be traced back around 18 months when Channel 5 first considered the idea of a primetime quiz, encouraged by the success of shows such as Only Connect on BBC2, part of the channel’s popular Monday quiz night.

Channel 5 is home to daytime quiz show Eggheads, fronted by one of Channel 5’s most familiar faces, Jeremy Vine, but has historically never had one in primetime.

But you can see the appeal - quizzes and gameshows are eternally popular and integral part of the British broadcasting landscape (as opposed to streaming services, for example, where they are rare or indeed non-existent).

‘Over the last five years or so - basically since the end of Big Brother - we’ve had a strategy of growing the peak time audience with original British content and our audience has got a bit older as a result, and broader as a result, and has grown quite dramatically as a result as well,’ says Pearl.

‘We are always aware of where that audience is and it’s really, really clear that a lot of them watch BBC2 and the biggest shows on BBC2 are intelligent quizzes. That's a trend that is impossible to ignore.’

Around the same time former Deal or No Deal executive producer Glenn Hugill, all-round quiz guru and the UK president of Jimmy Kimmel and Brent Montgomery’s Wheelhouse, pitched the idea to Channel 5 of a format based around IQ tests.

‘That’s what life is like; sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time,’ says Hugill. ‘We walked right through the door with exactly what they were talking about, so they were tremendously excited from the off.’

The format evolved over the coming months with the key element being ‘playability’, allowing people to play along at home without the need for a vast reservoir of general knowledge and have a go at cracking the puzzles themselves.

Each of the five rounds tests a different part of the brain - language, calculation, lateral thinking, visual intelligence and memory. You might be good at one or two of them but it takes a special talent - genius, you might say - to excel at all five.

‘It’s all about playing along,’ says Channel 5’s Pearl. ‘You care about the contestants … but fundamentally you watch this quiz because you want to test yourself. It’s almost irresistible - you cannot help but shout out the answer.’

The boom in popularity of logic puzzles and word games such as Wordle and before that Sudoku has been a phenomenon which gained even more traction during lockdown and is one which Puzzling taps directly into.

‘When you see how people are challenging themselves these days, to stay sharp and keep their minds active, the trend is no longer ‘Name the fifth wife of Henry VIII’ because you can Google that,’ says Hugill, who is also one of the executive producers on the Channel 5 show.

‘There’s a trend towards lateral thinking, logic puzzle and riddles. Puzzling is Google-proof. It’s the ultimate challenge. And you could be end up smarter at the end of it.’

Puzzling is another string to the bow of presenter Worsley whose day job - well, one of them - is joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

She says she had been ‘channeling Miss Marple’ in her presenting role. ‘I think Miss Marple is, in many ways, my best self, someone I aspire to be in life. Somebody who may not look very ferocious or intimidating or scary, but at the core of herself, she has an idea of what’s going on.’

‘It’s an inclusive quiz,’ she adds. ‘Often when I’m watching a quiz show like University Challenge, I do feel a bit excluded from it, because my general knowledge isn’t that great, it’s quite concentrated on Tudor history. But this really does offer something for everybody.

‘We hope that the people watching it will feel like they’re in a puzzling club, because everyone will be able to play.’

*  A 13 x 60 minute series produced by 12 Yard Productions and Wheelhouse, Puzzling airs on Channel 5 at 8pm on Thursdays