Some gameshows you can win and not know that Yugoslavia is no longer a country. I like a lot of those shows.
This isn't one of those shows and that is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it's just an observation.
It's a fun concept and you'll either love or hate it. It allows the gameshow to be distinctive but not get old.
I find that the third round in which they are selecting groups from a grid really halts the pacing dead. Some people will stomach it but...yeah.
Everything about the design of this show jacks itself off over its status as a quote unquote "highbrow" show:
-The clinical white and blue color scheme.
-The smug, pseudo-baroque theme tune on the strings.
-The host that is sitting.
Oh and by the way...the one thing that really repelled me from this show for a long time was its host. Ms. Victoria Corren-Mitchell. She is just the exact opposite of Alexander Armstrong. He is so warm and paternal and reassuring when you make an error... golly, she is just so obnoxious...she completes the whole tone of thinking they're all way smarter than they really are. Well the contestants might be. I get that she's just playing a character and a lot of it is probably just a script but regarding this fictionalized Victoria we see in the show, she is desperately uncharismatic; she is snide to the contestants and her chipper "let's get to it, chaps" palled before it was introduced.
The most violent thing on television is her butchering a joke. They don't even make sense half the time. They clearly want to be this "look at us, we're so smart but we're also smart enough to be kooky and quirky". It's excruciating.
And then those hieroglyphs...you couldn't make it up. They began being greek letters and viewers said it was pretentious and 100% I agree. Even if you keep everything else, yes, more or less objectively, the greek letters are just completing image of smart rather than being smart.
And so they replaced them with hieroglyphs. I mean **** your mother right up the ***.
If you don't want to give implicit quantitative values to the symbols then use a crescent, a rhombus etc.
I also feel the final round kind of folds it in.
I never want to support anti-intellectualism though I don't claim to actually be an intellectual, this show could have been a prime example of British quaintness and wit but really just embodies neo-colonial snobbery.