Jeremy Vine reveals why his game show is a new joy amid the 'death' of the quiz in the modern age

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

I’d like to tell you about the day I took part in a big charity quiz. The man with the microphone asked the first question: “Which American football player began the practice of taking the knee to protest racial injustice in 2016?” Tricky. I racked my brains. Was it Colin Someone? I threw a beseeching glance across the table.

That’s when I saw a younger team member – a smart professional member of Gen Z, and for all I knew an upstanding member of the community – fishing in her handbag. “Right,” she said. “Let’s find out.” And produced her phone.

A phone! At a quiz! I was alarmed. Looking up answers to quiz questions is such a no-no it might have resulted in the disqualification of the entire team, not to mention subsequent reputational destruction (I was presenting the long-running quiz show Eggheads at the time).

Aghast, I remonstrated. The woman rolled her eyes and reluctantly pushed the phone back into her bag. Then I spotted her neighbour at the table also re-bagging her phone. It dawned on me that this wasn’t a simple case of a single miscreant. This was generational.

Luckily for me, I had smuggled one of the Eggheads into the event. The inimitable Kevin Ashman, probably the greatest quizzer in the world at the time, spent a few seconds rubbing his chin before coming up with the answer: Colin Kaepernick.

Ah! I know what you’re thinking. What’s the difference between smuggling a phone and an Egghead into a quiz? The answer is that the Egghead is human, and the mobile is machine. The more we lean on smartphones, the dumber we become.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about that moment. My father stopped needing to know the layout of London when he bought an A–Z street atlas. For people born after 1990, the idea of knowing something is the same as knowing where to find it. Extend the analogy, and someone with a mobile needs to know nothing at all.

For years, TV has given us quizzes – Mastermind, Celebrity Squares and the greatest quiz show of all time, Ask the Family. I’ve been lucky to be part of this history, asking more than 45,000 questions while filming over 1,000 wonderful episodes of Eggheads between 2008 and 2023. But winning teams were rarely young.

The classic quiz appears to be rusting like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Why would there be any social cachet in knowing stuff when your phone knows everything? Where once we had quiz geniuses, now we have smartphone bores. There are still great TV quizzes, but new formats are thin on the ground. I’m sad. The whole “not a lot of people know that” (cue Michael Caine voice) was such a part of British culture.

Perhaps the next step is a TV quiz where you simply test how fast people can google the answers. Or perhaps we should move gratefully to the TV puzzle? For it eliminates one downside of a quiz – embarrassment.

On Mastermind in 2008, the then Higher Education Minister David Lammy almost tanked his career when he was asked the surname of the French scientists Marie and Pierre. His reply? “Antoinette.” He also said Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII. By contrast, no one gets embarrassed by a failed Wordle. The audience wouldn’t have laughed if Lammy failed to work out what eight-letter word is formed from the letters ZIPGNULZ.

5 has caught this breeze with Celebrity Puzzling, the show I host with team captains Carol Vorderman and Sally Lindsay. We feature brainteasers, tricky puzzles, tests of logic and lateral thinking. While I love a quiz and lament their death in the mobile phone age, I think we’ve found a new joy in something. We embrace shapes, anagrams and word connections, and there is a complete lack of embarrassment when you can’t work out the answer.

*(anagram answer is PUZZLING)

Jeremy Vine presents Celebrity Puzzling Monday to Friday at 7pm on 5.

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