Since I’ve written about three shows I more or less like, it’s time for some balance.  The opening credits of Kerwhizz  provoke involuntary flinching and a sense of mild dread.  The show is a decent idea on paper.  It could have been a great show.  But those quiz segments.  Oh god, those quiz segments.

Kerwhizz was made in 2008.  It was a major commission for CBeebies at the time – it was their first show to be made in HD – and it was hyped accordingly.  It was described as the first game show for pre-schoolers, which it really isn’t.  The BBC press release is a pile-up of bygone buzzwords – by the end of the first paragraph, the show has already been billed as a “mixed media pre-school quiz show”, and “a brand new breakthrough multi-platform entertainment format aimed at 4 to 6 year olds”.  (Quite how it can be both a pre-school quiz show and aimed at 4 to 6 year olds, when most British kids start school at age 4, is not readily apparent.)

What made it a “multi-platform entertainment format”?  Well, it had a website.  With a podcast and a game and everything.  Look, it was 2008.

So here’s what Kerwhizz actually is.  It’s a CGI animation in which three teams of pod racers have a pod race.  Every episode’s track has a different, gimmicky theme.  The duos are all driver-and-sidekick pairings – Twist and Snout, Ninki and Pip, and Kit and Kaboodle.  And before they get to the actual racing, they first compete in a quiz to win “pod mods” – power-ups to use in the race.

It’s a perfectly good idea, and it ought to work.  And there are plenty of things it doesn’t reasonably well.  For a start, the actual pod racing half of the show is perfectly watchable, even if it’s formulaic.  It’s basically a parade of eccentric mishaps with everyone using then their pod mods to get out of trouble.  The point of reference is pretty obviously Wacky Races, though that’s not a comparison that exactly favours Kerwhizz.  But these segments still have some life to them, and the writers are pretty good at using the two-lap format to set up things for a pay off on the second lap.

The anime-influenced character designs are pretty good.  If you’re interested, that side of the show’s development is very thoroughly documented, since there was a law suit alleging that the characters had been copied from another pitch.  The claim failed comprehensively – the judge described that other pitch as “not especially memorable” – but some of the concept drawings can be found at the end of the judgment.

The three main characters have some charisma, even if they’re not especially well distinguished from one another.  The kids doing the voice acting are really quite good.  So all this is positive.

But then you get to the quiz segments.  Those are brutal.

For a start, there’s Kerwhizzitor, the show’s only live action character, who serves as quizmaster and race commentator.  He’s scripted with the sort of dreadful jokes that really call for a magnetic performance.  There are people on CBeebies who could probably have got away with it.  Jacob Scipio is not one of them.  His unremittingly stilted performance is a sight to behold, but only in small doses.  To be fair, he would have been fifteen at the time this was made, and he’s been working consistently enough to suggest that he was just hopelessly miscast in a role that does call for some fairly specific skills.  But he’s still a seriously challenging watch.

Then there’s the quiz itself, which is designed for the kids to play along with at home.  As such, it consists of very simple multiple choice questions, with long pauses for you to answer.  Up to a point, this could be one of those unbridgeable gaps between the kids and the parents.  In order to challenge the pre-schoolers, you have to pitch the quiz at a level which the adults will find intolerably boring.  Fair enough.  But it’s hard to imagine some of the questions posing any real challenge to anyone old enough to understand them in the first place, and it’s also painfully repetitive, built around endless variations on a fairly small number of question types.

There’s a structural problem here too.   Ostensibly, the whole point of the quiz is to win points in order to get first choice of pod mods.  In theory, this is supposed to give you a huge advantage.  But because the races themselves work on Wacky Races logic, most of the pod mods are so weird and arbitrary that you have no idea what help they might possibly be, and quite often they end up simply clearing the road for the benefit of everyone anyway.  That’s fine as far as the races segments are concerned, but it means that there’s precisely no sense that winning the quiz actually makes much difference in terms of your chances of winning the race.  Which makes the quiz seem even more boringly futile than it already does.

And this is half the show.  To the adult viewer, it’s a wasteland of tedium.  And surely even the kids must regard it as the dull bit before the racing starts.

Why is the quiz so underwhelming compared to everything else in the show?  One answer might be all that “mixed media” and “multi-platform” stuff I mentioned at the start.  You can still play the Kerwhizz game on the CBeebies website, if you want.  Basically, you sit through a quiz section to earn points to buy pod mods, then you do races to earn points to buy more pod mods, then you do another quiz… you know the drill.  It’s an upgrade grind.  The race sections of the game are pretty lame.  But the quiz – the quiz is faithful to a fault.

And perhaps that’s the problem.  Maybe they were so busy trying to make a multi-media phenomenon that they ended up hobbling the quiz segments by restricting them to stuff that could be easily replicated in a 2008 browser game.

Kerwhizz makes a hash of the game show format, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea in principle.  Next time, the 2015 take on the pre-school game show: Swashbuckle.