1/10/2024 0 Comments Creepy gameshow host name![]() The winner takes all the other seven players "leave with nothing," as Robinson keeps reminding them. Eight contestants play as a team, answering questions in turn the object is to build a chain of correct answers and pile up money. When she trains her haughty British cannons upon a contestant for not knowing an answer, or reads the questions verrry slo"Weakest Link" has some interesting game show mechanics, though. But we can do that: He may be a blockhead, but he's our blockhead. Yes! Yes! I know, this very publication has made sport of the flickering candlepower of our current chief executive. We prefer Regis Philbin's supportive coddling, Alex Trebek's gravitas, even Jeff Probst's firm yet slightly apologetic "The tribe has spoken." We prefer to let our losers down easy in this democracy, where every kid who shows up to play gets a soccer trophy and you don't have to be a brainiac to be president. We prefer to do the name-calling ourselves, from the privacy of our living rooms, when somebody on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" wipes out on the $200 question because he or she doesn't know how many blackbirds were baked in a pie. We Americans are not accustomed to watching game show contestants being called idiots to their faces. But it is another thing entirely to watch her ridiculing American quiz show washouts. Because it's one thing to have Robinson shaming and humiliating her countrymen, shame and humiliation being two of the cornerstones of the British boarding school education. The British version of "Weakest Link" may be a national passion, but when it comes to the Americanized import, I am not amused. Goodbye." Anne Robinson is a bitch and a scold, and sure it's all an act - see how she winks and smiles ever so slightly when she says goodbye at each show's end? But after the thoroughly unpleasant exercise in public humiliation we've just witnessed, that wink is just creepy: Imagine Godzilla turning to the audience in midchomp and shrugging, "Whaddaya so afraid of? It's my shtick!" ![]() WEAKESTLINK?'" And of course, there's the polar chill of her signature line, with which she curtly dismisses losers from the show: "You ARE the. WEAKESTLINK" 36 times in the space of one hourlong show last week. She says it the same way, every time, which gets old pretty fast, given the fact that she said "the. WEAKESTLINK!" - with an accent on the first syllable. And she has a way of pronouncing the name of the show, throwing her whole body into it like a female softball pitcher letting one fly it comes out sounding like "the. She wears black, sometimes leather, overcoats and her red hair is cropped in a no-nonsense Julie Andrews do. The audience, which appears to have been coached to side with the host, gasps appreciatively when Robinson launches a zinger. The contestants, who appear to have been coached to not bite back, stand there and look miserable. "Is there any beginning to your knowledge?" ![]() "Not a single question correct, Chuck," she sniffs to one contestant. "Who is the poster child for incompetence?" Robinson sneers in her flutey, upper crust accent as the eight contestants flub answers and fail to rack up winnings. Watching the affectedly severe British host of NBC's much-hyped new quiz show, "Weakest Link," use shame and ridicule to put down contestants' lack of intelligence, you feel like you're back in grade school, quaking at your desk as some bitter battle-ax of a teacher rips into the slowest kid in the class. She isn't fun to hate, like Jerri on "Survivor: The Australian Outback." She isn't fun, period. Anne Robinson is a bitch, and not in a good way. ![]()
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