Moneybags: with tense trivia and total chaos, Craig Charles is the new king of TV quizzing

Picking a quizshow host is an unknowable alchemy. Who ever put Jasper Carrott forward for Golden Balls? How did Anne Robinson end up a panto villain on The Weakest Link? If you really pull back the curtain, it doesn’t make sense that Chris Tarrant ended up fronting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (though can you imagine anyone doing as good a job as he did now?). The throwback weirdness of Noel Edmonds, the showbiz-dazzled toughness of Danny Dyer, the primetime glam of Ben Shephard. And then, of course, the maestro, Bradley Walsh.

Yes, it’s late autumn, which means it’s time for quizzes. This week we have three new offerings: Ian Wright’s Moneyball (Saturday, 6.30pm, ITV); Gary Lineker’s Sitting on a Fortune (Sunday, 7pm, ITV); and Craig Charles’s Moneybags (Monday to Friday, 3pm, Channel 4). You can see how all quizshows blend into one another. It doesn’t matter what channel you are on: at some point, a man in his 50s is going to ask you about flags.

When you watch three quizshows in a week you gain the ability to see through space and time, which is to say: I think, now, I understand the quizshow host more than anyone on Earth. The rough formula for a successful quiz is this: Trivia (there must be enough trivia – and crucially it must be the right level of chewy, satisfying-to-answer trivia – for the watching contestant at home to yell at the TV); Tension (there must be something on the line for the contestant – you have to want them to win, and to want them to win you have to know enough about them to care, and for that to happen the host has to strike up some quick camaraderie); and Chatter (Chatter is divided into two forms: asking a contestant about themselves – crucial for Tension – but also rule exposition, which, depending on the complexity of the quiz, is vital). When these three are in harmony, quiz brilliance happens. When the numbers are off … you get Sitting on a Fortune.

Gary Lineker seems like a nice man, but fundamentally he doesn’t care whether you’re buying a new kitchen or not, and that’s what makes him not a quizshow host. It doesn’t help that the format of Sitting is clunky: six contestants sit in various illuminated chairs, and if they get a question wrong from the golden chair at the front they are condemned to the doom-ridden red chair at the back. Now, while the final round – a three-way shootout where remaining contestants compete for the jackpot – threatens to be fun, in the end it isn’t, really. Sitting on a Fortune suffers from too much manufactured Tension (the lingofication of the modern quiz: Lineker is constantly trying to make the catchphrase “Lock it in!” happen) and not enough genuine Chatter, and that failure is almost entirely on Lineker’s shoulders.

On the opposite side of that coin we have Ian Wright who is, frankly, quizshow dynamite. From the very first interaction, Wrighty is putting them at ease (a cheery “What are we doing?” before a Covid-aware fist bump), before the Moneyball format swings in. Contestants have to pair up soft trivia answers then roll a huge bowling ball across a digital screen in a bid to win money. Although Moneyball has more than enough Chatter and plenty of Tension, the lack of good Trivia lets this one down.

Then there’s Craig Charles, who understands about 80% of what’s going on with Moneybags – and, frankly, good. You don’t care, but I’ll explain it anyway: a studio of contestants are paired up in front of a conveyor belt carrying bags of money, and they pick them up if they think it is one of the answers to a question Charles just asked. Chatter-wise, this is arguably the best of the bunch – we get to know every dental nurse, IT teacher and retiree who comes through the studio – and the mechanics of the game, allowing people to steal money from one another, ramps up the Tension. The Trivia is pitched at the right level, too: a left-field question about the size of things compared to a standard Shetland pony had me stumped. But there’s another element here, one only Craig Charles could bring to it: Chaos. I didn’t expect this – I didn’t even particularly think it while watching it – but you can’t argue with the science. Craig Charles is the perfect quizshow host. Moneybags is the perfect quiz.

Moneyball, 6:30pm, 6 November, ITV; Sitting on a Fortune, 7pm, 7 November, ITV; Moneybags, 3pm, from 8 November, Channel 4