Quotation Marks

Synopsis

Future second highest paid woman on the BBC Vanessa Feltz fronts a game show offering book tokens as a prize, in which three contestants answer a series of questions based around quotations, who said them, where, and why.

There's no messing around in the first minute of the show, contestants get introduced, opening titles are played and then we go straight into the first round. Each contestant gets two quotations and they are given a multiple choice of three answers, picking the one that corresponds to the quotation wins them two points, which means a maximum of four is on offer.

Talking Heads is the name of the second round and it's a Telly Addicts-like round where members of the public, walking down the street, are asked to put on their best acting skills and recite a quotation from either a film, TV show, book, play or song and the contestants have to identify where it's from. A correct answer is worth two points and they are then asked a question based on that answer, which is worth one point if answered correctly. There's six people to choose from and each contestant has two goes, which means they can choose two people.

The third round is a subject round where contestants get to choose one of six categories and they have 90 seconds to correctly answer as many quotation questions as they can for five points apiece. If they don't know the answer immediately, they can ask for a clue; they have a maximum of three clues available to them, but the points value goes down with each clue, to three, then two and finally one.

Gossip Columns is the fourth round where two columns of six names will appear, each contestant gets different names on the columns and they are given four quotations in 90 seconds to try and identify which person on the left column said what about which person on the right column, they will have to get each one of the four correct in order to move on, each correct answer is worth two points and the names that were correctly answered are wiped from the board.

It's fingers on buzzers for the fifth round where a quotation is read out and then an anagram of the person who said it quotation will appear, contestants will then have to unscramble the letters on a board and if one of the contestants figures out who that person is, they will have to buzz in and answer correctly for five points. Again, there are clues to help them out, but like with the subject round, the value of points go down.

It's back to the third round for the sixth round where the remaining three categories out of six remain on the board but this time they only have 60 seconds to answer as many quotation questions correctly as possible.

Finishing Lines is the seventh and final round of the show and a quotation that is blank will appear, each quotation in this round is either a literary line, a lyric from a song or a title, each word in that blank quotation will be revealed in a random order and if a contestant knows what the quotation is, they have to buzz in and say the full quotation, every correct answer is worth one point for each word of the quotation that had not been revealed.

After all seven rounds, the winner who scored the most points won a grand prize of book tokens. Really? That's it? They spent half an hour going through seven rounds full of quotations and that's all they get for winning? Bit of a let down don't you think?

The show went out in a 12pm slot during the summer months when Wipeout was taking a break and let's be honest, as awful as the daytime version of Wipeout was with Bob Monkhouse at the helm, we would rather watch that over Quotation Marks. Hell, we would rather watch Pass the Buck over this, which went out in the same slot and we gave a favourable review to.

Quotation Marks is a show that seemed vastly over-produced for a lunchtime show and a bit of a one-trick pony. It also tried way too hard to make the show be like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with its serious tone. Sorry, Millionaire had a top prize of £1 million to give away within 15 questions, all you had to give away was book tokens for the winner, so you have no reason to give your show a darker tone.

And for Vanessa Feltz's first and only game show she hosted? We just couldn't stand her. She had no banter with the contestants and didn't even bother explaining the rules at the start of the show, which left us viewers in the dark.

We were not surprised when after three weeks into the run, the show was moved to a different slot...30 minutes later at 12.30pm. But at least the 12pm slot was now replaced by repeats of Call My Bluff, which is a show that's a lot lighter, funnier and easy to play along with at home.

Quotation Marks was dropped after one series, which we all breathed a sigh of relief. We just can't bear having a second series of this, we just can't.

Catchphrases

"Clue!" - when people wanted a clue.

Theme music

David Lowe

Videos

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