SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Are board games boring? When someone gets the Monopoly, Cluedo or Trivial Pursuit out, do you die a little bit inside? Oooh, a VINTAGE Monopoly set depicted on Vine's Facebook page. It's 'Britain's favourite boardgame' according to a pre-show survey... Channel 5 then conceded that board games might have some merit, y'know, for the kids? isn't anything that gets kids away from playing Fortnite or Minecraft and spending more time with family and friends actually a good thing all round? If you're not too Vine-averse you can watch the show yourself: Jeremy Vine and guests chat about board games at 45:00 (skip the stuff on Brexit and Dry January!) until 56:00 Didn't fancy it? OK, I'll tell you what went down... Jeremy Vine introduces the topic by describing those dreadful social predicaments where your host hauls out Monopoly or Cluedo and you "die a bit inside". I can't really believe this goes on at the sort of dinner parties Jezzer attends in his gentrified W6 postcode. I suspect Jez is just reading off the autocue (the same line is on the Facebook page), so I'm guessing some hapless Channel 5 script-monkey 's desperate social milieu is being referenced here. Straight over to Vine's elegant but strangely-monickered co-host, Storm Huntley, perched on a high chair, who is quick to point out that she loves Monopoly. And Snakes & Ladders. Snakes & Ladders, Storm? Really? You're 31 years old with a degree in Politics & Economics from Glasgow University but you've got a passion for Snakes & Ladders? It's not unusual to see clever, successful women putting on this "I'm just a widdle girl" routine, so maybe she's just treading carefully round Jeremy's ego with self-denigrating silliness like this - but there's more to come, so hold that thought. Jezzer is back behind his desk. He's got a stack of games and my heart lifts: there's Vlaada Chvátil's excellent Codenames - the prince of intelligent party games - and Ticket To Ride, which I don't rate personally but it's got chops, and Sushi Go which is delightful little card drafting game, like 7 Wonders but for people with only 20 minutes left to live. Someone's been doing their research! Is there a Secret Gaming Nerd in the studio? The Secret Gaming Nerd is revealed. He's a spotty ginger youth sitting in the audience. He's 22 and he 'works on the show' (intern? mailboy? Scooter from The Muppets?) and, despite his fashion disaster jumper, he's confident and articulate and he might just save this whole segment for shame and ignominy. Jez and his three guests are going to play a game and Scooter is going to talk them through the rules. Everyone looks thoroughly uncomfortable. The game is Say Anything, which is one of those party games you bring along instead of Cards Against Humanity if the host is your boss or a born-again Christian. Jeremy Vine is the games master and offers his guests a coy question: "What's the worst question to ask on a first date?" Guests James Haskell (man-mountain, rugby player), Dawn Neesom (peroxide bob, middle-aged journo) and Dr Bull (no idea) have to jot down a witty answer. They were tipped to the question earlier, because they all seem to have answers ready-made. James Hagrid asks about shaving his body hair after the couple marry, Dawn alludes to a worrying rash, Dr Bull comes right out with it and inquires about chlamydia. It isn't redefining comedy, but this is 10 o'clock in the morning on terrestrial TV, what do you want? Things start to come unstuck the moment that actual 'game' element surfaces. You see, Jezzer has to decide on a winning response and the players have to guess whom he's going to choose: they have little coloured tokens to do this. Scooter tries to explain but he's hampered by three things:
No one can understand what to do. Here's a group of people who've made it onto a flagship daytime TV chat show because of their wit, charm and general social aplomb, but Scooter might as well be instructing them on how to deliver a baby. Let's be clear, Hagrid might look like beef brisket on legs, but he's written cookbooks and fitness guides. He can handle complicated ideas, like slow braising in a barbecue sauce. Dawn Neesom was editor of the Daily Star (which presumably doesn't edit itself) and Dr B is a doctor and probably can deliver actual babies. (To be fair to the good doctor, he's the only one asking pertinent questions and trying to clarify Scooter's garbled instructions). I'm left wondering whether this faux-idiocy is a sort of pantomime of contempt, whereby the guests (and Storm Huntley) think that board games are so stupid the only legitimate response is to act as if you yourself are even more stupid, or is it a genuine confusion arising from people being placed outside their comfort zone? Or an odd aspect of British culture where we all try to project an image of ourselves as dull but salt-of-the-earth proles whenever anything inter-ter-leck-tual is put our way. Jeremy abandons the game and goes to talk to Scooter, who is so charming and sensible you rather wish he was presenting. Scooter shows off his stack of games, admits that this is where most of his paycheck goes (I hear you, brother!) and mentions a board game cafe he frequents and how these places are popping up everywhere. He presents Jezzer with Magic Maze, a sweet co-op game where fantasy heroes raid a magical shopping mall but the players can't talk while making their moves. Scooter's a nice guy. I'm going to stop calling him Scooter. His real name is Ash. Jezzer furrows his brow. He's a man on the horns of a dilemma. Should he pursue this line of questioning, ask about board game cafes, explore this post-modern notion of 'cooperative games' ... But that would involve dropping his 'I'm-just-a-simple-working-bloke' persona. What to do, what to do... Simple-working-bloke persona wins out! "No one wants to learn all these rules!" Vine declares, waving the rather flimsy rule book for Magic Maze at the camera. "I mean, look at this!" he gasps, showing off p4 with its clear diagrams and photographs of components. "Once the instructions are more than 4 pages, I'm 'gone'" he confides. The rules for Magic Maze take up 5 pages. Jeremy Vine has a degree in English Literature from the University of Durham. Think about that. Over to Storm. She has viewers phoning in. I hope, for one mad moment, that Basement Guy is watching this and is phoning to set the record straight, sing the praises of Dominion or Five Tribes or Shadows Over Camelot, tell everyone there's been a renaissance in gaming brought on by crowdfunding, 3D printers and cheap Chinese manufacturing and leave Jezzer and his chucklehead guests hanging their heads like bloody penitents. But it's