Weaver's Week 2009-07-19

The Fuse is played by six people. In the first half of the show, they play as a team; in the second, they play as individuals. And, gawds, they've been told to whoop and holler as loudly as they possibly can, in a vain effort to fill the gap where Canned Crowd would have gone. Is this indicative of the cutbacks at Britain's Former Favourite Button, they can't even afford to play in tape of an audience applauding? Just as the first series of Battle of the Brains discovered, you can't conceal the lack of a claque.

The host of the show is Austin Healey, the former rugbyman. He's not exactly the first choice we would have made for this or any other programme: in some of the episodes, he clearly had difficulty reading the questions as they appeared on the screen in front of him (a lack of practice, no doubt), and there were some very obvious overdubs. In others, his small talk let him down: asking "So, what do you do for a living?" has us wondering if we'd fallen into a timewarp and were watching hospital drama The Royal. When he's good, Healey is entirely adequate, and is certainly no worse than Anne Robinson was after the first hundred or so episodes of The Weakest Link.

Anyway, once the category has been picked (and there's usually a 90-second chat with the contestant choosing the category first), we get into the questions. The objective is to start at the far end and reach the picker, with each person answering a question correctly. Think of the end-game from Battle of the Brains, only without the captain directing questions: it's strictly pot luck. Most but not all of the questions will contain a small number of choices. The team has the option to confer amongst themselves, but only once per round.

Why might the captain choose a Quickfire? Each round is timed: the first lasts for two minutes, the last for just 70 seconds. This is demonstrated by, er, having the same graphic animated at a faster pace. Why they don't demonstrate it by having the fuse physically shorter is a mystery. Another mystery is the amount of money at stake for completing the category, or lost for failing to do so, until the round has completed.

So far, we have the captain's game from Battle of the Brains, interspersed with a fast version of Scattergories. We've also got the disappearing amounts of money from a certain other daytime show. This opening round drones on rather, and not even the false tension induced over a commercial break can make it anything other than a bit dull. It's only the revelation of how much the team's just won or lost, nothing life-shattering.

Mercifully, the pace of the game really picks up from here, so we'll pause to consider Gareth Young's music (some satisfyingly boomy booms as things are blown up, and one musical motif, a bit of an earwig) and the graphics. We think they're meant to indicate the progress of a flame down a fuse like that used on Acme Corp.'s barrels of TNT. The effect isn't all that convincing, and by relying mostly on yellow and black, we wonder if the graphic designer wasn't trying to convince us all to switch over to Setanta Sports at the end of the programme. Like The Chase, the graphics here are entirely done on a bank of LED screens; has ITV bought a tenth of this year's Eurovision Song Contest stage and needs to justify its investment? We should also note that there's an excess of camera swoops and zooms, particularly in the opening half: some correspondents have reported feeling quite queasy.

Only the winner of each round will progress to the semi-final, where they're given a 60-second fuse, and the round begins with both burning. As soon as one player gets an answer right, their fuse stops and their opponent must answer questions until they give a correct answer. This is a somewhat more direct copy of Grand Slam, with the opening possession decided by a buzzer question. No extra penalty for an incorrect answer, and the questions are mostly from the chosen subjects of both players.

The questions aren't as taxing as those on The Chase. The producers aren't trying to defeat the 2004 Mastermind champion, they're "only" trying to trip up people off the street. There are a few difficult questions in there, but most are no more difficult than Eggheads. It's unfortunate that the first show contained a very disputable answer: asked to name six continents, the round was lost when one contender said "Australasia"; the producers declined to accept that, preferring "Oceania". Another, less scholarly, wiki posits a distinct difference between Australasia and Oceania. We have consulted properly learned reference sources – various Oxford publications are entirely contradictory as to whether Australasia is a continent, a biological zone, a tectonic plate. There is modern usage for both names. We can only conclude that it was wrong to reject "Australasia" as the name of a continent; if the producers must insist on precision where it is not scholastically justified, they would have been best advised not to ask the question in the first place. In the event, the decision did not cost any money, purely because the endgame that day was lost.

