Puzzling perfection

Jeremy Vine and Carol Vorderman share their joy of solving puzzles with Ella Walker as they explain their new celeb-filled show, Celebrity Puzzling

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BETWEEN Only Connect, Pointless, The 1% Club, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, The Chase, and many, many more, you might think telly had enough quizzes to keep us entertained. But there's always room for one more - as long as the format is gripping enough.

Carol Vorderman and Jeremy Vine are adamant their new foray in the world of panel games, with Celebrity Puzzling on Channel 5, will stand out. Broadcaster Vine, 60, plays host while Vorderman, 64, and former Coronation Street actress Sally Lindsay, 51, battle it out as opposing team captains. They are joined by a roster of celebs each week, from Les Dennis and Shaun Williamson, to Scarlett Moffat and Melvin Odoom (who famously announced his crush on Vorderman in last year’s I’m A Celebrity jungle), as they face a series of puzzles, rather than a barrage of general knowledge questions.

“It's a format where you can win without necessarily knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings or the name of the horse in the painting in The National Gallery,’ explains Vine, who previously hosted quiz-show Eggheads. “You can come to it with an open mind, an open heart.”

The challenges include things like working out patterns of dots or letters, missing letter rounds and anagrams.

“All those really simple quizzes of the kind we had in notebooks on family holidays in the Eighties and the Nineties,’ says Vine. However, the Surrey-born Radio 2 presenter adds wryly: “Having presented graphics for the general election, I won't say it’s got the most cutting edge graphics in the world, but that’s part of the charm of it...”