WITH the Monday evening teacher training session cancelled I thankfully had to forgo the ground-breaking, weekly educational initiative, no doubt ‘borrowed’ from Doug Lemov’s book Teach like a Champion, and travel at breakneck speeds through the mean streets of Radlett to arrive home in time for Tipping Point.

Due to work commitments, I rarely enjoy this particular guilty pleasure. I am openly envious of those fraudulent ‘work from homers’, whose workload seems to afford them the ability to watch inane daytime TV in between sending out an email every four hours as they sporadically display their home working productivity to their remote line managers.

Tipping Point: Oh to be a fly on the wall of the ITV creative department when the idea was muted: "Hey Rupert, I’ve a fab idea for our corporate objective of wealth distribution to the stupid. Let’s get some big plastic discs, put them on a really slow machine like the 2p ones I hear the precarious proletariat social class play and ask idiotic questions so they can win some pin money".

It will not advance culture, is simplistic in format and execution, yet utterly compelling. I even found myself shouting on that Monday "go for drop zone two you dumbwit!" as Cheryl battled limply to walk off with the 10 grand used as her carrot for openly displaying her lack of knowledge on any subject to the masses.

After what seems like a lifetime of really lame game shows, finally the genre has struck gold in the noughties and teenies.

The low benchmark must arguably be Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin’s Naked Jungle. I have no wish to see him clothed, so am nonplussed as to why anyone, bar Mrs Cheggers, thought seeing him naked was a boon.

At the time, the choices were Cheggers flapping in the wind, or getting "shafted" by Robert Kilroy Silk. I took Option C when there were only options A and B available.

Current terrestrial fare includes Total Wipeout, countdown, 15 to 1 and The Chase. With the exception of wipeout, the others success is built on the ability to pack copious questions into the format, which is where shows from yonder failed with too much gloss and not enough substance.

The intellect of the contestants is the secondary USP, with the viewer’s realisation there are people with lower intellectual stock and in comparison they may indeed be Stephen Hawking’s unearthed love child. Ben Shephard once asked "On What day is Christmas Day?", the answer: "Wednesday". Other notable examples include "Leonardo Di Caprio" as the artist who painted the Sistine chapel, "Abu Hamza" as Cat Stevens Islamic name and, on Family Fortunes, when asked to name a domestic animal, the contestant answered "Leopard".

My confessional is that there is a little game show jealousy going on.

As a teenager, I reached the final of the interschool Blockbusters auditions and was packed off for the day to the studios in London. After the pre-recording interview, I was dropped and had to watch as my friend, who was less acne ridden than I and therefore more palatable on screen, won £10 and was knocked off in disgrace. His humiliation was intensified by telling an irritated Bob Holness that he wanted to go for a P and saying "I want U Bob".

To have gotten so close and been turned down was a low which took me years to overcome with the aid of some thickly applied Oxy10.

Some years later, minus pock marks, I got a day’s work on the pilot of a Julian Clary game show In The Dark.

With the recent advent of infra-red cameras, I had to enter a pitch black room against the clock and dress up in bizarre clothing ensembles.

A lame idea which unsurprisingly wasn’t commissioned, although I did get to stand semi naked in a darkened room with a rampantly double entendring Julian, which shows how desperate students are to earn a buck and display their intellectual sub-adequacy to the baying daytime-work-from-homers.

- Brett Ellis is a teacher who lives in London Colney