Years ago they had a footie type of quiz where footie teams played each other. Cant recall what it was called but you had four routes to goal. From roiute four was easier questions and route 1 harder question led to a goal. Maybe that could come back.
Will the BBC sell the show to an independent company 🤔; or had they already ?
Costs too much too make ! I find that hard to believe compared to a drama.
With the wages saved with Hugh Edwards who will be leaving and Lineker may walk soon so he can be the next Messiah. Aunty really should have some funds if there's still the demand from the public for AQOS.
Years ago they had a footie type of quiz where footie teams played each other. Cant recall what it was called but you had four routes to goal. From roiute four was easier questions and route 1 harder question led to a goal. Maybe that could come back.
I gave up years ago when Sue Barker left but did dip in in every now again but then seeing Sam Quirke on there does me tits in. Comes across as a big arse and the format changed. In the end I only used to watch it to see who the mystery guest was.
50 years old, is/was very good of its type, but the time has come for a rethink .. question is, what could replace it .. a cash prize quiz just dedicated to sporting questions ? .. that sounds more ITV than Auntie B though
This may sound really harsh and i apologise if it offends but the reason it's unwatchable is because the mainstream audience can't play along anymore . Because of the BBC box ticking quota of sporting guests must have a much higher proportion of women and Para athletes, the audiences for these sports are minimal ( i know women's football has become popular but i can't watch it) the questions relate to the guests sports and i haven't got a clue who they are talking about . I know i'm not alone . I don't know anyone who watches it any more and yes it doesn't help that the pillock Paddy McGuinness is hosting it either. If if ever comes back it needs to go back to basics. Mainstream sports with guests that people recognise at least.
This may sound really harsh and i apologise if it offends but the reason it's unwatchable is because the mainstream audience can't play along anymore . Because of the BBC box ticking quota of sporting guests must have a much higher proportion of women and Para athletes, the audiences for these sports are minimal ( i know women's football has become popular but i can't watch it) the questions relate to the guests sports and i haven't got a clue who they are talking about . I know i'm not alone . I don't know anyone who watches it any more and yes it doesn't help that the pillock Paddy McGuinness is hosting it either. If if ever comes back it needs to go back to basics. Mainstream sports with guests that people recognise at least.
The fact you feel you have to start with an apology when you’re just stating facts shows how sad it all is. The ‘home’ questions are basically all ‘away’ ones now for the audience because the guests are Paralympic high jumpers.
I really can’t stand Sam Quek either, gives off bad vibes.
Haven't watched it for years loved Billy Beaumont and Emlyn Hughes and a few after that including John Parrot. Most of the sports stars on it today when i have briefly tuned in have no idea who they are.
#chippyshowinghisage. To be fair, I’m also clueless about them.
This may sound really harsh and i apologise if it offends but the reason it's unwatchable is because the mainstream audience can't play along anymore . Because of the BBC box ticking quota of sporting guests must have a much higher proportion of women and Para athletes, the audiences for these sports are minimal ( i know women's football has become popular but i can't watch it) the questions relate to the guests sports and i haven't got a clue who they are talking about . I know i'm not alone . I don't know anyone who watches it any more and yes it doesn't help that the pillock Paddy McGuinness is hosting it either. If if ever comes back it needs to go back to basics. Mainstream sports with guests that people recognise at least.
The fact you feel you have to start with an apology when you’re just stating facts shows how sad it all is. The ‘home’ questions are basically all ‘away’ ones now for the audience because the guests are Paralympic high jumpers.
I really can’t stand Sam Quek either, gives off bad vibes.
I wouldn't worry abut it - she loves herself more than enough for the three of us!
No at all surprised. Another show destroyed by box ticking .
Supposedly, it’s production costs. What are these ticked boxes of which you speak?
I've explained that in my post at the top of this thread . As for production cost's that's absolute nonsense . Six people sat in a studio can't be expensive compared to other shows the BBC make . The reason it's finishing is because nobody watches it anymore because they've destroyed it . It's all about viewing figures.
I think it had been losing viewers over a prolonged period before the doomed revamp, which I'm guessing the BBC intended as a kill or cure. I'm not surprised it hasn't worked, those I'll conceived changes not attracting a new audience and alienating many of the old.
