The National Lottery: Who Dares Wins

This was a surprisingly good game show actually.

The sign of a good gameshow is whether it's addictive and whether you can play along at home easily without having to scrabble for bits of paper etc. It should make you turn to the person next to you and go "you'd have known that" and engage you.

ITV seem to spend have their lives coming up with formats that don't do that, but the BBC struck gold with this one.

It ticks all of the boxes I've mentioned up above and proves to be quite good fun, even excusing the fact that Nick Knowles is never likely to win any awards for being the best gameshow host ever.

A show that started as part of the UK National lottery strand, developed into it's own stand alone show and it's a great show. The basic premise is that two pairs of strangers are put together to battle it out as to who can name the most number of a particular list. It could be Steven Spielberg films or countries with a population over 50 million. So one couple will bid the maximum number they think they can name and the other couple decide whether they can name more, or let them play, gambling that they will make an error, resulting in them winning that game in the qualifying heat. Once they win the rounds they can then play for a cash prize up to £50.000 by naming as many items as they can come up in the master list. Simple but addictive. Nick Knowles is the host and is perfect in this show.