Weaver's Week 2025-03-23

Last week | Weaver's Week Index | Next week

Something a bit different this week, as we look back at a one-series wonder from many years ago.

Late last year, BBC2's daytime quiz block repeated Beat the Pack, which originally went out in early 2013, and hadn't been repeated since. Fans gave it quite a hammering at the time, this column was unimpressed, so we wondered if the passage of time had changed our view, or if the show had been influential in the genre's development.

Contents 1 Beat the Pack 1.1 BBC Entertainment for BBC1, 4 – 29 March 2013 1.2 Remind us of the format, would you? 1.3 How good and influential was this show? 1.4 If they were to revive it today, what changes would be made? 2 Jeopardy! 3 In other news 3.1 Quizzy Mondays

Beat the Pack

BBC Entertainment for BBC1, 4 – 29 March 2013

Jake Humphrey hosts the show, where eight members of the public take part. One has been selected as the "control" player, and the other seven are The Pack, standing behind a long bench. There's a top prize of £12,000 to be won.

Remind us of the format, would you?

The player in control is shown a board with six categories on it. These are precise categories – not "actors" but "Meryl Streep", not "entertainment" but "Eurovision Song Contest". The player picks a category, and is asked a question with four possible answers. The Pack give their answers, and a sound effect plays when all have responded.

And then the discussion begins. Jake and the player in control have a long chat about the possible answers to the question, what answers might be right, and indeed whether the Control player is actually going to play it or not.

Suppose the Control player plays. A correct answer to this first question is worth £2000, and gives Control the opportunity to remove any player at the bench. An incorrect answer will remove Control from the game, and the best player from The Pack will step forward and take their place.

Usually, Control will decide to pass the question. At this point, there's an extended sequence where lights in the desk flash, before eventually coming to rest as either green or red, right or wrong. Whoever in The Pack has given the correct answer goes to the safe area, a soft seating area out of Control's sight. These players cannot be eliminated in the current round. Should all of The Pack qualify for the safe area, then the player in control is eliminated as if they'd given a wrong answer. Jake talks up this possibility often, even when it's unlikely.

Assuming Control passed on a question, and at least one of The Pack got it wrong, the game continues. The value of the question is halved, to £1000, and the cycle repeats. Subsequent questions in each category are easier, and the values halve at each turn – to £500, £250, and we think they might have got down to £125 once.

Each category is played with one fewer contestant – either the Control player or one of The Pack will be eliminated after each round. As well as managing the order of categories, the player in control has one small advantage – when answering a question, they can give a Double Answer. This advantage lets them pick two answers to the current question, and continue if either answer is right. The player can only play this once during the entire game.

We'll discuss the finale a bit later.

How good and influential was this show?

Beat the Pack has a very simple central conceit: don't come last at any time. You don't have to be the best quizzer on the show, but you do have to be at least as good as the worst player. You've only got to out-run (well, out-quiz) one other person, but you must do it in every round. The show expressed that easy concept in a complicated way, and caused itself more problems than it ought.

At heart, we expect quiz shows to be all about answering questions. Someone answers a question, gets it right, gains an advantage. Or someone answers a question, gets it wrong, loses some advantage. Beat the Pack takes that expectation and throws it out of the window.

The player in control can do one of two things: answer, or pass. "Answer" is a decisive verb, it will end the category. Control can answer a question, get it right, get some advantages. Control can answer a question, get it wrong, and be gone.

"Pass" is an indecisive verb, the category will probably continue. Control can choose to not answer a question; they risk instant elimination, may well get some disadvantages (fewer opponents, greater jeopardy in the next question), but will get other advantages (an easier next question).

In the decade since, we don't think any other quiz show has used "answer" and "pass" as distinct actions in this way. Perhaps that's because "pass" leads to a lot of treading water, and a sense that the show is going nowhere. On some episodes of Beat the Pack, we saw three or four questions in every category, and the show became a cycle of question—"ooh I'll pass"—anyone got it right—safe area. Repeat, like we're running up a treadmill that never ends.