Let us repeat the three questions we posed last week. Is it better than Golden Balls? Yes, the test card would be preferable. Is it better than The Weakest Link? There's not much in it – neither host is actually very convincing, there are clear after-dubs for questions they've botched, though the best contestants on The Fuse do tend to win out. Does it have the cult potential of Blockbusters? Not really: Austin Healey has all the charisma of Mark Austen, the Survivor host, and the first half hour potters along without ever getting anywhere.

Are there better formats that ITV might consider in the 5pm spot? Half-hour shows have done rather well for Channel 4 – Coach Trip and Come Dine with Me made for a very popular combination last month. Might we have a 30-minute version of Spin Star, paired with House Guest? Does ITV have a 30-minute Tat From A Charity Shop show they could pair with Blockbusters? Might The Colour of Money yet return, as it's done in Italy (as Mr. Bother of the Bar pointed out, they'll watch anything there)? Are there other, more novel, quiz shows that ITV could try?

Though Thumper makes many references to various things, he doesn't call Manchester the defending champions. Since Manchester merged with UMIST a few years ago, every side has made the semi-finals. It's a trick that this year's side hope to live up, and they begin by getting word of the week (trick) and inscriptions on the edge of the two pound coins. We're impressed that they've actually seen any toonies, our local shops seem to hoard them as though they were winning tickets in the lottery.

The Royal Veterinary College (like Voiceover Man, we'll be calling them RVC from here) was founded in 1793 on a site far enough from the city to be away from temptation. That'll be Camden, then. They kick off with knowledge of a Van der Graaf generator, and add the Messier catalogue of Things That Aren't Comets. Up to the first visual round, every single question has been answered correctly, a record that falls on those Name the Poet from the Rhyming Couplets (Except We've Removed All but the Last Words of Each Line). After five starters, both sides are doing well: Manchester's lead is 75-35.

Manchester's next starter is on the ninth element missing from a mnemonic: it's Pluto, the erstwhile planet added to Holst's suite when it was thought to be a planet. And then it's all Manchester: they get Thumper's long definition of the Law of Diminishing Returns, and benefit when one of the opposition zigs with "entropy" on a question asking after "enthrapy". Thumper rather gives that game away when he asks the first player to repeat himself. The second visual round – and we should note that Rachel Neiman of Manchester is using cards in Braille – goes to Manchester, and includes "decus et tutamen", an inscription on the one-pound coin. Manchester's lead is 200-40.

There's four-and-a-half minutes to go, so we're only playing for pride. RVC pull back with knowledge of the history of The Times, and every member of that side has at least one starter correct. They can't tell the difference between the volume of a gallon and a pint. Manchester knows that, in area at least, one France = 26.5 Waleses = 17.6 Belgiums. At the gong, Manchester has won convincingly, 235-60.

Next match: Loughborough v UCL

Oxford gets the game under way, with what we found to be an easy question on sets with 24 members. Cambridge passes on what turns out to be alternative forms of Rock Paper Stones, popular in Japan. Neither side gets a question about breaking the fourth wall, but Cambridge gets on the board with the music question, about barbers. Oxford get a question on homes of authors, Haworth Parsonage a bit of a giveaway. Cambridge get the picture round, but the point's dropped: there's a Berliner doughnut, the size of The Guardian newspaper. At this stage, Oxford leads 3-1.

Cambridge's connecting wall appears first. They get the first group quickly – Hitchcock films, and chance on a set of shapes, getting it's sporting shapes. They've been playing with Chapman, Booth, Ray, but take forever to add Ruby, famed assassins. The last group is of fictional pirates – "Treasure Island" ones, to be exact. A perfect ten points, well earned.

Oxford's wall gets companions on Dr Who at once, but then they're distracted by theatres. Iron ___ forms the second group, then there's a long think as the side guesses: double letters in the word? Would the question-setters be so obvious? The three lives run out, and the missing links are theatres, and kicks in martial arts. After all that, Oxford's lead is trimmed to 14-12.

The mssng vwls round still ends the show, and still with a point deducted for an incorrect answer. The first set on parliaments ends 1-1, and Roald Dahl books 2-2. Computer hardware goes to the quizzers 3-0, and that gives them the lead. "Expressions beginning O C" is a 1-1 draw as time expires, which means that the Cambridge Quiz Society has snatched the lead right at the death, winning 19-18.