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From: Max Category: Books Date: 03 August 2007 Time: 02:58 AM Review: Forgive the negativity, but: This was a desperately poor half hour of telly, so bad that I lay awake afterwards thinking of how much it annoyed me. It was written and presented by David Baddiel. It can't have taken him long to write because the questions were banal and the jokes were hopeless, smug, schoolboy non-puns which embarrassed his guests. Baddiel twice, pointlessly, used the 'is it cos I'm Jewish' joke that he frequently uses (see his silly Times Book Supplement column and apparently much of his other output). It made me cringe. It also seemed to make Mark Thomas and Lionel Shriver cringe with the sheer power of its rehearsed irrelevence. The default atmosphere of the show was awkward, cheaply produced trivia-with-nerd. At the start of the show Baddiel did an imitative quiz show device of saying 'You'll hear this noise when someone says something particularly funny or clever' but at the end of the show we hadn't heard the noise! It left the viewer with the certainty that this programme hadn't been thought through at all. Nor does it look to have cost more than about £3.50 to stage and edit. There must be a million people able to write book related quiz questions more interesting or original than the ones on this show. As a result the whole thing stank of a self-congratulatory post-grad show for parents. And more than all this, I put down an exceptional book to watch it. Robbed, beaten and insulted by my digi-box. Bah humbug.