iaitch said:

Could do with a serious sports quiz show, maybe like Mastermind, no celebs just members of the public.

Years ago they had one on radio, was it Brain of Sport or something like that.
 

Rock Spectacle said:

So what happens next 

Chippycafc said:

Years ago they had a footie type of quiz where footie teams played each other. Cant recall what it was called but you had four routes to goal. From roiute four was easier questions and route 1 harder question led to a goal. Maybe that could come back.

Friend Or Defoe said:

shirty5 said:

Tried to be like League of their own with the cheeky chap comedian as host and got rid of dear Sue

You reap what you sow. 

They had their own comedic sports quiz called They Think It's All Over which QOS out lasted. 

Bedsaddick said:

clive said:

TV sports quiz show Question of Sport has stopped production after more than five decades, the BBC has confirmed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67731546

No at all surprised. Another show destroyed by box ticking . 

ValleyGary said:

Bedsaddick said:

This may sound really harsh and i apologise if it offends but the reason it's unwatchable is because the mainstream audience can't play along anymore . Because of the BBC box ticking quota of sporting guests must have a much higher proportion of women and Para athletes,  the audiences for these sports are minimal ( i know women's football has become popular but i can't watch it) the questions relate to the guests sports and i haven't got a clue who they are talking about . I know i'm not alone . I don't know anyone who watches it any more and yes it doesn't help that the pillock Paddy McGuinness is hosting it either. 
If if ever comes back it needs to go back to basics. Mainstream sports with guests that people recognise at least. 

The fact you feel you have to start with an apology when you’re just stating facts shows how sad it all is. The ‘home’ questions are basically all ‘away’ ones now for the audience because the guests are Paralympic high jumpers. 

I really can’t stand Sam Quek either, gives off bad vibes.

lolwray said:

Sports personality of the year next for the chop 

Bangkokaddick said:

Good article by Rod Liddle in The Times today. Doesn't hold back on why he think's it's gone wrong. Behind a paywall so I've posted it in full

How BBC ‘progressives’ killed off A Question of Sport in three years

Criticism from the more cynical elements of the national media are as nothing compared with wounds the broadcaster routinely inflicts upon itself month after month

Rod Liddle

Sunday December 17 2023, 12.01am, The Times

Adozen or so years ago, while filming a programme for the BBC, I remember being led with a bunch of other participants through deserted studio sets in search of our green room. At one point, the producer leading us stopped suddenly in the gloom and said: “Behold!” We stared across the darkened set, and then the gasps began. There was the chair on which, every week, Sue Barker sat for A Question of Sport. We were all gripped by a certain awe.

It wasn’t quite the same as staring at the cross on top of Calvary, or Churchill’s bunker, or Shakespeare’s first folio. Television is largely a dim-witted entertainment and its practitioners faintly risible. Further, Barker was not quite Richard Dimbleby or David Attenborough or John Cleese. But she became very good at what she did and people were comfortable with her. Sue was hokey, undoubtedly — but magisterially hokey. Back then her weekly audience was about six million.

It was also one of the few programmes that stripped sport of its seriousness and reminded us that it was all just a game. It was — in perhaps a slightly bygone, turn of the 1970s, way — fun. You could also rank the sports of the team members by the amount they knew about anything — by and large, rowing and cricket at the top, football at the bottom (one reason football was underrepresented in the early days). It was eminently lampoonable, and Nick Hancock’s They Think It’s All Over took the piss to its heart’s content. But A Question of Sport easily outlived its cheeky rival.

Barker may have been a tad hokey amid the buffoonery of Dawson, left, and Tufnell, but it was all nonetheless enjoyable television

VISHAL SHARMA/BBC/PA

The BBC, in an act of magnificent stupidity, sacked Sue (rather rudely) in 2021 and handed over the reins to Paddy McGuinness. Gone too were the jovially inane and bifferish antics of team captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson. In came those, er, loveable household names, former GB hockey player Sam Quek and rugby union’s Ugo Monye.

Everybody knew exactly what would happen. From a very respectable (these days) audience of four million under Barker in 2021, those tuning in on a prime time Friday night slot dwindled with great rapidity until Paddy and co were drawing in 780,000 and being beaten by such delights as Britain’s Poshest Farm Shops. The predictable ignominy. The plug was finally pulled last week.

To see a programme’s audience reduced to a fifth of what it was only two years previously must be some kind of record. Auntie, wrapped in its West London bubble, believes it is beset by enemies both commercial and ideological – and there is some truth in this. But the slings and arrows it suffers from The Daily Mail and The Daily Express are nothing to the wounds it blithely inflicts upon itself, month after month.

There is a good case for saying that the treatment of Barker was both ageist and sexist, but that is to miss the point — we have to climb inside the minds of those wretched execs to work out what that was. They are “progressive”, those BBC staffers, and wish the programmes that they make to reek of progressiveness, regardless of whether the viewing public want that kind of thing, or whether it makes for good television. It is the Hugh Greene mentality: sod the licence payers, we will give them what we want to give them because we are always right and they need re-educating.

From left, Quek, McGuinness and Monye’s version of the programme never resonated with dwindling audiences

JAMES STACK/BBC

Sue, Phil and Matt were not “progressive”, they just made programmes people enjoyed watching. Not good enough — so out they go. In come Ugo and Sam.

This is the problem for the BBC, especially in the sport and light entertainment sectors, but also even more notably on BBC Radio Four (away from current affairs coverage). The execs are engaged in a kind of box-ticking exercise which has devalued many of the programmes we watch. In fairness, it is not just the BBC doing this, but nearly all the major broadcasters. Let me ask the question, delicately. When you tune into a football game and they cut to the pundits at half-time are you always convinced that they have been engaged for their services principally for their expertise, articulacy and charismatic personalities?

All any of us want is programmes we might enjoy watching because they are presented by expert and likeable personalities. That’s what the Beeb had with A Question of Sport, and it threw it away.