Spoilers

 “Hello, I’m Lee Mack and welcome to 3×3, the brand-new quiz show that gives three teams of three people three chances to win a big-money prize.”

This of course is not the advertised episode Hold On Tight, an On the Buses spoof starring Robin Askwith which doesn’t exist despite the convincing promotional material for it. I thought something might be up as the episode wasn’t available for preview, and similarly to 2018’s Halloween special Deadline the audience were hoodwinked. That time it was faux technical issues (yes I was fooled), this time it was a last minute change to the schedules. I missed it live so instead spent a good while assuming iPlayer had put the wrong thing up before it dawned on me that Pemberton and Shearsmith had pulled a fast one again (and 3×3=duh). It seems to have fooled a good chunk of social media too, including quite a lot of rather angry On the Buses fans.

An attentive viewer would have immediately smelled a rat when the replacement wasn’t an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys (the BBC’s inexplicable go-to when shows get pulled) plus these sort of game shows just don’t go out that time of night. Nonetheless the show itself did feel initially convincing. Lee Mack does his usual schtick, well-worn Dad Jokes and slightly facetious comments. The reactions of the unseen audience were recorded during other programmes and the slightly naff set (almost entirely computer generated) has that whiff of cheap daytime telly. A few standard tropes of quiz shows are here too – the tedious “and what do you do?” contestant introductions and the incredibly annoying “I wasn’t born then” response you so often hear from younger contestants.

It’s not long though before it’s clear something’s off. It is very hard, even for very good actors, to convincingly act “ordinary”. There’s a world of difference between even very naturalistic acting and the sort of slightly awkward banter between famous TV host and Joe Bloggs who’s never even been inside a TV studio before. The actors involved largely do a good job, but one or two are very clearly giving “proper” acting performances. Plus if you’re a fan of Peaky Blinders or were watching EastEnders back in February you may well have recognised Gemma Page, here playing research scientist Margaret.

I think it’s deliberate though. I don’t think we’re meant to genuinely think this is a gameshow up until the last few moments. There are lots of indications that something is amiss along the way, mainly involving Margaret’s daughter, Gemma (Saskia Wakefield in what seems to be her screen debut) and their tense relationship. At one point she correctly gives the answer to an incomplete question before any information she could have used is given. She’s clearly not being allowed access to the outside world – studying at home, never travelled and so on – so something sinister is being hinted at fairly soon.

The drama here is the viewer trying to work out what’s going on. I immediately thought of the deadly game-shows from the final episodes of Christopher Eccleston’s season of Doctor Who (particularly when Margaret’s husband is “frozen” and then removed from the game) or the post-apocalyptic lockdown-quiz sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Show. I was wrong on both counts, it’s referencing something else entirely and while this is a somewhat spoilered review I shall refrain from identifying that.

Ultimately how effective this is is down to your own experience of it. I’m sure plenty of fans switched off quickly (Twitter seems to confirm this) while others may have been genuinely fooled until the end (if you think that unlikely, well my Dad was once genuinely fooled by an episode of The Day Today into thinking George Fornby wrote Subterranean Homesick Blues, so it can happen!). I suspect most viewers were savvy enough and spent the half hour trying to work out what was going on, which I think was the whole point.

Verdict: Very hard to judge. As an event it’ll get the internet talking for a while and it’s certainly memorable. As an episode in itself, it’s probably not one that I’ll be revisiting very often but I’m glad they tried something different and unexpected. Although while I loathe On the Buses with a passion I was curious to see what they did with that as a source. 7/10

Andy Smith