Malcolm Barker: If I Love My Country is the answer, we should be questioning BBC’s sanity

The warnings were there. Two comedians, Frank Skinner and Micky Flanagan, were announced as team leaders for the series of eight programmes, and it was reported that a third comic, David Walliams, had abandoned the role of compère after the pilot episode. In his place is Gabby Logan, the daughter of the former Leeds United Welsh international Terry Yorath.

I watched the second programme. It was rather like intruding on someone else’s nightmare, with Big Ben whizzing round in the background, and an excitable audience decked out in blue and red, with wigs to match. I Love My Country is a celebrity show, as indeed are so many BBC offerings, Celebrity Masterchef, Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Bargain Hunt and so on.

In the teams were girls called Christine Bleakley, Melanie C and Chelsee Healey, Jonnie Peacock from the Paralympics, the actor Larry Lamb, and Len Goodman, the judge from another celebrity show, Strictly Come Dancing, who takes that caper seriously, and appears dispassionate even when John Sergeant and Ann Widdecombe are galumphing round the floor.

For this quiz he shed his gravamen and his tie, and presumably his critical faculties, for he smiled bravely throughout the 50-minute show.

Also involved was a six-strong band, and a singer called Jamelia who got mixed up in one of the questions, and did not appear to be quite sure whether she had ever been to Aberdeen. The audience was very much in on the act, and throughout a kind of frantic hilarity prevailed, as though laughing gas had somehow leaked into the air-conditioning.

Christine Bleakley’s CV apparently contains memories of an encounter with an unfriendly goose, prompting Frank Skinner to remark that in Africa she might find that sauce for the goose was also sauce for Uganda. Len Goodman was on his feet proclaiming this the joke of the week. Sadly, it was.

Mrs Logan grinned during all the proceedings and occasionally gyrated and wagged her arms in the air. It was her lot to ask the questions, and it was on these that any hope foundered of I Love My Country proving anything but very light entertainment. I can only remember three that might have got into a proper quiz. They concerned the breed of dog favoured by the Queen, the river that rises on Plynlimon in the Cambrian Mountains in Wales, and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

The performance began with a competition in which the teams were required to identify place names as certain letters in their titles appeared at random. The first was Aberdeen, occasioning Jamelia’s confusion. Extra points were available if the competitor could place a pork pie on a named location upon a large map of the United Kingdom.

Frank Skinner did well with Aberdeen, but Len Goodman placed Burpham far wide of the mark. He kept smiling, though, perhaps somewhat fixedly. Apparently a Yorkshire pudding was used as the marker in the first airing of the programme. Presumably over successive episodes other comestibles will be featured, but perhaps a load of tripe would be too close to home?

There was an extraordinary version of pass-the-parcel. A large box was handed on by competitors once they had answered a question correctly. After a set period of time the game ended with the box exploding, scattering feathers everywhere. The team then in possession forfeited all points to the opposition.

Sample questions: “What item of cutlery accompanies an egg in a traditional race?” and “Name Harry Corbett’s puppet”.

After Frank Skinner and Micky Flanagan had danced with life-size dolls, the show drew to a close with the appearance of the special guest, whose claim to fame was her collection of Spice Girls memorabilia. The contestants were asked to estimate how much she had paid for a dress worn by Melanie C. It came out at £2,500.

The BBC has put a lot behind I Love My Country. There were 50 names on the credits that rolled at the end, including a “celebrity producer”. The original idea came from Holland, and is broadcast by arrangement with a company that also sold The Voice to the BBC.

The Corporation sometimes seems bereft of ideas. It no longer broadcasts Test cricket, a dreadful deprivation during this glorious Ashes summer, or horse-racing, or live Premiership football, and is evidently at a loss to fill its schedules. Day-time viewers are offered cooking programmes, antique hunts, house renovations or quizzes, which are often repeats. BBC2 is even running old Antiques Road Shows again, without even bothering to update the valuations, or disclosing the subsequent fate of items admired by the experts, which would have been really interesting.

A celebrity cult pervades the Corporation at the expense of professional broadcasters with flair and great ideas. Hence such travesties as I Love My Country.

* Malcolm Barker is a former editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post.