Skip to content
As ITV scrabble around to find something as good as The Chase, they hire Giles Coren to host new primetime show 500 Questions.
Can Giles Coren (right) count up to 500? Well, this pillock couldn’t count up to 31 when he applied for the Amazon Prime month-long free trial and then let it run on over a year!
With one player “battling to keep control”, and to make sure they don’t get 3 questions wrong in a row and thus, get kicked out, the first question was: Why is this daytime rubbish in prime time? Oh, so they can build an elaborate set that’s monumentally pointless with screens all over the place in order to bamboozle the contestants, and also invite a studio audience, rather than fake the noise of one during their afternoon quizzes.
And to that end, while I enjoy The Chase, and have tired of Tipping Point, what can realistically challenge it? Certainly not the baffling Cash Trapped, nor the drawn-out Alphabetical.
Basic questions must be answered within 5 seconds, some questions have multiple choices and the two contenders can go head to head, some have multiple answers yet just the one person must answer, and they get longer, while some… oh, I began to fail to care.
Random bobbins in this first episode…
- Giles told first contender Jim, at one point after he’d had two wrong in a row, “Oh, it’s a lightning round.. that’s not good news for you, Jim”. Who the hell is meant to know what the problem with with a lightning round, and especially with Coren’s ineffectual delivery that makes it sound like he’s cradling an injured lamb and whispering sweet nothings into its ear?
- The programme also gave us chapter and verse about each contestant before they arrived in front of the cameras… as if we cared.
- Second contestant (and first challenger) Nu got one wrong on the board. Giles told her to “wipe it off”. WTF?!
- Next up, Neil travelled hundreds of miles to get to the studio, but, Giles told him, “the real journey was to get from *there* (challenger position) to *there* (main contestant position)”. Who wrote this crap?
- Neil: “I’ll finish off (the category of) Kings & Queens”. Giles: “Just like revolutionary France”. Oh, someone call the Comedy Store and ask if they need a headliner!
Finally, each player will only have to answer 50 questions to win some money. That might happen within an episode, or it might not. This is a programme which is only scheduled for 5 episodes. However often a contestant wins money, where the hell did they get a total of 500 from??
500 Questions starts tonight at 9pm, and airs every weekday after on ITV, slightly earlier, at 8pm. The series will never be available pre-order on Blu-ray, DVD or even streamed on Amazon Prime.
If you missed the episode, you can catch it later on the ITV Hub.
Episode 1 Score: 0/500
Presenter: Giles Coren
Director: Liz Clare
Series Producer: Laura Turner
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.