In Appreciation of House of Games

House of Games recently has become our chosen programme to watch whilst eating our supper, Monday to Friday. We usually only watch one episode of 25 minutes. It is light, we can join in and there is unlikely to be anything that puts us off our tea.

I think it has a sort of liturgical function. It is the same thing at the same time every day. It follows a varied, yet strict format.

Four minor celebrities, with occasional space for a national treasure, answer questions over five rounds. The first round is usually for each player in turn and has a few easier questions to gift points and confidence. Other rounds are clever and reward different types of thinking beyond plain general knowledge. For instance an answer may have to be given backwards, or with the words in alphabetical order. The 16 rounds are repeated week by week, although the order varies. The last round each day is always the same - Answer Smash. Here the questions are in two parts and the end of the answer to part one is the beginning of the answer to part two. Contestants must only give the duplicated bit once and 'smash' the answers into each other. This gives answers such as Malcolm McDonald Duck or Ring of Fireball XL5. The jeopardy of Answer Smash is increased as it is the only round where a point can be lost for a wrong answer, thus allowing gaps to be made up on the leaders if they are over hasty.

This principle is extended on Friday when points for a win are doubled 1,2,3,4 becomes 2,4,6,8 and again allows gaps to be made up.

Groans greet any 'new' round like a new hymn in a church service.

Our knowledge of current TV, especially soap is poor. We are not good at identifying people from pictures. We do not know the names of today's pop artists although the programme digs back well into popular music's past.

We laugh at how poor these minor celebrities are at geography or guessing historical dates. The younger ones obviously think that inventions of the early twentieth or late nineteenth century could have happened in the 1970s or 80s. History is before I was born syndrome.

I like to imagine I take one of the chairs and answer that contestant's questions to see if I could win. I usually do OK.

Daily prizes are red, with a House of Games logo on a regular item such as a bread bin, salt and pepper shaker or rucksack. Each week the dart board and the wheelie luggage are popular. Weekly winners get a trophy. A couple of times per series there is a redemption week for those who did OK but won nothing in a previous week. And a champions' week for previous winners where the daily prizes and trophy are gold(ish).

Richard Osman has presented it for nine years but is now to hand over to Michael Sheen. The current logo is an avatar of Osman's face and each of the contestants is given a similar avatar - basically a black and white caricature of their key facial features.

I imagine that each week is filmed in a day with guests changing clothes between episodes and trying to remember to refer to yesterday rather than an hour ago. Osman's clothes change very little - white shirt, polo neck, polo shirt, blue shirt, always with jeans and jacket. He has good patter and can gently encourage the disappointing 'You've got a win in you this week surely?' He can also prick the bubbles of pomposity that occasionally break out, always with a twinkle in his eye. Things that need moving on from are moved on from professionally. It is the sort of consummate broadcasting I admire very much.

It will probably take Sheen a while to get his feet under the table. Like a new Rector in church people are happy with a change in personality but want to continue recognising the format.

We don't watch the programme live. It is all on the BBC iplayer so we just watch the next episode we haven't watched. Given that we have holidays and time away for other things it means our gap between series is shorter than the live watchers' experience.

I once laughed at our next door neighbours in Leamington, an older couple, when we realised they had recorded Big Break, as the Snooker Loopy theme tune was playing out of the window long after it had finished. Are we like them now? It's different, but I couldn't tell you how.

The point? You were expecting a point were you? I've told you about that. TO humour you, how about this:

Writers have a complex relationship with repetition. Sometimes its rhetorical use can be extremely effective. I was tired. I was hungry. I was dirty. I was thirsty. I was almost out of hope. I was rescued. That's not my finest work but you can hear the effect.

But although I like some of the repetition in liturgy it is the tendency for it to change slightly by season that makes it effective for me. It is the theological equivalent of a screen-saver.

It makes me poor at saying 'I love you' and always looking for other ways to put it. Turns out people prefer the mantra to word-play. When I say it, because I perceive that the other person will appreciate it, it costs me. My life is an internal monologue of Just a Minute and that loses points.

On Easter Sunday we use the versicle and response:

Priest: Christ has risen!

All: He has risen indeed. Alleluia!

I dislike it. I want my affirmations more nuanced than that. As a famous piece of spoof liturgy once said:

Priest: Christ is risen

All: Quick, sit down
, he's starting

That service would have my attention