Weaver's Week 2009-10-11

The Big Food Fight is billed as a comedy quiz, with Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall as a regular guest. Other contributors to the first edition included James Martin (who we'd never heard of), Ching-He Huang (again, our ignorance is showing), and Charlotte Church. As in the opera singer, perhaps better known for her consumption of food and drink than her creation of it. Later shows have featured the likes of Patsy Kensit and Greg Wallace.

After the introductions, it's into round one, "Ten of a Kind". Contestants are asked to name ten things that fall into a specified category. Types of knife, varieties of lettuce, dishes on the menu at their favourite restaurant. It's all grist to the mill. Twenty seconds to name as many items as they can, and all Sue needs to do is implore them, try not to panic.

Round two has a habit of changing each week. Perhaps the most memorable experiment was in the opening episode, when the teams were tied together so that they had one person's left hand and the other player's right hand, and had to make some dish while in their ropes.

For our money, the highlight of the show comes with the "Taste Test" round. Here, unusual flavours are blended into one dish – a sausage made from cheese, celery, and shortbread, for instance. The players are blindfolded, and must attempt to decide what's in their grub from the smell, taste, and texture alone. Written down, it's a perfectly simple idea, but the possibilities are almost limitless. The show ends with a quick-fire on-the-buzzers round.

And, er, that's about it. The format's never going to be ramp up the tension a la Masterchef, it's not going to be as presumptious as Snacks From Our Shed or as laid-back as Còcaire nan Còcairean, for those are shows about the act of cooking. No, The Big Food Fight is about the consumption of food. It doesn't much matter how one gets the grub, so long as one does. The closest comparison is with the Food and Drink Christmas Quiz, and while there's a certain level of amusement in asking Jilly Goolden to identify precisely which vineyard a particular wine came from, that stunt had no relevance to the lives of the average viewer. The Big Food Fight is much more accessible to the man in the street. It's aimed at people who go out for dinner, not at haute cuisine gastronauts.

Above all, The Big Food Fight is fun. It is a quiz, there is scoring, there are winners and losers at the end. None of that really matters, because the main requirement is for everyone to have a fun time, and that does show through in the final programme. It's the Angel Delight of game shows: light and insubstantial and probably a bit naughty for you, but a little bit moreish.

The only problem comes when a perfectly average show – because that's what Clever V Stupid is – gets ribbed mercilessly by every other reviewer. We've not found a single critic with anything positive to say about it. Brian Viner of The Independent said his wife "wondered whether anyone not professionally obliged to sit through it would suffer more than five minutes before reaching for the remote". Unreality TV said, "Whoever brought this abject drivel onto our screens needs to be lined up and shot, but only with rubber bullets." Custard TV added, "we've never seen a quiz as confused and contrived as this miasma of foetid porridge."

This column is going to nail its colours to the mast: Clever V Stupid is not that bad. It's not the greatest programme in history, but it's not the worst we've seen this year. Heck, it's not the worst we've seen this week.

The rounds are independent of each other, and they're all branded as different sorts of "intelligence". Viewers are given rounds on "emotional intelligence" (aka how well can you convince strangers that you're not lying), "practical intelligence" (how well can you navigate through Camden while carrying five pints of beer), "creative intelligence" (how well can you tell a story to children), and "physical intelligence" (how well can you make an ice cream sundae when the world is upside down). There's also "the quiz", a bit of intelligence intelligence, how well do the players know stuff about intelligence.

Throughout the show, presenter Matt Edmondson refers to the jaw-dropping finale. It turns out to be a remote control car race, and a one-point advantage is worth a one-second head start. The cars are running on a fixed track, and they move in response to the brain waves of the contestants. The more relaxed the contestant, the faster their car will move, and whichever car completes ten laps first will win.

There are a couple of glaring errors: the show has an annoying coloured tinge around the edge of the studio sections, and that gets old after a short while. We find ourselves laughing at the geeks, and laughing at the bimbos and bodybuilders. There's not a tremendous amount of laughing with anyone, and the resident geeks are chosen for being a bit whacky – there's no-one with the quiet charm of Gail Trimble. And it does seem that the programme's been made on a microscopic budget, with a cheap set, few props, and a rotating team of Clever people.

The programme fills time with some interviews with people on the street, showing that there really are some people in Britain who don't know where Sheffield is. Is this a failure of their knowledge, or an indictment of the educational system? Oops, sorry, we're asking difficult questions in a direct manner, and that would never do on BBC3. The youth channel prefers to address such deep matters in an indirect, almost deliberately obtuse manner. Viewers are invited to make their own decision on whether they want the swots to win or lose, there's no editorial position from the host.

This column is the first to applaud people who have great book learning (see University Challenge review elsewhere, and Only Connect passim), but we know that this isn't the only valid form of learning. Some people are great hairdressers, some people have the physical blessing to be a model, some people are good television presenters (and, from what we've seen, Matt Edmondson is already one of them). Clever v Stupid isn't great television, but it gently asks interesting philosophical questions. There are programmes far more worthy of vitriol out there.

Nostalgia comes from "return to native land" and "pain"? We learn something new every week. There isn't a biologist in the room, which might explain why both sides missed the elements in DNA; we're not entirely sure how anyone can confuse Bristol, a city in England, with Kolkota, a city in India.

The first visual round is on flags of international navies, and it's answered by Somerville Oxford. That's a young college, founded by Mary Somerville for the education of young women; it remained single-sex until admitting men in the early 1990s. Famous former students include the politician Shirley Williams and the author Dorothy L Sayers. It's got them off the mark, but St Andrews had a good lead, 65-20.

The AMPAS awards for 1989 form a round of bonuses, and we should remember that many of the players were still in nappies at the time. Who would call their arts centre The Armadillo? Who would call their arts centre The Aardvark, for that matter? The mind boggles. The teams don't remember The Treasure Seekers but do remember the Roman goddess of the sewers? The mind boggles some more. We'll not laugh at St Andrews for guessing "Kiev" when asked to name a battle sharing its name with a chicken dish, because that's what we shouted. Paintings of Bacchus form the second visual round, and it's St Andrews leads 230-85.

That's just about Game Over: St Andrews need to take their foot off the accelerator to give Somerville any chance of the repechage. It's not exactly happening, they're going for the highest score of the series, currently the 270 of St John's Oxford. Somerville pull themselves above 100 with a few minutes to play, make progress on vaccines, and all of their players get a starter with a few moments left. Can they pull off a storm into the repechage? Can St Andrews get that highest score? There's not time for both, and when Somerville remember that Macmillan introduced life peerages, they're on, but the gong *just* beats them to the last bonus question. St Andrews have won, 255-150.

Next match: Emmanuel Cambridge v Regent's Park Oxford