Richard Osman: Pointless star quits BBC quiz show

11 comments
  1. I both love and find Pointless infuriating.

    It’s maybe the slowest show in history, especially the first round where they have to ask all 8 guests about their life story, which you can often hear from the same people 3 shows in a row. It could so easily be cut in half and still fit all the questions (getting rid of the bonus round).

    The questions range from really interesting to outrageously lazy, and if you get a lousy one that’s 1/3 of the show gone to waste right there. So painful them doing the same ‘name an element’ question once a fortnight, or the ‘name a word ending in —‘, or name an ingredient that specifically the Hairy Biker’s happen to have in their pavlova recipe. There was a question recently to name a Monopoly board piece that’s alphabetically between ‘Electric’ and ‘Waterworks’, there’s only like 3 spaces outside of that range!

    The prizes, man I thought the Bullseye prizes were weak (bus fair home anyone?), and yet compared with how hard Pointless is to win and how it’s not the 80s anymore, I dunno how the BBC look themselves in the eye starting at 1k prize. They’re even cheapskates on the charity specials, £2.5k if they win compared with up usually £50k on Catchphrase or the like.

    Dang it I still watch it recorded though and just fast foward through half of it, I can’t stop at least until I see someone actually take ‘Rare breeds of poultry’ in the final round, must’ve been showing up for years now.

  2. Blimey, he had the easiest gig in the business.
    Any chance Danny “one suit” dyer by name… Could quit the wall?

  3. I genuinely love Pointless, it’s a lot of fun to play along with my gf and has definitely led to an improvement of my geography and chemical table knowledge. They should get Barry from Eastenders to replace him.

  4. The surprising banter between him and Alexander Armstrong made Pointless more of a joy to watch

  5. I hope he still gets involved behind the scenes. His wit is razor sharp and his Twitter feed is brilliant, so hopefully more free time leads to more projects where that really comes into force.

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