The quizshow will never die. Nuclear war could rid the earth of all living creatures bar the cockroaches and still, a shiny floored half-hourer hosted by Stephen Mulhern will somehow be airing on the emergency broadcast system. Quizshows have been airing on British screens since 1938, when a televised spelling bee was broadcast on the BBC, and they have remained remarkably resilient. Today they seem a good accompaniment to an era where everyone seems to be tapping away at puzzles on their phone.

Scroll down the channel guide of your TV and it won’t be long until you find a quizshow (and that one will almost certainly be The Chase). The format remains completely irresistible to commissioners. Relatively cheap and endlessly replicable, it serves as perfect filler for teatime TV. If one fiendishly high-concept quiz doesn’t catch fire it can be quietly cancelled without too much bother, knowing another will be conjured up in short order. If it really catches fire, in the manner of Pointless, Tipping Point or The 1% Club, primetime and the hallowed celebrity special awaits. And if it really catches fire, then well, you have something that can trundle on for decades (The Chase is now almost old enough to vote) before being regurgitated endlessly in repeat form on Challenge.

But beneath those big hitters exists an entire ecosystem of quiz programming: clever quizzes; insultingly easy quizzes; specialist quizzes (praise be to PopMaster, the TV version of which has just been commissioned for two more series); quizzes whose rules are impossible to follow, quizzes that are little more than fastest finger first (or literally Fastest Finger First). There’s something strangely pride-inducing about the British quizshow landscape, where excruciatingly difficult Mensa-level puzzlers like Only Connect can sit alongside a gameshow where people yell as loudly as possible at a telly.

So in this week’s Guide we’re celebrating some of the less talked-about quizshows, including some that were cancelled before their time, but can still be played along with at home on streaming.

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Impossible BBC iPlayer

This Rick Edwards-hosted brain-frazzler lasted eight series (plus two celeb ones) before quietly getting shuttered towards the end of the pandemic. Still, it remains popular enough that its repeats receive regular daytime rotation, as well as people on social media and in the letters pages of the Radio Times calling for it to return, (although the latter might just be Edwards writing in). You can see why – it has a great, tricksy concept: contestants are given three answers to a question, one correct, one wrong, one impossible (ie. so wrong it could never be the answer); get the correct one and you add to your prize pot, get the wrong one and you don’t; or get the impossible one and you’re out of the game. This format is cleverly embellished on in each round, building to a corking final round. The people are right on this one: bring it back, BBC.

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Puzzling with Lucy Worsley/Celebrity Puzzling Channel 5

If in doubt, add celebs. That was the rule Channel 5 followed with this series, which first emerged in civilian form in 2023 with happy historian Lucy Worsley tasking members of the public with verbal and visual brain-teasers. It only lasted a series, and that would usually have been that, but in this post-House of Games landscape, Channel 5 spied an opportunity and reframed it as a celeb face-off hosted by Jeremy Vine. Carol Vorderman and Sally Lindsay are team captains leading some fairly mid-tier famouses into battle, but the games – missing word rounds, cyphers, anagrams – are reliably good. If not quite as wildly inventive as House of Games, it’s a very solid stand in.

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The Finish Line BBC iPlayer

Currently airing on BBC One, this visually very silly quizshow is also deeply enjoyable – and at times surprisingly nail-biting. Five contestants race each other on giant, garish, motorised podiums by answering questions in turn. Answer a question correctly and your podium starts moving towards the finish line, get one wrong and it stops. The enjoyable wrinkle is that podiums keep moving even when other contestants are answering their questions, ratcheting up the tension and prompting those contestants who are trailing behind to answer their questions in a mad rushed panic. Roman Kemp, who definitely has designs on Mulhern’s light entertainment crown, hosts (with side-kick Sarah Greene).

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The Answer Trap Channel 4

Another prematurely cancelled show, this one hosted by Anita Rani (picture above) and reminiscent of Only Connect in its cheerful cleverness. Teams of contestants are given a grid of answers and have to place the correct ones into one of two possible categories (like “mononymous footballers”, or “impressionist painters”). But sneaky “trap” answers have been placed in the grid by the show’s resident Trappers, University Challenge breakout Bobby Seagull and champion quizzer Frank Paul, who are playing their own parallel contest to collect the most incorrect answers. Had someone come up with it a few decades earlier, The Answer Trap would have happily aired on More4 for years and years. As it is, there’s only a single series to gorge on, though if you enjoyed it, one of its creators is also behind the podcast Here’s What You Do, which sets three new fiendish quizzes each episode.

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