Good article by Rod Liddle in The Times today. Doesn't hold back on why he think's it's gone wrong. Behind a paywall so I've posted it in full
How BBC ‘progressives’ killed off A Question of Sport in three years
Criticism from the more cynical elements of the national media are as nothing compared with wounds the broadcaster routinely inflicts upon itself month after month
Adozen or so years ago, while filming a programme for the BBC, I remember being led with a bunch of other participants through deserted studio sets in search of our green room. At one point, the producer leading us stopped suddenly in the gloom and said: “Behold!” We stared across the darkened set, and then the gasps began. There was the chair on which, every week, Sue Barker sat for A Question of Sport. We were all gripped by a certain awe.
It wasn’t quite the same as staring at the cross on top of Calvary, or Churchill’s bunker, or Shakespeare’s first folio. Television is largely a dim-witted entertainment and its practitioners faintly risible. Further, Barker was not quite Richard Dimbleby or David Attenborough or John Cleese. But she became very good at what she did and people were comfortable with her. Sue was hokey, undoubtedly — but magisterially hokey. Back then her weekly audience was about six million.
It was also one of the few programmes that stripped sport of its seriousness and reminded us that it was all just a game. It was — in perhaps a slightly bygone, turn of the 1970s, way — fun. You could also rank the sports of the team members by the amount they knew about anything — by and large, rowing and cricket at the top, football at the bottom (one reason football was underrepresented in the early days). It was eminently lampoonable, and Nick Hancock’s They Think It’s All Over took the piss to its heart’s content. But A Question of Sport easily outlived its cheeky rival.
Barker may have been a tad hokey amid the buffoonery of Dawson, left, and Tufnell, but it was all nonetheless enjoyable television
VISHAL SHARMA/BBC/PA
The BBC, in an act of magnificent stupidity, sacked Sue (rather rudely) in 2021 and handed over the reins to Paddy McGuinness. Gone too were the jovially inane and bifferish antics of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson. In came those, er, loveable household names, former GB hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union’s Ugo Monye.
Everybody knew exactly what would happen. From a very respectable (these days) audience of four million under Barker in 2021, those tuning in on a prime time Friday night slot dwindled with great rapidity until Paddy and co were drawing in 780,000 and being beaten by such delights as Britain’s Poshest Farm Shops. The predictable ignominy. The plug was finally pulled last week.
To see a programme’s audience reduced to a fifth of what it was only two years previously must be some kind of record. Auntie, wrapped in its West London bubble, believes it is beset by enemies both commercial and ideological – and there is some truth in this. But the slings and arrows it suffers from The Daily Mail and The Daily Express are nothing to the wounds it blithely inflicts upon itself, month after month.
There is a good case for saying that the treatment of Barker was both ageist and sexist, but that is to miss the point — we have to climb inside the minds of those wretched execs to work out what that was. They are “progressive”, those BBC staffers, and wish the programmes that they make to reek of progressiveness, regardless of whether the viewing public want that kind of thing, or whether it makes for good television. It is the Hugh Greene mentality: sod the licence payers, we will give them what we want to give them because we are always right and they need re-educating.
From left, Quek, McGuinness and Monye’s version of the programme never resonated with dwindling audiences
JAMES STACK/BBC
Sue, Phil and Matt were not “progressive”, they just made programmes people enjoyed watching. Not good enough — so out they go. In come Ugo and Sam.
This is the problem for the BBC, especially in the sport and light entertainment sectors, but also even more notably on BBC Radio Four (away from current affairs coverage). The execs are engaged in a kind of box-ticking exercise which has devalued many of the programmes we watch. In fairness, it is not just the BBC doing this, but nearly all the major broadcasters. Let me ask the question, delicately. When you tune into a football game and they cut to the pundits at half-time are you always convinced that they have been engaged for their services principally for their expertise, articulacy and charismatic personalities?
All any of us want is programmes we might enjoy watching because they are presented by expert and likeable personalities. That’s what the Beeb had with A Question of Sport, and it threw it away.
Good article by Rod Liddle in The Times today. Doesn't hold back on why he think's it's gone wrong. Behind a paywall so I've posted it in full
How BBC ‘progressives’ killed off A Question of Sport in three years
Criticism from the more cynical elements of the national media are as nothing compared with wounds the broadcaster routinely inflicts upon itself month after month
Adozen or so years ago, while filming a programme for the BBC, I remember being led with a bunch of other participants through deserted studio sets in search of our green room. At one point, the producer leading us stopped suddenly in the gloom and said: “Behold!” We stared across the darkened set, and then the gasps began. There was the chair on which, every week, Sue Barker sat for A Question of Sport. We were all gripped by a certain awe.
