I've come to the conclusion that adding the prefix "Celebrity" to the name of a TV show is tantamount to attaching the word "turd" to a dish on a restaurant menu.
I don't have a problem with celebrities per se. After all, most TV shows and films are heavily populated with celebrities. But most of the time, celebrities are in the right place. Like items in the home. Kitchen utensils are in the kitchen. Bathroom utensils are in the bathroom. And so on. But should I find the toilet brush in the cutlery drawer, then the balance of my universe becomes upset.
In the case of celebrities, it's when they appear on quiz shows.
Very few celebrities have become celebrities on account of their general knowledge. Fred Housego was a rare exception. A few more are endowed with a well-stocked bank of important and trivial facts, but generally speaking, celebrities have a different skills set to people who have heard of at least two authors, three capital cities and four 'historical figures' outside of Marcus Rashford and Jamie Oliver.
So, when I turn on "Celebrity Mastermind", I know that the show title is going to be as oxymoronic as a dish of "delicious dogshit". It will often host one or two celebrities who won't embarrass themselves. A TV presenter with a background in journalism perhaps. It may also include a sports person, which is usually a bit awkward, because as much as we can admire them for their single-minded dedication and countless years of 24/7 focused effort in excelling enough in their chosen sport to attain celebrity status, it is exactly that single-minded dedication and 24/7 focused effort which has prevented them from investing time in learning any general knowledge. At all.
And then you might get a "Celebrity Mastermind" contestant who is a soap actor, a radio DJ or a reality TV show participant. The Only Way is Chelsea or Made in Essex or some such crap involving culturally void half-wits. These types of celebrities make a living out of showing off, so when they appear on quiz shows they show off in a way that the usual ordinary contestants don't. I don't just mean on Mastermind, where its usual contestants are directed to demonstrate a level of robotic, emotionless decorum that you'd find cold even from a Victorian undertaker, but even on the quiz shows with normal behaving contestants, like "The Chase" or "Tipping Point". These celebrities absolutely revel in the attention they can glean from their ignorance of the basic knowledge required to get above a grade U at GCSE. And they really do revel in it. Their excitable self-deprecating laughter at thinking the capital of France is Belgium, is not shame, it's a form of arrogance against everyone who is a sad and boring bookworm for knowing the answer's Paris. How is it entertaining to watch the delirious showing off of a misplaced celebrity who is getting payment and media exposure just for being as thick as a fucking brick?
The other example of misplaced celebrity casting is their use in those shows that act as a compendium of nostalgic entertainment from the 70s or 80s, or those "50 best/worst" types of shows that we might gravitate to Channel 5 to watch on a weekend evening. Typically, you get clips of whatever the show's focus might be... old adverts, songs, sitcom extracts... and these clips are punctuated by a "talking head" (who explains the context and slightly ruins the enjoyment as a result). Each one talks about the subject matter as if they remember it well, along with all the details, from their own experience. When that "talking head" is someone who was a teenager in the 70s talking about a 70s pop song, or an actor who did loads of adverts in the 80s talking about adverts in the 80s, then that has some credibility. But if I'm watching a 22 year old You Tuber whose 'funny' content gets them a million views each post, and whose own parents were born in 1981, telling me about the 1970s as if they remember them well and haven't just regurgitated what the researcher told them to say with their own 'funny' twist on it, then, really, mate, do us a favour and pretty please, kindly just fuck off. And of course, film yourself fucking off so you have something else to post tomorrow, you fucking attention seeker,
Right that's the end of my rant. I'll give this post a careful review now to ensure a sprinkling of vocabulary that only a genuine Mastermind contestant will know and then I'll upload it and share it online in the hope of gaining some attention.