Wot, MORE game shows?

        Hands up, everyone who gets Channel Five!
        Hands up, everyone who can get 5 who actually bothers to watch it!
        Hands up, those who have seen the show "Whittle" on Channel Five!
        ANYONE?

        I wasn't alone at the Wanted taping, for I agreed to meet up with two
friends (and GIT readers) Tom Lancaster from Scunthorpe and Phil Hannay from
Maidstone at the show. Afterwards, I went back with Phil for a few days' not-
too-specific larging it at his house in Maidstone. A pleasant coincidence was
that Whittle was being taped at the Maidstone studios while we were there, and
we had tickets for two of the evenings' filming sessions.
        For the 98% of you who haven't seen Whittle, it's just like the old
"Everybody's Equal" show on ITV, but cheaper. Still blank? The 100 audience
members are the players in the game. Each one has a keypad with four buttons.
A question is displayed with three wrong answers and a right one in some
order on a giant computer screen. The audience each have ten seconds to
press a button on their keypads according to which answer they think is right.
Those guessing wrongly drop out, those guessing correctly stay in. Usually
one answer will be ludicrous, and those picking the ludicrous answer are
gently publically ridiculed by name and by close-up. Repeat five times, and
take the players giving the ten fastest correct answers to the fifth question.
Second half has four more questions in the same way for those ten people, but
each right answer earning ten pounds as well. Fastest correct answer on the
last question wins 250 pounds. The last question takes the form "put these 4
things into the right order". If the winner gets it right, they double their
money to œ500; if not, that œ250 is split between all the members of the
audience who got it right.
        Other features: ludicrous, nay, post-ironic catchphrases; ludicrous
W masks to be worn by those eliminated having reached the second half; human
interest added by "the Whittle computer working out the four most likely to
win" and foppy host Tim Vine (whose hosting style consists of rapid-fire puns
like Tony Wheatley on speed) interviewing them and pointing out each one's
progress question by question. Jolly family fun, and not too costly to make.
        Except it's not a computer who picks the Four To Follow. A random
production associate asks audience members to nominate outspoken people in
their party, and a response pointing to me behind my back with the phrase
"he'd make for comedy television" is enough to get me selected. Thanks, Phil.
        So indeed I was interviewed for fully three or four minutes in the
green room, and Tim Vine was prompted with loaded questions with which to
bait me into saying something outrageous. Knowing how low the viewing figures
are (circa 300,000) I didn't make a prize clown of myself, but I came across
as I do in person. When you see that through the medium of television (and
when I'm wearing an obligatory comedy yellow fez with a purple tassle), and
when the other three to follow are a bit more reticent and giggly, I come
across as... well, I don't know. I haven't seen how I came across. Apparently
it was more interestingly than most contestants do, though.
        Luckily I followed the path of minimum embarrassment in that game; I
got all five first-half questions right but was too slow on the fifth one. No
money was earned. In all, we attended two sessions, each one taking the best
part of four hours to film three 25-minute shows, playing one game on Monday
and three on Wednesday. Wednesday's game two was the only other eventful one
for me. Question four was "Anne Boleyn's last words, to her executioner, were
'My neck is very...'?". The four answers were dirty, pimply, slender and
sweaty, and, not knowing, I thought dirty was a reasonable guess. Oosp. 74 of
the 77 remaining players correctly chose slender, 1 chose pimply and only one
other person apart from me chose dirty. "Oh dear", I thought, "but at least
one person alone chose something much more wacky than I did, and so I'll
escape exposure." Wrong-o. I got my second close-up and tried to blabber my
way out of it. Still, at the end of the game I picked up a thirty-fifth share
of œ250 (œ7.14) by getting the ordering question right, unlike the winner.
        The sodding history questions skunked me every time, and I never did
make it to the last ten in four attempts. Phil did, once, though, only to get
his first money question about zebra crossings wrong. D'oh!