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I love A Question of Sport.
In fact, I do not think I have missed an episode since I was eight years old.
So, reading in Sportsmail on Monday that the BBC is happy to rip up the format for the highest bidder makes me sad.
A Question of Sport is hosted by Sue Barker with team captains Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell
The show has been on for nearly 50 years, and has aired over 1,100 episodes
Why does everything need to be refreshed, or updated, or reworked? Leave the quiz alone – it works brilliantly as it is. Not everything on telly needs the X-Factor treatment.
It may not have the razzle-dazzle of A League of Their Own – with its special effects, mad-cap challenges and after-the-watershed language – but that’s fine.
While James Corden’s show is a laugh-a-minute, banter-fuelled entertainment show, one which I also watch religiously and enjoy for entirely different reasons, A Question of Sport has stuck to its firmly-bedded roots. And quite right too. It is a quiz. Trivia is at its heart. Questions are king.
Ok – some topics are annoyingly tailored to that week’s C-list sporting icon, meaning you can let your mind wander while they try and name the running back who made the most rushing yards in the 2008 American Football Conference, but the best thing about it is that the score matters.
Too many panel shows nowadays are scripted, strap-in-for-the-ride half hours where no one is keeping count.
But on A Question of Sport they all want to win. It’s the competitive nature of each of the sporting stars laid bare. Does Hannah England go away for three points to make up the deficit? Could Tuffers fluffing a cricket question, again, scupper his team’s chances?
The staple quiz show lacks the razzle-dazzle of other iterations like A League of Their Own
After the final whistle there are heads in hands at one desk and high-fives at the other.
And you’re involved. You want to get them all right at home, and beat your sister to the answer. It’s why we like sport in the first place isn’t it? The triumph, the disaster, the competition.
For people like me who relish trying to name 10 countries that have won the most Winter Olympic medals, or deducing what year Justine Henin hit that winner at Wimbledon by the brand of cap she was wearing in the clip, or revelling in the fact they know that is James Toseland’s forehead under the pilot’s cap, it is the perfect comfort viewing for the sporting anorak.
Even better – finding out that Paul O’Connell is brilliant at hangman, or that Sam Quek cannot pronounce ‘Kiribati’ is heart-warming.
Trivia is at the heart of what makes the long-running BBC show stand the test of time
In a world of Premier League prima donnas it pulls you away from sport's dark corners
In a world of drug-addled athletes, brown envelope back-handers and Premier League prima donnas wearing gloves and short sleeves, it is pulls you away from sport’s dark corners.
It is probably not cool to like the quiz show as a 24-year-old. Probably even less so to have it on series link – a mainstay of the Sky planner – but why does that have to dictate what is popular?
The show has been on for nearly 50 years, and has aired over 1,100 episodes. While the captains, the guests and the presenters change, the simple joy has not subsided.
And while we have grown tired of all those talent shows, all those sketch shows, all those comedy panel shows, A Question of Sport has remained different and constant.
Maybe that’s because we like it how it is. Maybe that’s because it works. Maybe you can let us have this one, BBC.
Oh, but please change the theme tune back. I keep having to whistle the old one over the modern synthesiser strings and it probably annoys the family.
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