It wasn’t quite the same as staring at the cross on top of Calvary, or Churchill’s bunker, or Shakespeare’s first folio. Television is largely a dim-witted entertainment and its practitioners faintly risible. Further, Barker was not quite Richard Dimbleby or David Attenborough or John Cleese. But she became very good at what she did and people were comfortable with her. Sue was hokey, undoubtedly — but magisterially hokey. Back then her weekly audience was about six million.
It was also one of the few programmes that stripped sport of its seriousness and reminded us that it was all just a game. It was — in perhaps a slightly bygone, turn of the 1970s, way — fun. You could also rank the sports of the team members by the amount they knew about anything — by and large, rowing and cricket at the top, football at the bottom (one reason football was underrepresented in the early days). It was eminently lampoonable, and Nick Hancock’s They Think It’s All Over took the piss to its heart’s content. But A Question of Sport easily outlived its cheeky rival.
Barker may have been a tad hokey amid the buffoonery of Dawson, left, and Tufnell, but it was all nonetheless enjoyable television
VISHAL SHARMA/BBC/PA
The BBC, in an act of magnificent stupidity, sacked Sue (rather rudely) in 2021 and handed over the reins to Paddy McGuinness. Gone too were the jovially inane and bifferish antics of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson. In came those, er, loveable household names, former GB hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union’s Ugo Monye.
Everybody knew exactly what would happen. From a very respectable (these days) audience of four million under Barker in 2021, those tuning in on a prime time Friday night slot dwindled with great rapidity until Paddy and co were drawing in 780,000 and being beaten by such delights as Britain’s Poshest Farm Shops. The predictable ignominy. The plug was finally pulled last week.
To see a programme’s audience reduced to a fifth of what it was only two years previously must be some kind of record. Auntie, wrapped in its West London bubble, believes it is beset by enemies both commercial and ideological – and there is some truth in this. But the slings and arrows it suffers from The Daily Mail and The Daily Express are nothing to the wounds it blithely inflicts upon itself, month after month.
There is a good case for saying that the treatment of Barker was both ageist and sexist, but that is to miss the point — we have to climb inside the minds of those wretched execs to work out what that was. They are “progressive”, those BBC staffers, and wish the programmes that they make to reek of progressiveness, regardless of whether the viewing public want that kind of thing, or whether it makes for good television. It is the Hugh Greene mentality: sod the licence payers, we will give them what we want to give them because we are always right and they need re-educating.
From left, Quek, McGuinness and Monye’s version of the programme never resonated with dwindling audiences
JAMES STACK/BBC
Sue, Phil and Matt were not “progressive”, they just made programmes people enjoyed watching. Not good enough — so out they go. In come Ugo and Sam.
This is the problem for the BBC, especially in the sport and light entertainment sectors, but also even more notably on BBC Radio Four (away from current affairs coverage). The execs are engaged in a kind of box-ticking exercise which has devalued many of the programmes we watch. In fairness, it is not just the BBC doing this, but nearly all the major broadcasters. Let me ask the question, delicately. When you tune into a football game and they cut to the pundits at half-time are you always convinced that they have been engaged for their services principally for their expertise, articulacy and charismatic personalities?
All any of us want is programmes we might enjoy watching because they are presented by expert and likeable personalities. That’s what the Beeb had with A Question of Sport, and it threw it away.
A not dissimilar article could be written for a number programmes, not least Football Focus.
Didn't the charmless McGuiness also host the shit show that Top Gear became? I spot a pattern emerging...
Question of Sport, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2023
Top Gear, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2023
Take Me Out, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2020
Benchmark, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2015
Your Face Sounds Familiar, presented by Paddy McGuiness and Alesha Dixon, axed after one series, 2013
71 Degrees North, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2011
Rory and Paddy's Great British Adventure, axed 2008
To be fair, the titles of most of these alone gives a pretty fair clue that their days are numbered even as they are conceived. Perhaps he just won't say no to anything.
McGuiness is an easy target here. Frankie Boyle, Mo Gilligan, Romesh Ranganathan could have replaced Sue, it would have made no odds but when they go with a different way of doing something that worked for 50 years then people will just turn off
Comments
No likey, No lighty.
