Six Degrees of alienation: will Brian Cox’s new quiz show be too hard?

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ave you ever played the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?’ You’re given a Hollywood figure, and you must link them to Kevin Bacon through their films (i.e. Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Edward Asner, who was in JFK with Bacon – you’ve won). The idea behind this game is the principle of six degrees of separation, which states that any two people on Earth can be connected by six or fewer acquaintances, and is expanded further to the idea that everything is connected. With a maximum of six steps, anything can be connected.

I mention this because esteemed ex-pop star and scientific grin-athon, Brian Cox, has got a new science quiz show coming out, Six Degrees, which is based around and will test this very principle.

Brian Cox and his famous grin. Photo: Flickr / Bob Lee

The professor has already been going on about how difficult it will be.

“There will no celebrities on my panel,” he says. “The reason I like that is that it drives the panelists to very high intellectual ideas. It’s an undumbdownable programme. The questions have to be so difficult that even experts can’t answer them… it’s going to be unintelligible.”

The obvious question here is what merit there is in a show such as this – if it is so difficult that experts are required just to answer the questions, what can the general viewer possibly take away from it? And why would a viewer choose to watch a show like this?

Although the presence of Cox will undoubtedly lure in a number of viewers, the star of the show here is going to be the science.

Despite mother television’s aim to paint viewers as thick livestock sitting around at home, staring gormlessly at the box, a lot of the general public are not stupid. Arguably, most of TV’s best rated shows are hideous, mind-numbing dross (watching any Simon Cowell show is akin to undergoing a top-notch lobotomy, for example), but you can always find more ‘intellectual’ programmes if you look for them. Even so, TV’s output tends to be divided very clearly between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ shows, and it seems to emphasise the latter much more.

I’ve watched some incredible documentaries about history, politics, and TV, and quiz shows like Only Connect force your brain into action, offering a stark contrast to reality shows and random guesswork factory Deal or No Deal.

These shows are often seen as boring, but it is an incredibly shallow non-reason not to give them a chance, which closes you off from a world of potential interest

Ben Miller might be lending some celebrity glamour to the show. Photo: Flickr / Diamond Geyser

People are also asking why they would watch a show that has no celebrities in it (although Dara Ó Briain and Ben Miller are scheduled to appear), and that again speaks volumes: why wouldn’t you?

The idea that a quiz show lacking in celebrities is somehow worse, or of less interest, is a daft one. It is worth noting, too, that celebrity editions of quiz shows are often much easier, and if we’re getting a show about science, I would prefer it actually to engage with it. Often, science documentaries are designed for everyone, and so the amount of time required explaining basic concepts means more in-depth discussion is spurned – this show could right that balance.

Television was initially designed to inform and to educate its viewers, and Six Degrees is a good step in a flood of cookery and talent shows. Science is an inherently interesting subject and getting to spend time with it, learning about it in the company of experts who love it, sounds to me to be a very worthwhile experience. I’ve got very high hopes for this show, and I’m very much looking forwards to it.