daytime TV isn't it? So here's Christine from Staffordshire who loves playing Snap! with her 5-year-old daughter. Even Jeremy Vine seems to think this is a bit of a slap in the face. So Jez makes a striking confession. He took a game home last week and played it with his family. The game was Mysterium. Mysterium is the real deal. It's a reworking of a Ukrainian game called Tajemnicze Domostwo, in which the players are psychics trying to solve the mystery of an ancient murder and another is the Ghost who can only communicate by handing out cryptic vision cards. Have you payed Dixit? It's like that, but cooperative and set in a haunted house. I'm really excited to think Jeremy Vine sat his family down (wife Rachel, pre-teen daughters Martha and Anna) and played Mysterium. Why isn't that a Channel 5 TV show in its own right??? I really wanted to hear Vine say something about this. Maybe about the fun of getting the family working together to solve a puzzle. Or the challenge of providing clues based on how you know someone's imagination works. Or just the lovely art. Vine complains that it took them 45 minutes to work out the rules and it nearly led to his wife divorcing him (as if anything could separate those two love-birds, ho-ho!). But then he seems to sense he's being churlish and muses about the odd concept of a 'cooperative game': "I have to get my head around that slightly," he concludes, sounding lost and tragic, like a man out of time. But that's the nearest we get to analysis, because here's Storm again to introduce Sue from Lancashire. Sue is 70 and plays games with her son and grandson and loves it. She agrees that board games are boring, but only the old-fashioned sort, like Cluedo. Jeremy, still stupefied by the idea of cooperative games, clutches this like a drowning man. "No one understands Cluedo!" he exclaims with feeling. A degree from University of Durham, remember? In English Literature! I'm just saying... Another caller sings the praises of Monopoly, but only the Friends version, which her daughter adores. Jeremy moves to salvage things. Can Ash recommend something for any viewers motivated by this shambles to experiment with board games? The camera pans back to Ash who, quick as as flash, says "Carcassonne" and sticks two thumbs up in a desperate parody of Paul McCartney. The thing is, Ash isn't wrong about Carcassonne, which is a fantastic entry-level game: it can be played idly, to build a pretty map, but players with more shark-like instincts will identify placing farmers as the winning strategy and they'll ride roughshod over everyone else then grow a taste for more exciting fare. But the other thing is, what the hell is going on here? I get that this is daytime TV and there's a picture of Jeremy Vine in the encyclopaedia if you look up "banal nonsense" but this seems exceptionally confused. Clearly no one, not Lord Jezzer or the fragrant Storm or any of his guests, was prepared to acknowledge for a moment that a grown up might want to waste an evening with a board game. There were a vague concessions that it's nice for the children, family time, get them away from their damned iPads, etc etc. But adults? So here's Ash with his horrid jumper and a lot of proper board games, trying to evangelize, and Jez took Mysterium home to play with his family - even though he can't understand Cluedo. Twenty minutes previously, he'd been discussing Article 50, but he didn't reveal back then that he couldn't read anything with more than four pages in it, did he? So why the sudden pretense of being incredibly dim? Perhaps it's a sort of inverse snobbery. Jeremy is fundamentally an effete talk show metrosexual, but the one place he can burnish his macho credentials in the the presence of a dork like Ash - which is why he suddenly starts posing as a testosteronal illiterate who's just too damn manly to sit down at a table and learn how to play Cluedo. Maybe, but that doesn't explain his female co-host and guest, who seem to be reading from the same neanderthal script. Maybe it's our culture? Is some strange fracture in the British psyche on show here? Is it because, on a subconscious level, we despise childhood? Here's a thought: we bury our childhoods pretty deep here in the UK and we roll a big rock on top of the grave. That's how we grow up: by turning our backs on our younger selves. For most boys, only football is allowed to function as a conduit between childhood and adulthood. If you're lucky and your parents made you learn an instrument, then music can bridge that divide. But few people have hobbies that they can trace right back to childhood. For most people, the golden thread is broken. Lost in the maze of career and family and mortgages, they settle down in front of the TV or the work email server. Childhood is reduced to a meme that you share online about stuff "only '90s kids will remember". But childhood is the well of life, isn't it? You have to keep going back to it to drink and be renewed. Yes, but the well is fenced around by vast multinationals who sell us the life-giving water in plastic bottles, branded with superheroes, Star Wars and Harry Potter. As adults, we're reassured because this bottled water is expensive and dignified by state-of-the-art technology and celebrity endorsement, so that we don't feel too ashamed while we consume it, usually in a very passive way. Is this why intelligent grown-ups in this country can't engage with the institutions of childhood, with play and singing and dancing and telling stories, without getting drunk first or regressing entirely (like Storm and her Snakes & Ladders)? Faced with childhood activities, they profess themselves baffled, as if forced to speak an unknown language or pick up and play a strange musical instrument. But you know how to do this, I want to tell them: You used to find it easy and fun, but you've made yourself forget. A colleague from Austria recognises this peculiar pathology in the British. Childhood isn't shameful or despicable in Northern Europe. They love games there, and the folk literature we call 'fairy tales' and the immemorial music we call 'nursery rhymes'. "It's because, in Britain, you don't really have childhood," she tells me: "You end it too soon. At age 4 or 5, they start school, doing tests, learning Maths and Science and writing. In Austria, we don't start till later. Children carry on playing. We let them be children." I'm left wondering by this. Is there something wrong with us? The sight of Vine and his guests cheerfully representing themselves as idiots rather than tapping into their childhood delight in play is deeply dispiriting. I don't think I could watch daytime TV every day.
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