The way they treated the prize was the fashion in 2013, and has since been abandoned. When the Control player gives a wrong answer, the entire jackpot goes with them. They might have built up a prize of £4000 across four categories, but an error in the fifth means that work was all for naught. Not only have we viewers wasted our time watching something of no consequence, but so many players have come and gone. It's possible for the grand final to be played for £ZERO, and a "prize" of coming back as tomorrow's Control player.

The show makes much out of its "potential jackpot of £12,000". Although a couple of players won many thousands of pounds, the bulk of shows were played for a grand or less. Beat the Pack followed in the footsteps of The Weakest Link, dangling a large theoretical prize they'd never get close to paying out. Compare against modern shows – The Finish Line, which offers £5000 and pays it about once a week; or The 1% Club, which offers £100,000 and is quite prepared to pay that much.

The final itself is also an oddity. Whoever's in Control gets 75 seconds of rapid-fire questions; their one remaining opponent waits for them to make an error and pounce with a correction. Three corrections to steal the prize. It's the only piece of rapid-fire quiz – indeed, it's the only point where Beat the Pack exerts itself beyond a gentle amble round the garden. If we remember correctly, this finale was added quite late in the format's development, and it does feel like something that hadn't been fully playtested and thought through.

Jake Humphrey was at an interesting point in his career. The CBBC star had moved to host the Beeb's coverage of Formula One motor racing, and he brought a boyish charm and good looks to the contest. And he was someone who made contestants feel at ease, never encouraging them to take any particular action. But he'd left F1 a few months earlier to host football matches for the new BT Sport channels, which launched later in 2013. He was also getting more involved in Whisper Productions, which has grown from a start-up in 2010 to making all sorts of sport and entertainment programmes these days. Jake stepped back from presenting sports in 2023, to concentrate on Whisper and his High Performance podcast.

Looking back at this distance, we got the impression that Beat the Pack wanted to be a psychological study into the Control contestant: what would make them play? What would make them pass? What makes them tick? But, somewhere in the edit or the formatting, they lost this focus and we got to see a show that seemed to wobble from point to point.

If they were to revive it today, what changes would be made?

We can assume that Jake Humphrey would not be available for our hypothetical revival. It needs an affable and personable host, who's able to talk to anyone and bring out their story at some length so the tape editors have something to work with. CBBC is a great training ground for this; if you can make television with children, you can make television with grown-ups as well. Assume we've picked your favourite CBBC host for the job.

How would they treat the prize these days? Lower stakes is a certainty – a flat prize of £1500 to £2000 per show seems to be the afternoon average on the BBC. Keeping track of the money is another distraction from the main game, and a flat prize would instantly remove the complication of "how much is this question worth?" But if they really want to keep the halving mechanism, start each category at £800, and go down to £400, £200, £100, with further questions for no money but for survival in the game.

Draining the prize fund was an iffy idea in 2013, and won't work in 2025. Dividing by ten feels harsh: turn £3000 into £300 is a sharp drop. It's another argument for a flat prize.

Another little problem is that some contestants are gone before we get to know them. It might be possible to do what Fifteen-to-One did, and bring eliminated contestants back for a second go; but if you get into Control at any point, you won't be coming back. Also, they could open the show with a general knowledge question to each of the Pack. Use a ladder something like £10-20-50-£100-200-500-£1000, and that money is added to whatever comes through in the main game.

The questions on Beat the Pack were very good. Solid, interesting questions, with options to entice players to think about playing. The questions were precise, we couldn't quibble with any of them, and nor could we seriously argue that the ordering in the categories was wrong. Perhaps, to a 2025 view, these questions were a little dry and dusty, but that is the smallest of criticisms and we may be spoiled by the wit on shows like The Finish Line. Superb work from the questions team, and it's great to find that other BBC quizzes have kept up that accuracy.

What if Control were able to choose their own categories? Show a long list of specific questions they'd written, and let Control pick areas they're comfortable on. This would help us to get to know their thinking a lot better, brings out the "experiment on Control's psychology" we mentioned earlier. Perhaps having subjects you'd picked would add to the risk of being over-confident and making an error.

