Erm, we couldn’t find a clean press release picture for this revival so here’s an 80s classic.

Wednesday 28th and January 4th,
BBC4, 9:30pm

Well this is quite a nice idea. To sort of tie-in with the popularity of 1980s Top Of The Pops repeats BBC4 regularly show, a two-off revival of the defining music quiz of the decade, Pop Quiz, once again hosted by DJ, I’m a Celebrity alumni and political songwriter Mike Read and featuring guests who may well have turned up on the original, from the programme blurb, “Guests include Toyah Willcox, Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Andy McCluskey (OMD), Steve Norman (Spandau Ballet), Mari Wilson and Leee John (Imagination).”

The promo we’ve seen suggest they’ve nicked the desks from A Question of Sport, and we’ve actually no idea whether the questions will all be based on 80s music or everything up to today. It’ll be interesting to see if this leads to anything though – whether it’s repeats of the original show to partner TOTP or further new episodes.

Is nothing to do with Christmas at all, but thanks to people on Twitter to alerting us to its existence.

Basically it’s a gallery recording of Talking Telephone Numbers. But not just any episode of Talking Telephone Numbers, the famous episode where a show purported to be live suddenly started fast forwarding through Richard Digance’s act.

These days it’s fairly common knowledge that in live shows, especially one with lots of elements, some of it may be recorded ‘as live’ earlier in the day and dropped in at the relevant point – some of the Strictly group dances and X Factor musical guests for example. Sometimes this is because the guests have to run to a different schedule, sometimes it’s to give the stage hands more time to set a later segment up. Viewers don’t tend to mind if they can’t see the joins.

But when this happened on TTN it blew our tiny minds. Does this mean the whole show is recorded then? Is the whole thing a fix? It isn’t and it wasn’t but it’s not the greatest shop window for a show that asked people to phone in to them (although unlike the more recent and for legal reasons completely different Magic Numbers, I don’t think 0345 was premium rate even then).

This clip shows us what was going out on television, but more crucially we can hear all the panic that’s going on in the gallery. What’s quite fun is the production willing the callers to lose because they have six minutes to fill with the endgame when evidently they’d usually only have about three. Schofield and Forbes look unflappable. Also it sounds like live direction of a musical act (The Human League in this case) takes a huge amount of concentration, “I can’t talk to presentation!”

Happy Christmas! It’s that time of year where I put up a set of 21 Questions Wrong Hotseat for you to play/endure around the post-turkey dinner table. I think this is towards the higher end of the difficulty scale, feel free to print and play. I hope there are no mistakes in it.

21 Questions Wrong Hotseat Xmas 2016.

And if you didn’t watch Festive Game Night, here’s the set produced for that.

It can’t have escaped your attention that it’s Christmas, and really there’s not much likely to be going on over the next fortnight, although we’ll still be about and we’ll have a Show Discussion page for Teeny-Tiny Blankety Blank on Saturday, obviously.

In the meantime Dan Leitch’s Youtube Channel has been uploading loads of Christmas specials lately. Here’s one that seems especially relevant, a Pop Quiz Christmas Special from 1984. A two-episode reboot of Pop Quiz with Mike Read and loads of eighties stars airs on Wednesday 28th December and 4th January on BBC4 at 9:30.

And goodness me, they appear to have filmed it on a set I would kindly describe as “travel size”. I can’t help but think that if you don’t look like you’re worth bothering with then you don’t get to act surprised if people don’t bother with you, but I quite like Blankety Blank, I quite like Walliams, I live in hope.

Meanwhile there’s a “preview” episode of NBC’s big hope and Lebron James produced The Wall on tonight which looks a bit like what Tipping Point would be like if there were just six drops an episode. For $12m.

Edit: And now Only Connect is moving to Fridays 8:30pm from Jan 6th. What?