The Tepid Take

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2018. Imagine, for a moment, that you are wandering through the old town of Amsterdam. As a tourist, you might not be au fait with the smartcard system there, so you buy a “1 hour ticket” to travel across the city. You check in upon entering your first mode of transport, and then you’re free to mix transport modes as much as you like until your hour is up, when you are obliged to check out. This is only one fare of many different types that exist in Amsterdam, but it already differs radically from how things work in London. Here, buses and trams are consistently separate from the Underground and Overground when it comes to how much you pay. The only similarity is that both London and Amsterdam will ask you to pay extra if you want to use a national rail service. To make it plain, the difference is thus: fares align in Amsterdam – everything is included in the same fare, and it’s how long you travel for, not exactly where you tra

The first “game show” ever to air took place in 1938, in the United Kingdom. It was called Spelling Bee, and consisted of a live enactment of said game. However, this ground-breaking first was notably short-lived, and ran for five episodes at most before ceasing production. Despite this commercial failure, the precedent had been set, and game shows soon grew strong in anglophone spheres on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the most important knock-on effect of game shows' popularity was the launchpad they created for what we now call “panel shows”: game shows with celebrities, now broadly stand-up comedy vehicles where the points scored hardly matter at all. John Lloyd might be seen as the catalyst for this revolution, given his executive role in the creation of – among others – the News Quiz, QI, and Have I Got News for You. The contemporary panel show bears stark resemblance to its modern game show relatives, such as Take Me Out, Big Brother or even Eggheads. The notion of