Mondays, 8pm,
U&Dave
Apparently this idea has been knocking about for years and years. Three comedians team up with smart kids to solve practical problems – the kids aren’t in the room, they can only communicate verbally. After two puzzles, the two best performing teams go through to the final round to decide the winner.
It’s Taskmaster meets Junior Taskmaster seemingly and it might be quite fun, but unfortunately Dave are expecting people to tune in to a show with that title (it looks like Jack Dee’s… was added quite late), so it will probably be another of Dave’s four-episodes-and-done wonders to add to all their other ones. Interestingly it has a forty-minute slot, which puts it in line with Dave’s other BBC-half-hour-plus-adverts shows.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
I absolutely loved this, probably the most entertaining half hour of programming that i’ve watched in a long time, really funny. who knew watching celebs getting into a tantrum would be so amusing. the remote control dog escaping the kennel was brilliant and quite unexpected, watching the celebs chasing it round the room did make me chuckle even the real dog wouldn’t do as it’s told! Lucy Beaumont is one of the most useless celebs of any program yet the most entertaining so she wins that award for that, I agree with Johnny Vegas the hover with the face on is way better and would probably work more efficiently to get the job done, that hover they was using was probably the cheapest they could find in the argos catalogue just to make a fool out of the celebs!
The kids are amazing such intelligent minds trying to put them celebs in their place and play their part well full respect to them for being some of the UK’s brightest, Only occurred while watching tonight’s episode that it’s the same big brains every episode I thought it was different kids for each one so it’ll be interesting to see how they progress throughout the 4 episodes.
As you mention above, U&Dave produce some very unique concepts which no other channel would produce then they ruin the fun by axing them after one series which is rather annoying, Battle In The Box was my favourite and deserves more than one series and they did it dirty.
Now i’ve seen this i’m disappointed there’s only 4 episodes, wish it was like 8 episode long. will probably watch the rest one episode a week when it gets broadcast because if I binge watch i’ll want more and there isn’t any.
Yes this was alright actually – don’t look at the title and write it off.
The three Tiny Big Brains are there all series and are joined by different comics each week to take part in practical Taskmaster-esque tasks, the kids mainly handle the brain element, the comics the physical element – so in episode one the first task was to match the six toy dogs to the dog kennels given the clues provided – a test of logic for the kids, the grown ups had to deal with one of the dogs being on a remote control and another one of the dogs actually being a real dog. Both sides of the team can talk to each other, the kid in this case can only see what comes through the comic’s head camera. The second task was for the comic to use a hoover to place numbered balls on stands next to a picture of Winston Churchill (cluing into prime numbers) a slice of apple pie (pi) and a pine cone (fibbonacci sequence), the total of the correct balls placed being their final score. The kid gets a locked-off crane view to see. 3-1-0 awarded for finishing each task first, second and third. Only the top two go through to the end game of the episode, here both players are in the same room and can work together – transporting water across a divide to raise an apple in this instance using any objects available (which handily included two hoses attached to garden chairs). This still seems to score 3 and 1 points, so there’s a rich get richer element here.
Entertaining enough, but Jack Dee acting as both Greg Davies and Little Alex Horne does lift it with his asides, a bit of piss-taking when someone says something stupid, genuine amusement at the comics attempts at doing things… it all comes together rather better than I anticipated, and I did wonder if the tasks might be a bit chestnutty but certainly episode ones were decent. You could have turned them into Crystal Maze games. Intrigued to see what they give to Cambridge engineering graduate Phil Wang.
Also it remains odd that the title suggests the celebs are the ones that require help but it’s the TBBs that need the celebs to work to earn them the points.
All four eps are up on U, it is certainly worth a sample.