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Lingo is a new ITV quiz show which premieres on New Year’s Day, and then moves to the Monday 3pm slot from the week after, displacing the current Tenable repeats.
Talking of which, after seeing Warwick Davis on the one new episode of that filmed since lockdown, he didn’t look at all well, and as if he’d had a stroke, so I hope he’s okay.
But back to this, and with Adil Ray – creator and star of the painfully unfunny Citizen Khan – as host, there are three socially-distanced pairs of contestants, trying to find words of four letters and up, within a 5-row grid (or ‘lingo’). After being given a clue, you start with one word guess, you’re told how many letters you have in the right place, and how many letters are right but in the wrong place. And you keep guessing until you’ve got the right word, or have run out of guesses.
In the example given at the start, we see the word THEIR (the TH is right, but the I is in the wrong place), then moving on to THICK, before getting it correct with THINK. So, it’s like an old board game called Mastermind, where you have to put four coloured pegs in the right holes down a board, albeit nothing to do with the TV show of that same name.
Part one has four-letter words (certainly NOT the word I was thinking just now), part two’s words have five letters, part three has a mixture of both, and periodically during each round, the teams will have to guess a much longer word – rather like the Countdown Conundrum, but with a clue coming first.
Eventually, they’re whittled down to one team for Part 4, where they get 90 seconds to work through a four-letter board, then one with five, and then six. Once you pass each board, the prize money will double, but if you don’t complete a board beyond the first one, then you haven’t lost the money banked so far, since you’ll bank the money won so far. I did think there would be a number of zero-winning final contestants in this series, though, as you normally get with gameshows in this timeslot. Perhaps this is the time of the year for giving…
The recent Winning Combination eventually won me over, as Omid Djalili has an effervescent personality, but Adil Ray just looks bored with this. And so was I watching it – exceedingly so. It really is the most low-rent gameshow I’ve seen in a long time. Feels like it was created in the ’80s and then left on a shelf until now, just to make 2021 start the same way that 2020 left off.
And maybe someone can tell me what the point is of an OBE for Adil Ray’s “services to Broadcasting”. It’s just doing your job, right?
Overall: Zzzzzz….
Lingo begins Friday January 1st 2021 at 4.35pm on ITV, then moves to weekdays at 3pm from Monday January 4th. It’s unlikely to ever be released on Blu-ray or DVD.
After broadcast, each episode will be on the ITV Hub.
Director: Richard Valentine
Producer: Adeel Amini
Presenter: Adil Ray
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.