Despite its enduring popularity with audiences, the quiz show continues to have an uneasy place in television studies. It has been the intention of this book to offer an introduction to the study of the quiz show, while also contributing to the scholarly visibility of the genre. Furthermore, the book has also aimed to reflect back on the study of television itself. Whether with regard to television history, issues of institutional regulation, television aesthetics, the circulation of programme formats or fan research, the quiz show has much to teach us about television as an object of study.

Skovmand (2000) is right to point out that a range of factors have contributed to the critical marginalisation of the genre, ranging from the apparent difficulty of approaching quiz shows as ‘texts for analysis’, to judgements of cultural value. In this regard, I have to admit that there was something deliciously strange about viewing extant archival copies of quiz and game shows at the British Film Institute in London. Sandwiched in between two students watching silent film classics, the images playing on my monitor (of pairs attempting to make wedding cakes on a 1973 edition of The Generation Game, or of the bespectacled ‘Norma’ who was called by the host to ‘Come on down!’ in a 1984 edition of The Price is Right) suddenly seemed conspicuous in their difference and their frivolity - apparently out of place in the more ‘serious’ atmosphere of an academic context.