Games, Brains, and English Canada
by licensed television critic Farrell ChildeGame shows tend to hang around for a long time. Jeopardy has been on the air, in three incarnations, for thirty-three of the last thirty-eight years. But there is a game show which has been on the air for thirty-three consecutive years, and which grew out of a show which had been on the air for seven years before that. It draws its contestants from an international network of clubs of its devotees. It's shown in Canada. On basic cable. You probably don't know what it is.
It's Des Chiffres et des Lettres, shown in Canada on TV5. The show probably has an anglophone audience of about four, which means it outdraws any English-Canadian game show, because there are no English-Canadian game shows. Perhaps game shows just aren't serious enough for the Canadian taste. Or is it just that devising game shows requires intelligence beyond that of the relatives of important people who run Canadian television?
Whatever the reason is, I doubt there are many people in Canadian television who could win a match on Des Chiffres et des Lettres, but before showing you why I say that I'll give you some information about the game. Like where it's made.
It's made in France. It first appeared in 1972 as a development of an older game show; it and its predecessor were devised by Armand Jammot. It appears daily on France 2, drawing up to 7 million viewers. The host is Laurent Romejko, who is assisted by Arielle Boulin-Prat and Bertrand Renard. Improvements in technology have rendered the stunning young women who used to select numbers and letters, or, in later years, used to pretend to select them, superfluous, and they have been congédiées.
There are clubs all over France and Belgium, and a few in other countries, which play the game and seem to furnish most of the contestants. What's surprising about this is that in this age of the dumbing down of everything, the show requires intelligence.
It consists largely of two games, one played with numbers (chiffres) and the other with letters. The number game ("Le Compte est Bon") consists of presenting two contestants with six randomly drawn numbers; the numbers may be any number from 1 to 9, 25, 50, 75, or 100. A three-digit number is then randomly drawn, and the contestants try to use some or all of the first six numbers once each in a series of arithmetic operations which produce the three-digit number. Here's an example from the show seen in Canada on March 9, 2005:
The first six numbers were 1, 1, 4, 4, 5, and 25. The three-digit number was 314.Simplicity itself. I didn't get that one myself, eh, but I was tired. I did get some of the easier ones, including one I'll present here and provide the answer for at the end: the first six numbers are 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, and 9, and the target number is 429.Okay, first you multiply 25 by one of the 4s to get 100, and then add the 5 to get 105.
Then you set aside the 105 for a moment and subtract one of the 1s from the other 4 to get 3.
Then you multiply 105 by 3 to get 315.
Then all you have to do is subtract the other 1 from 315 to get 314.
The letter game ("Le Mot le plus Long") consists of having the two contestants try to form the longest word from nine randomly selected letters (the contestants take turns specifying whether a vowel or a consonant will be drawn next). So on the same show all nine of the letters APESURIPE were used by one of the contestants to form PAUPIERES. I used that as an example because English Canadians often know what paupières are; many of the words the contestants come up with are more obscure.
To win a match, a contestant must win two of three games (or demolish his or her opponent in a single game). A game is an entire show, and proceeds in rounds consisting of one number game followed by two word games, plus a "duel" in the middle of the game in which the contestants play a couple of more demanding word and number games.
A winner of five matches is sent off with the grand prize, a trip to somewhere in…France. They used to get trips to…Scotland. I'm not saying that France and Scotland aren't wonderful places to visit, but only that they're like close to France. In fact, one is France.
But still people work hard in their clubs to get on the show. The standard of play is high. By contrast, Ken Jennings' recent achievements on Jeopardy look somewhat mechanical and dull. In fact, Mr. Jennings, whom later interviews revealed to be an interesting and engaging person, started to look robotic early on in his long string of victories simply because of all the time he spent asking "What's Shinola, Alex? What's a rolling doughnut? Where is up a rope?" and so on and so on and so on.
Another distinguishing feature of Des chiffres et des letters is its serenity. Its laid-back set makes Jeopardy's seem garish. While the contestants are solving their problems, silence reigns in the audience. I used to think that that was because the French must at bottom be as solemn as us English Canadians, but then I realized that they were all trying to solve the problems, too.
And that is probably the lure of the program. Mr. Jammot realized, as the huge audiences for his show realize, that using one's intellect is engaging, not to mention that it's fun. It certainly is more engaging and more fun than trying to come up with the answers quickly while watching Jeopardy.
I say that as someone who is pretty well hopeless at the game. My French vocabulary is, as the French say, petit, and my French anagrammatic skills minuscules. While buddy was coming up with paupières (a word millions of us learned in high school) all I could ferret out was apprise. But I still enjoyed ferreting it out. Even if your French vocabulary is non-existent you can still enjoy working out the number problems.
That enjoyment is probably why a program so obviously incarnating the famous White Male values has been allowed to stay on the air so long. Like many games beloved of the white race (Scrabble and Boggle come to mind), Des Chiffres et des Lettres requires contestants to exercise intense concentration and intellectual skill to achieve a trivial intellectual goal. The contestants are predominantly white and predominantly male; I had planned to include Lawrence Summers' opinion about that but for some reason he isn't replying to my e-mails.
Which is probably why there are no English Canadian game shows. Official English Canadian culture – that is, the culture of the people who produce Canadian television – incarnates White Female values.
[Des Chiffres et des Lettres appears in Canada on TV5 on late weekday afternoons. Starting time varies from 5:25 to 5:35 or so – those French, eh?Posted March 9, 2005One solution to the second number problem in the article is 8 X 9 =72, 6 X 72 = 432, 432 - 3 = 429, but I imagine you all solved it, which is why I didn't provide a link to the answer.]
Games, Brains, and English Canada © John FitzGerald, 2005