Will the BBC sell the show to an independent company 🤔; or had they already ?
Costs too much too make !
I find that hard to believe compared to a drama.
With the wages saved with Hugh Edwards who will be leaving and Lineker may walk soon so he can be the next Messiah. Aunty really should have some funds if there's still the demand from the public for AQOS.
If if ever comes back it needs to go back to basics. Mainstream sports with guests that people recognise at least.
A very young David Vine.
How BBC ‘progressives’ killed off A Question of Sport in three years
Criticism from the more cynical elements of the national media are as nothing compared with wounds the broadcaster routinely inflicts upon itself month after month
Adozen or so years ago, while filming a programme for the BBC, I remember being led with a bunch of other participants through deserted studio sets in search of our green room. At one point, the producer leading us stopped suddenly in the gloom and said: “Behold!” We stared across the darkened set, and then the gasps began. There was the chair on which, every week, Sue Barker sat for A Question of Sport. We were all gripped by a certain awe.
It wasn’t quite the same as staring at the cross on top of Calvary, or Churchill’s bunker, or Shakespeare’s first folio. Television is largely a dim-witted entertainment and its practitioners faintly risible. Further, Barker was not quite Richard Dimbleby or David Attenborough or John Cleese. But she became very good at what she did and people were comfortable with her. Sue was hokey, undoubtedly — but magisterially hokey. Back then her weekly audience was about six million.
It was also one of the few programmes that stripped sport of its seriousness and reminded us that it was all just a game. It was — in perhaps a slightly bygone, turn of the 1970s, way — fun. You could also rank the sports of the team members by the amount they knew about anything — by and large, rowing and cricket at the top, football at the bottom (one reason football was underrepresented in the early days). It was eminently lampoonable, and Nick Hancock’s They Think It’s All Over took the piss to its heart’s content. But A Question of Sport easily outlived its cheeky rival.The BBC, in an act of magnificent stupidity, sacked Sue (rather rudely) in 2021 and handed over the reins to Paddy McGuinness. Gone too were the jovially inane and bifferish antics of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson. In came those, er, loveable household names, former GB hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union’s Ugo Monye.
Everybody knew exactly what would happen. From a very respectable (these days) audience of four million under Barker in 2021, those tuning in on a prime time Friday night slot dwindled with great rapidity until Paddy and co were drawing in 780,000 and being beaten by such delights as Britain’s Poshest Farm Shops. The predictable ignominy. The plug was finally pulled last week.
To see a programme’s audience reduced to a fifth of what it was only two years previously must be some kind of record. Auntie, wrapped in its West London bubble, believes it is beset by enemies both commercial and ideological – and there is some truth in this. But the slings and arrows it suffers from The Daily Mail and The Daily Express are nothing to the wounds it blithely inflicts upon itself, month after month.
There is a good case for saying that the treatment of Barker was both ageist and sexist, but that is to miss the point — we have to climb inside the minds of those wretched execs to work out what that was. They are “progressive”, those BBC staffers, and wish the programmes that they make to reek of progressiveness, regardless of whether the viewing public want that kind of thing, or whether it makes for good television. It is the Hugh Greene mentality: sod the licence payers, we will give them what we want to give them because we are always right and they need re-educating.
Sue, Phil and Matt were not “progressive”, they just made programmes people enjoyed watching. Not good enough — so out they go. In come Ugo and Sam.
This is the problem for the BBC, especially in the sport and light entertainment sectors, but also even more notably on BBC Radio Four (away from current affairs coverage). The execs are engaged in a kind of box-ticking exercise which has devalued many of the programmes we watch. In fairness, it is not just the BBC doing this, but nearly all the major broadcasters. Let me ask the question, delicately. When you tune into a football game and they cut to the pundits at half-time are you always convinced that they have been engaged for their services principally for their expertise, articulacy and charismatic personalities?
All any of us want is programmes we might enjoy watching because they are presented by expert and likeable personalities. That’s what the Beeb had with A Question of Sport, and it threw it away.
Top Gear, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2023
Take Me Out, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2020
Benchmark, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2015
Your Face Sounds Familiar, presented by Paddy McGuiness and Alesha Dixon, axed after one series, 2013
71 Degrees North, presented by Paddy McGuiness, axed 2011
Rory and Paddy's Great British Adventure, axed 2008