Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having had sex since their children were conceived, and the kids being the weirdy, mushroom-cropped kind who aren’t allowed to watch TV, only practise the cello and solve abstruse mathematical problems.
Perhaps this is why I didn’t hate Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family (BBC2, weekdays) nearly as much as I hoped I would. To fill you in: Dick and Dom are the new Ant and Dec, only more lavatorial and more irritating, and the BBC has got them to update the quiz for the brain-dead Noughties generation. Children who get questions wrong have to put on an ass’s head (cue jokes along the lines of: ‘Whoa! He keeps his brains in his ass.’)
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