A former contestant on the BBC game show Pointless has confessed to being haunted by their failure more than a decade after appearing. Taking to Reddit, the participant shared their experience of being eliminated early in the competition, admitting, “I remain haunted by the failure 12 years later.”
A Tough Start: Head-to-Head with Teachers
The contestant described the first round of their first episode, where they faced off against opponents who were secondary school teachers. The category required identifying pop musicians. “Our opponents were secondary school teachers and thus passingly familiar with the things young people were into and knew about Rita Ora,” the player wrote. “I still hold a grudge against her.”
Disaster in the Second Episode: The Backtalk Blunder
Things went from bad to worse on the second day. The category was words ending in “LK”. “My co-contestant smashed it with a caulk, fantastically low score,” the player recalled. “I went seventh, so all the obvious choices had gone, and I took a gamble on backtalk. This is passably one word as an Americanism, but it is not in the OED, so I scored the full 100, and we were out.”
The contestant added that other participants were surprised when they returned to collect their belongings, as they had an “intellectual aura” that suggested they would do well. “They were mistaken. One slightly miserable hot chocolate in the Westfield Costa afterwards, and home we went.”
Previous Contestant Insights: Alexander Armstrong Off-Camera
This is not the first time a former contestant has spoken about their Pointless experience. Milly Fyfe, who appeared on the show with her husband Andrew last year, shared what host Alexander Armstrong was like away from the cameras. Speaking to Express on behalf of OLBG, Milly revealed that Armstrong was less engaging once the cameras stopped rolling.
“I think with Alexander, because he's been doing it for so long and he's very busy with other things other than the show, there wasn't really any engagement with him off-camera,” Milly said. “He was basically going over doing his emails, or he went into his dressing room. I was quite surprised. On camera, he was great. But equally, I thought he could have been a little bit more engaging with his contestants.”
However, she praised guest Trevor Nelson, the BBC DJ, describing him as “amazing” and “lovely”. Pointless has been a staple of BBC teatime programming since its launch in 2009, hosted by Alexander Armstrong and originally co-hosted by Richard Osman, who left in April 2022 after 13 years.
