Rude Britannia

Anne Robinson, host of NBC's hit "Weakest Link," takes all the fun out of watching TV game shows.

By Joyce Millman

Apr 23, 2001 | Anne Robinson is a bitch, and not in a good way. She isn't fun to hate, like Jerri on "Survivor: The Australian Outback." She isn't fun, period. 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.

"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. "Not a single question correct, Chuck," she sniffs to one contestant. "Is there any beginning to your knowledge?"

The contestants, who appear to have been coached to not bite back, stand there and look miserable. The audience, which appears to have been coached to side with the host, gasps appreciatively when Robinson launches a zinger. She doesn't smile. She wears black, sometimes leather, overcoats and her red hair is cropped in a no-nonsense Julie Andrews do. 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 ... WEAKESTLINK!" -- with an accent on the first syllable. She says it the same way, every time, which gets old pretty fast, given the fact that she said "the ... WEAKESTLINK" 36 times in the space of one hourlong show last week.

"Let's play 'the ... WEAKESTLINK!'" "Who will be 'the ... 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. 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!"

The British version of "Weakest Link" may be a national passion, but when it comes to the Americanized import, I am not amused. 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. But it is another thing entirely to watch her ridiculing American quiz show washouts.

We Americans are not accustomed to watching game show contestants being called idiots to their faces. 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 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. Yes! Yes! I know, this very publication has made sport of the flickering candlepower of our current chief executive. But we can do that: He may be a blockhead, but he's our blockhead. Robinson, though ... When she trains her haughty British cannons upon a contestant for not knowing an answer, or reads the questions verrry slowwwly for us dummies, it's like an assault on America's collective intelligence. This isn't entertainment, it's an international incident.

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