It’s Not What You Know (Challenge, 2008)
Rather a long time ago, there were a small amount of game shows exclusively produced for Challenge, along with the usual repeats from other channels. This one attracted a little more attention than most, as they hired the services of Chris Tarrant to host this one, and there was also a chance that a decent sum of money could be won too, with five-figures on offer.
The idea of It’s Not What You Know wasn’t to test the knowledge of the contestants exactly, but whether they could work out if other people knew the answers. A team of two take part, and they choose one of three games to play. There are five celebrities shown on the screen, although we never actually hear from them at any point, we just see their picture (watching them ponder their answer could’ve been fun).
Their specialist subjects are revealed, for example one might know all about animated films, while another could go for 90s pop music (a good choice). Although they are asked (and they are given four options), it doesn’t really matter in this case if the contestants know the answer, the idea is that they have to guess if the celebrities did or not.
There are 15 questions, and they are all on the various specialist subjects. The celebrity whose subject it is has to answer with no options available, while the other four are given a choice of four options. The contestants must determine who got it wrong (or to use this show’s terminology, “stumped”). Will they be able to choose the right people?
The scoring system is rather complicated, but there is money on offer for guessing which celebrity was stumped, and there are bonuses on offer if they can guess that a celebrity was stumped on a question on their specialist subject. It’s around this time that Tarrant explains all the available scenarios, and often says that they could’ve gone up a level, although this is unlikely to join his list of famous catchphrases.
They can also pass on one question, but a team who can win around £10,000 will have been determined to have done rather well. And all the reveals of the answers seem to use visual and sound effects like when you choose a player and a mode on a computer game. There was one series of Chris Tarrant’s It’s Not What You Know (as Challenge insisted we call it), and as always Tarrant encouraged contestants along the way, and made the most of the tension.
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