Would I Lie To You? Monday 9pm, BBC One

Would I Lie To You? © BBC

Peep Show’s David Mitchell! Grumpy Old Woman Jo Brand! Russell “why on earth do they keep booking him” Howard! Yep, it’s yet another clever-clever BBC panel show.

This time it’s the return of Would I Lie To You? for a third series, with newly anointed flannel-master Rob Brydon taking over presenting duties from poor Angus Deayton, who must surely be wondering if he’ll ever see a quiz show through to its natural conclusion.

If you’re not familiar with the format, rather than being a quiz based on the works of ‘90s soul warblers Charles & Eddie, it’s actually a kind of smug rework of gameshow classic What’s My Line? where two panellists aim to convince members of the opposing team to fall for their porkies, while the third is actually telling the truth.

Other members of tonight’s rent-a-panel include Larry Lamb, better known as EastEnders pint-puller Archie Mitchell, and dethroned Countdown queen Carol Vorderman, who suffers some rather cruel jibes at the hand of the quizmaster regarding her current employment status.

It’s not brilliant, and at times some of the panellists’ bluffs sound quite appallingly under-rehearsed, and while it lacks the biting wit of its current affairs cousin Mock the Week or a trivia treasure trove like QI, there are a few funny moments which make it a nice enough way to kill half an hour of your time.

Or am I just pulling your leg? Guess you’ll have to tune in to find out.

by Stewart Turner, Monday 10 August 2009

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Panorama: Chocolate – The Bitter Truth, Wednesday 9pm, BBC One

Image
Posted by Stewart Turner If you settled down to watch last night’s Panorama with a brick-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the arm of the sofa, the chances are it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth. Reporter Paul Kenyon got trussed up in his best Man from Del Monte finery and went undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa, and the results were pretty shocking. Cocoa’s only been growing in West Africa for a couple of hundred years since sweet-toothed colonial powers took it over from South America, but the Ivory Coast and Ghana are now the world’s biggest producers. Sadly it seems a fairly hefty amount of it is farmed by kids – some as young as eight – who’re smuggled over the border from the poverty of neighbouring Burkina Faso to work long days cracking open cocoa pods with machetes. But surely the kindly men churning out our KitKats and Crunchies would something to say about that, right? Well, sort of. Kenyon found that one farm which uses child labour supplied a company selli...
Read more

Knight Rider

Image
To men of a certain age, David Hasselhoff will forever be the epitome of leather jump-suited cool and absolutely not a washed-up alcoholic who’s never quite lived down that claim to have single-handedly dismantled the Berlin Wall. And sure enough, The Hoff crops up for a cameo at the end of this series opener, albeit in a scene emitting a more pungent stench of cheese than a 60-year-old slab of Stinking Bishop. Hoffheads will doubtless have serious reservations about this Knight Rider remake, which aired in the US last year. To a certain extent, they’d be right to – but that’s not to say this two-hour pilot is awful. It’s just that after a reasonably entertaining opening, complete with the obligitory high-octane car chases, edge-of-the-seat casino showdowns and a bit of Man v Cold-Hearted Machine banter, it all becomes a little tedious. Of course, there’s some serious suspension of belief required from the word go. One has to wonder whether the Pentagon would really allow it...
Read more

Tower Block of Commons, Monday 9pm, C4

Image
Posted by Stewart Turner Most commentators agree the Labour Party needs nothing short of a miracle to win a fourth term when the country goes to the polls in May – and if they were looking to veteran MP Austin Mitchell to win over a few hearts and minds and score a few political points in last night’s highly watchable Tower Block of Commons, they were sadly mistaken. The show rehoused four MPs – the Tories got two, for some unexplained reason – in grim, inner-city high-rises for a week to see how they coped with a slice of edgy urban life, rather than rowing a coracle around their moats all day and paying their children £30k a year to make tea and fetch HobNobs. With Mitchell’s insistence on getting his very own flat – all the other MPs gam...
Read more