Fingers on Buzzers, it's time for Robert Robinson

Robert Robinson divided opinion based on whether or not you actually watched his programmes. If you didn’t, he was a pompous intellectual knowall: ‘Smuggins’, as the Private Eye magazine would dub him. If you were a viewer, he was an erudite, witty host with a sense of humour drier than the Sahara. Throughout the Seventies and part of the Eighties, he was a BBC mainstay as presenter of two long-running quiz and panel game shows.

His most memorable physical feature was his generous combover, although this look was a lot more common on mainstream telly than it is now. For example the Beeb also boasted Cliff Michelmore, go-to host of so many live or recorded studio broadcasts, from Apollo moonshots to Holiday. Cliff appeared more affable, the smile readier, but for some reason Robinson occupies a more prominent berth on my list of TV legends. He was as avuncular as Top of the Form’s Geoffrey Wheeler but perhaps a little more aloof.

The aforementioned school quiz show was required viewing for me in the early Seventies but all of us would gather after tea on, I think, Monday evenings to watch the primetime Ask the Family. It was an easy target for satirists. Don a ‘bald’ wig for Robinson, add professorial parents in heavy specs and nerdy-looking kids, et voila! I did wonder whether Dad would actually apply in mid-70s; after all, we were the classic unit of two teachers and reasonably clever kids three years apart. On one summer holiday we met people who were convinced they’d seen us on the programme and they seemed disappointed when we insisted they were mistaken.

The questions were tailor-made for us, a mix of general knowledge, words, numbers and memory tests and no doubt we would have appeared suitably geeky. I like to think we would not have disgraced ourselves in the competition, nor been overawed by Mr Robinson, but I was quite content to enjoy it, testing ourselves against the participants from our living room. After all, it was easier then Mastermind or University Challenge!

Robert Robinson also presented well over four hundred editions of Call My Bluff on BBC2. There were no children but Seventies team captains Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell did sport an air of overgrown schoolboys about them. It was always an entertaining half-hour and Robinson was in his element, chairing with a wave of a pen and a ting on his desk bell. It was all about definitions of obscure words, a precursor of the board game ‘Balderdash’ and part of the fun was trying to guess ourselves which of the guest panellists was giving the correct definition.

Words were very much Robert Robinson’s preserve. As a writer and journalist, he was also a Radio 4 legend, hosting the Today programme (I don’t remember that!), Stop the Week and Brain of Britain, which out-smugs just about every quiz show ever broadcast. On telly, in 1978 we also sometimes watched Word For Word, a heavy highbrow programme about books. We probably only tuned in because it followed Jonathan Miller’s The Body in Question, but Robinson was the ideal presenter. It was a bit too literary for me on a school night. My A level homework was tough enough without Robert Robinson butchering my brain.

Both Call My Bluff and Ask the Family have been revived periodically, albeit with different presenters. I’m sure Sandy Toksvig and Alan Titchmarsh were capable hosts but when I saw clips of ATF anchored by the manic duo Dick and Dom I was horrified. So were those who actually watched the programme and it was quickly axed. Robert Robinson may not have fitted in with the twenty-first century Ant and Dec/ Love Island generation but for me he remains an icon of my 1970s childhood, before intelligence and geekiness became dirty words.