it’s all over
A couple weeks ago the BBC announced the cancellation of the long-running BBC1 comedy quiz show They Think It’s All Over.
All Over was one of my first favorites when I began my longstanding TV exchange with my friend Danny, back in 1999. And it remained an eagerly-anticipated highlight through the following years.
For those of you unfamiliar with the quiz comedy format, it’s like this: there’s a captain who asks questions and sets challenges of a small panel of two teams, each chaired by a permanent team captain, and one or more guests. Every quiz comedy show is built around a consistent theme; in All Over’s case, it’s the theme of sports. The guest teammates are invariably plucked from the UK sporting world, and have included some big names over the years. Anyway, these two teams “compete” against each other to incur the most points and be declared winner for the episode. It’s all a bit like a themed game show, only it isn’t.
In truth, it’s a farce. There are no prizes. The two teams compete against one another for nothing at all. Oftentimes, they’re so busy developing elaborate jokes that they forget the question they were asked in the first place. The whole quiz format is an elaborate set-up for everyone involved to simply create comedy, a hoax game show whose only purpose is to laugh.
The whole concept is inimitably British. No other country could produce such an oddball and seemingly pointless program[me], where the entire point of the game is absolutely nothing at all. The structure leads nowhere, or rather to nothing more fulfilling than to receive meaningless points (in some of the other quiz comedy shows, like Never Mind the Buzzcocks, points are given or taken away sometimes on a whim just for amusement). All they care about is being funny — the format is merely a framework in which to work their delirium.
All Over was perhaps my favo[u]rite in the quiz comedy lineup in the beginning. Some episodes … I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed so hard. Sometimes I was convulsing so badly that I feared I might rupture something, genuinely feared that I was going to harm myself. One of the most famous “challenges” in the show was the Feel the Sportsman challenge, where two members from a team were blindfolded, and then had to guess the name of the sports personality by touch alone; by pawing at them.
Just consider the comic possibilities of that challenge for a moment.
And tiebreakers — oh, boy did I hope for a tiebreaker episode, because in the event of a tie there was always some ridiculous physical challenge the two captains had to compete in to break the tie. Once — I nearly wet myself — the two captains were put in these inflatable Sumo wrestler costumes and made to wrestle. But since the costume was really just a giant skin-colo[u]red balloon surrounding them, every time they collided they would bounce off each other like helium balloons. Okay, maybe it sounds stupid, but it was hugely funny, dangerously and lethally funny.
Then things began to unravel. First one, then the other of the longtime team captains left the show. Ultimately, for the season last fall, host Nick Hancock left to be replaced by Lee Mack.
I didn’t like Lee Mack. And when you don’t like the host, things start to take a nosedive.
So the show I loved so much started to kind of stumble and lose ground. And then, a couple weeks ago, the axe fell. Which, actually, I think is a bit harsh. Couldn’t they have moved it to BBC2, gotten rid of Mack, and started afresh, perhaps tweaked the format a bit? Did they really have to kill and bury the thing altogether? Guess they thought they did. It makes me a bit melancholy.
So much laughter, so much absurdity. So many fabulous episodes.
They think it’s all over … it is now.