Applaud now.

As a 'Happy Valentine's Day' present to myself I made my way to White City this morning and stood in line with a collection of school parties, unemployed people and retired folk, in order to watch Alexander Armstrong's Pointless. I have to admit, I had no idea what I was in for, having applied for the free tickets on a whim, following the arrival of a cleverly worded email in my inbox. "Would you like free priority tickets to see QI?" Applause Store asked. "Why yes, yes I would", I replied eagerly. "Well we'll give them to you", said Applause Store, dangling the proverbial carrot, "if you come and watch Alexander Armstrong's Pointless with us first!" So off to the BBC television studios I did go, none the wiser as to the programme I was about to watch.

Last November, when I went to see Have I Got News For You at the ITV studios, the waiting process involved standing around in the cold until filming began, then spending the next hour and a half attempting to reclaim the feeling in my toes. At the BBC there was a cafe and a shop and a wide selection of The Archers/ Amy Pond-related memorabilia. We milled around with numbered stickers on, comparing sandwich prices, while waiting to be called forth by a lady with a microphone. Eventually, by a process of eavesdropping and assessing the set once I got into the studio proper, I was able to deduce that Pointless was a game show, airing on BBC2 in the late afternoon, which was ultimately a reversal of the Family Fortunes format. Not quite what I had in mind when I saw the name Alexander Armstrong, but interesting enough. We were welcomed to the show by a wonderful warm-up comedian. Wonderful because of his humour or wonderful because of his ability to entertain and placate the moaning audience as the day wore on, I'm not sure, but I liked him a lot. We practised our 'lines' (read: collective noise making abilities) for a couple of minutes before the show began and I have to say, they work their audiences much harder at the BBC studios. At Have I Got News For You all that was expected of us was the obligatory laughter and a bit of light whooping when the credits rolled. At Pointless we had to applaud on cue, ooh and aah when the score counter decreased and cheer hysterically when somebody obtained a 'pointless' answer. In effect, confirming my frequently unvoiced suspicions about the validity of audience enthusiasm.

At HIGNFY the show started, Hislop, Merton and co. appeared, they rattled through a series of questions and humorous anecdotes, pausing once or twice to repeat a muddled sentence or adjust a microphone, the credits rolled, the audience cheered with genuine intensity and the show finished. It was, for all intents and purposes, a fully-formed preview of that week's Have I Got News For You, with some 'Even More News For You' content thrown in for good measure. At Pointless the show started, Alexander Armstrong appeared, the contestants appeared, the autocue broke, the opening was shot and then shot again, questions were asked, answers were given, answers were re-given because somebody missed the no-pronouns concept of the show, scenes were re-shot, the autocue broke again. At one point the set was cleared for a good twenty minutes or so, while somebody ran off to check the dictionary definition of woodwind instrument; the show resumed, then stopped for a further ten minutes, while somebody else ran off to check whether an oboe was in fact classed as a woodwind instrument. Five hours of this jilted filming and the poor warm-up man was struggling to keep people in their seats (they were cold, they were hungry, they needed the toilet - to be fair, their whining was more annoying than the stop-start format of the shooting schedule). By the end of the day our audience enthusiasm levels had waned several knots below wholehearted and with one last, strained round of applause and a conclusive pan of the camera we were released into the cold night air. But you know what? I had a good time and if it means QI tickets in the summer, then it will have been the most worthwhile unproductive day ever.