Would I Lie to You on BBC One – a great show! Everyone loves it: the concept of outrageous yarns that may or may not be true lets celebrities display gifts for comic timing and talking off the cuff that we never knew they had. It is a hit, which means it must be imitated. Would it, Channel 4 wonders, perhaps work not as a panel game but a gameshow, without the famous people and with members of the public lying to win a cash prize instead? And we have the answer, as Channel 4 has gone ahead and made that programme and called it You Won’t Believe This: no.
Punters arrive in groups of four, each of them obliged to tell a personal story on a particular theme, the first one being: “I opted out of civilisation.” Someone explains how they once joined a cult, then rival participants spin tales about the time they took a vow of silence for a year in a Spanish monastery, the time they lived for a week as a goat in the Alps, and the time they left home to reside in an underground bunker due to their fear of nuclear Armageddon. Only one of these people is telling the truth. If a fifth contestant, who hears all the stories, can then identify which one isn’t a lie, they win £5,000. Pick a liar and the liar wins the five grand.
The guesser has help. You Won’t Believe This joins Hunted (Channel 4) and The Heist (Sky) in a new sub-genre of gameshows where contestants must outwit retired mainstays of Britain’s law enforcement elite: extensively trained professionals who used to trap the country’s sneakiest criminals, and who are now forging careers as pretend showbiz sleuths. Billed excitingly as “the interrogators” and given further mystique by the show’s industrial-chic set design – glass walls, bare bricks and cavernous unoccupied spaces, like a Berlin nightclub on a quiet Monday – it’s the sternly attired former coppers to whom the storytellers must relay their experiences, real or fictional, answering questions as they go and trying, if they’re lying, not to be found out.
A fearsome ordeal? Not really, since the experts have to keep themselves on tight leashes. If they actually did what presumably they could do, and expose a liar by zooming in without mercy on the discrepancies in their accounts, it would spoil the bit where the guesser – and those playing along at home – have to decide who isn’t lying. What is confusingly billed in the show’s press notes as “the grilling of their lives” in a “pressure-cooker environment” is more of a quick warming in a low oven, provoking only small hesitations and tells for armchair body-language connoisseurs to snack on. In a couple of cases, an absurd claim or glaring missing detail that the liar isn’t quick enough to cover with smart improvisation does make it obvious that they are not the one, but mostly it really is hard to know.
The trouble is, it’s also quite hard to care. Nobody spins the sort of elaborate yarn that would, in retrospect, be a breathtaking display of chutzpah once it’s revealed to have been total bilge – that is, the kind of thing that makes Would I Lie to You? such a lark. The liars are disincentivised by the prize money: the way to win is to keep your head down, not say anything silly and seem more blandly plausible than the other fibbers. The people telling the truth, meanwhile, also can’t be allowed to have anecdotes with too many fascinating details, lest they be too convincing and give the game away. If you tried to put any of these stories in the Guardian’s Experience column, it would have to be resized to a quarter of a page.
With not much going on in the interrogation room, a lot rests on the presenter, Ellie Taylor, and she’s just right for this: on the other side of a soundproofed window, listening in alongside the contestant who has to discern which of the four interviewees is telling the truth, Taylor is their mischievous wingwoman, snorting with them at dubious claims and always ready to add a bit of sauce. She immediately strikes up a fine partnership with the first guesser, 60-year-old Karen from Kent, who is tremendous value with her sceptical arm-waving, cries of “Shut up!” and bursts of incredulous laughter.
Format tweaks that might make You Won’t Believe This less flat include adding a studio audience, and getting rid of the underwhelming interrogators altogether and letting Taylor and the guesser do it themselves. At the moment, they can feed questions through via the hidden earpieces worn by the cops, but they hardly ever do because – like everything else in this weird mash of various other, better formats – it’s just a bit of an awkward faff.