But, ultimately, these are tinkerings around the edges. Beat the Pack is, at heart, a show about how much Control knows, how much Control doesn't know, and how much they're prepared to risk in that margin. As soon as they remove the Control player, we viewers find we've wasted time in getting to know and empathise with the player. This is a risk inherent in the format.

By also wiping out the entire pot when Control changed, Beat the Pack meant that the replacement player was in it for vastly lower stakes. Basically, if the Control player for question five doesn't make the final, the prize is not worth it, and we feel slightly cheated. And when this happens day after day, we are going tune out and find something less depressing.

Beat the Pack is about finding losers more than it's about finding winners. There are far fewer shows about finding losers these days. And that is why we don't see a revival happening any time soon.

Jeopardy!

These days, Jake Humphrey's company is making game shows for ITV. Whisper is part-owned by Sony, and seems to be the first company in line to adapt Sony's formats.

For the second series of Jeopardy!, they've changed the rhythm of the show: where it was answer-question-factoid-choice, it's now answer-question-choice. Less chance for the contestants to show their knowledge, less chance for us to learn and remember something we didn't know before.

The obvious comparison is Only Connect (2), where questions are the springboards for discussions that could range anywhere and threaten to become entertaining. But, just as he was prone to do on QI some years back, Stephen Fry uses his forceful personality to smother anything interesting and force the show in another direction.

Sound effects have also been added (Paul Farrer's work is to the usual high standard: shame he's not credited). We can take or leave the buzzer noise. Music playing under the Daily Doubles is an idea they've ripped from the Bob's Full House playbook, spotlights at the same time are added for viewers watching in the background. We will lose the distracting "tension" music under Final Jeopardy!.

For this column, the changes are neutral-to-negative; the show has always been inessential viewing, and seems to have lost something of its charm. Other commentators have been neutral-to-positive, but then we liked last year's series a bit more than seemed to be the consensus.

Anyway, Jeopardy! continues every weekday afternoon on the ITV network for the next few weeks. Except when it's replaced by horse racing.

In other news

Oleg Gordievsky has died aged 86. He was best known as a double agent, working in the KGB and providing information to Britain – until he was unmasked and taken to London in 1984. Having written his memoirs and told all he could, Gordievsky carved out a small career in the media, talking with expertise on espionage and undercover activities. He was an unlikely booking for Channel 4's Wanted, but contributed informed and educated points to add depth to the show.

Limitless order ITV has commissioned two further series of Limitless Win, the Ant and Dec quiz where couples with a sob story can win stupendously large amounts of money, but only if it's numberwang. Two series will kick off 2026 and 2027, with a pair of Christmas specials to add to the ITV2 December rotation well into the next decade.

Quizzy Mondays

Rashmi Bhardwaj won the final heat of Mastermind, having taken Audrey Hepburn as her specialist subject. Two rounds clear of passes ensured Rashmi had an advantage over Rob Caley, and she won because Rob made one pass late in his round. Graeme Donaldson was just one point adrift, in quite the blanket finish.

A draw on University Challenge. Imperial College got starters here and there, and scored heavily on their bonuses. Queen's Belfast got slightly more starters, but blanked an awful lot of bonuses. Neither side got too far ahead. A late interruption cost Imperial five and gave Queen's the chance to take the lead, but a frantic finish and good guesses on Richard Dawkins allowed Imperial to tie the game. 170-170 at the gong, and both sides go into the draw for the next round.

What? Oh. University Challenge refuses to accept a draw as a valid result (clearly the influence of host and cricket fan Amol Rajan is limited), and Daniel Rankin won it for Queen's with events in the 1680s, the same decade as the birth of Georg August Hanover Jr.

ITV has a very simple challenge: Stephen Mulhern's Celebrity Catchphrase (Sun). We have the Counterpoint grand final (Radio 4, Sun), and finals week on Great Local Menu (BBC2, from Mon). New episodes of Pointless (BBC1, from Tue). No Gladiators next week, but the Bonnie Langford Fan Club will be ecstatic to hear she's back on The Weakest Link (BBC1).

To have Weaver's Week emailed to you on publication day, receive our exclusive TV roundup of the game shows in the week ahead, and chat to other ukgameshows.com readers, sign up to our Google Group.

Last week | Weaver's Week Index | Next week