Thursday, January 04, 2018

Does Pointless tell us something about why we voted for Brexit?

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Perhaps we are starting to feel we have had enough of Pointless, but it is a good quiz show.

This is not least because it requires contestants to be knowledgeable. You might think that all quizzes do that, but not so.

Pointless is almost a mirror image of Family Fortunes, which rewarded contestants for being average not for being clever.

Yet there are two subjects where Pointless contestants generally know little and find the thought they might know something to be so unreasonable as to be amusing.

One is British politics and the other is geography.

Maybe this shows us some gaps in what is taught in schools. Maybe it shows the decline of hobbies like stamp collecting and trainspotting that taught you where places are.

At least being a travelling supporter of a football club still teaches you that.

And I wonder if, deep down, these gaps in knowledge tell us something about the reasons the public voted for Brexit.

Later. I have written a second post with an example of this lack of political knowledge.

1 comment:

Frank Little said...

I share your despair at the lack of knowledge of British politics on the part of Pointless contestants (but our intelligentsia are little better, judging by last night's Christmas University Challenge), but a round on party leaders some time ago gave me cause for a little giggle: Leanne Woods was pointless.