- Quiz shows are a major TV genre, with their roots in radio, and before that in party and community games. Their grounding in oral culture gives them a vitality and a strongly interactive relationship with the viewers.
- There is a narrative structure underlying quiz shows, their basic structure lies in the non-literary forms of game and rituals.
- Lévi-Strauss defined the difference between game and ritual
GAME --> Participants start out equal and finish differentiated into winners and losers
RITUALS --> Us differentiated groups and provide them with equalising communal meanings and identities.
- Differences of natural ability are discovered about people in game shows, and the reward is upward mobility in the real of social power which 'naturally' brings it material and economic benefits.
- The structure of quiz shows reproduces the education systems in western societies. e.g. All students start equal, take examinations that gain them qualifications where their knowledge can influence of social power and influence if 'successful'.
- Quiz shows tend to test two types of knowledge: Academic and Social/Common interactive skills.Understanding people and social interactions with the world around you politically opposes the academic, more elitist and democratic quiz shows.
This table reproduces the hierarchy of quiz shows - those at the top require academic or specialist knowledge that has a more popular inflection in 'general knowledge'. The further down the list, the shows tend to be screen ed in day-time or late afternoon broadcast slots, thus are watch by audiences that are predominantly woman or women and children. As knowledge becomes more democratised, so the popularity of the programs shifts toward those with less social power.
- In all quiz shows, whatever the knowledge that is tested, there is an element of luck. In some such as Pick a Box or Deal or No Deal, luck and choice is the force motive. Of course the law of averages and probabilities come into account in other similar luck based shows such as Play Your Cards Right. Luck is often related to gambling, it works to mitigate the harshness of judgement for luck provides an ideologically acceptable explanation of success or failure.
- In a society that celebrates both the material rewards of wealth and the right of everyone to them, but limits the opportunities to acquire them to a minority - the appeal of gambling of easy money in risk to make more is hardly surprising.
- Huizinga (1949) suggests that games structure the tensions between chance and rules, between the predictable and unpredictable, the uncontrollable and controllable.
- Prizes in quiz shows are typically consumer goods, such as foreign tours or cruise or in some cases - money. On the other hand, sometimes the reward is public respect, personal pride and glory. Quiz shows are often charged with encouraging materialism, positioning the viewers as the consumer. Prizes are glamorised and idealised by the way the winners and audiences react towards them. Quiz shows, like advertising, are part of commodity capitalism and use many of the similar cultural strategies.
- Quiz shows produce particularly active, participatory viewers since quiz shows are not represented as enacted fictions, but as live events. The viewers of quiz shows are positioned to like that of a soap opera - they are positioned actively towards the text by its unwritteness, its sense of a time span in which the present and future are equal for both characters and viewers.
- The fact that quiz shows are typically played by adults inserts them easily into the mainstream of social values. It implies that the competitive testing of school is not confined to students, but continues into adult life. This could be seen to provide pleasure for students and children upon viewing these shows as they see adults subjected to a similar disempowering process that they'd undergo at school. Being able to compete with adults on an equal terms and seeing them make mistakes can all help improve the a child's self-esteem.
- Quiz shows are a culture product of consumer capitalism, they relentlessly address and position the woman as a housewife and consumer. In fact, on dating/gaming shows, women are free to enjoy dates in a way that is almost never shown un-judgementally elsewhere on television.
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Holmes, S. (2008) ‘The 'Give-Away' Shows - But Who is Really Paying?": Rethinking Quiz and Game shows on 1950s British Television’ in Entertaining television: The BBC and Popular Television culture in the 1950s. Manchester University Press: Manchester.
- ITV introduced the 'give-away' gameshow to Britain fro America. These shows were cemented by the Pilkington Report on British TV screen for it's 'triviality'.
- It's commonly perceived that on radio and early television, the BBC merely dipped its toe into the genre, providing certain types of quizzes and panel games which avoided the spectacle of prize-giving, and which mere more benefitting of a public service broadcaster.
- It has been suggested that the 'quiz show' involves the display of factual knowledge through questions and answers (Hestroni, 2004), while the game show incorporates a wider sense of competition, often involving physical performance, within the sphere of fun and games. (Hoerschelmann, 2006)
- Despite the considerable range of ITV quiz shows, they were primarily attacked by critics for fostering a morally unhealthy attitude towards money, for rewarding trivial displays of knowledge, and for engaging participants in exploitative and degrading performances.
- Many radio quiz shows from the BBC transitioned themselves into television programs during the 1950s such as Ask Me Another and The Brains Trust.
- Wether showcasing the knowledge of experts of inviting 'ordinary' people to perform, the programmes on ITV and BBC incorporated a wide variety of cultural referents. In doing so they demonstrate John Fiske's point that the genre can be read in terms of its interacting with a range of cultural domains including schooling and education, shopping and consumerism, as well as leisure and social relationships.
- Give-away show rewards were regulated by the BBC to change the public service of game shows to reward intellect over risk and gambling. They felt that giving out large prizes would lead to accusations that they were 'using license-holders money wrongly.'
- The Charlie Chester Show of 1951, produced by the Light Entertainment department, which was categorized by the press and BBC as the first prize-giving programme on television. The outcome of this show for television was the sight of hidden prize boxed being shuttled across the screen.
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