Best current UK Gameshows?

[TLEberle]

Plus, I like how Pointless and some other games in the UK play straight through without any commercial breaks.   It's great to watch a modern game show that doesn't cut to a commercial break at an edge-of-your-seat moment Every. Single. Time.

That'll be because BBC doesn't have ad breaks. ITV and the other ones are commercial endeavors and thus ad breaks.

[rebelwrest]

The one new British game show that I thought had a lot of potential was "The Code".  There was a solid game there, but there were parts where it dragged.  I think the main reason for that is when a new game premieres in Britain, they have to be 45 minutes to an hour long.  So a game that could have flourished in a half-hour time slot, now has to stretch with either more game (which can get tiring) or include more filler.

[Brig Bother]

Pointless really is the most quintessentially British show in the world, loads of different countries have tried it, it's only ever been really successful here.

The Code is returning for a second series in 2017.

You've just missed it but there was quite a neat little show called Tenable with Warwick Davies which just finished its initial run which hits so many beats from series one Pointless it's spooky. Not much original in it at all - it's naming things from top ten lists with some game elements borrowed from other shows, and it has a reveal mechanism I'd describe as divisive, and there are certain rules I think I'd change, but it's very much a show that's more than the sum of its parts and is usually rather engaging. Also has a difficult to win six figure top prize potentially but is smart enough not to bang on about it. First series did pretty well, my main worry is that they'll run out of entertaining lists. Pointless spotted this issue and changed its course a bit, I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to how many good top/first/last ten lists there are.

[TLEberle]

I would have thought that Only Connect would have run out of connections and sequences, but they seem to come up with new ways to link stuff together, so I suspect Pointless can go as long as they like. The other thing about Pointless is that it's less about the knowledge of the lists but guessing how the polling group will respond to them.

If it's true that two titles used during the run-through phase were Obviously and Only You, they nailed it.

[Brig Bother]

There's quite a difference between 'lists' and 'entertaining lists' (Pointless Final lists are often very narrow and would not pass for round one questions, that's why you get three in the hope you'd be able to hazard some guesses at at least one of them), but there's basically an infinite amount of quiz questions. Pointless has its roots in earlier show called Beat the Nation where the amount of points a question was worth was dependent on how many of the polled public got it right.

http://ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Beat_the_Nation

Richard Osman has intimated it has one of his all time favourite end games.

Pointless having its own in-built choose your own difficulty option is ingenious, really.

[Matt Ottinger]

Yeah, when I thought Pointless was always going to be about Olympic Host Cities or Tom Cruise Movies or Kings of France, I thought they'd exhaust their topics fairly quickly.  But they've ingeniously adapted the format several ways in order to give themselves a wider berth without losing all the good things about the game.  I love it.

[TLEberle]

America had a show very briefly in 1980 by the title Play the Percentages that touched on a couple of those themes but either didn't flesh them out or didn't stick with the idea (I thought it had legs--not just asking trivia questions but gauging whether folks could answer them.)

I'm plump again for Big Break, which is Bullseye on snooker felt and has a similar feel. Also you can't go wrong with Crystal Maze and the forefather Fort Boyard.