Summaries

Synopsis

In each episode, a team of contestants, collectively referred to as the "challengers" and known by a team name, compete against a team of former quiz and game show champions referred to as the "Eggheads" for the chance to win a cash prize, which increases its value in each episode until it is won by the challengers.

Originally, the show was played in five rounds and was hosted by Dermot Murnaghan. In each of the first four one-on-one elimination rounds, the host will tell the teams which of eight possible subject categories (Arts & Books, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Geography, History, Politics, Science or Sport) the questions in the round will focus on. After this, the challengers select one person to play the round, and the person they choose selects one of the Eggheads that they want to compete against. The people chosen in a round cannot play any subsequent rounds if they win, so in the fourth round two challengers decide which of them will play, and the one who plays has to choose between two Eggheads to take on.

The chosen contestants then leave the studio bound for an area known as the "Question Room" in order to ensure that there is no conferring. Once they are there, they will be shown in the studio on large screens behind the people they are representing. The challenger then gets to decide whether they want to go first or second in the ensuing round, which is played in a best-of-three format, with each contestant asked a question and presented with three possible answers of which only one is correct. At least four questions need to be asked in each round in order to decide a winner. The winner of each round will be guaranteed a place in the final round, while the loser of the round is eliminated from the game. If there is a tie after each contestant has answered three questions, then the round will go into "sudden death", with pairs of questions asked, one to each contestant, but this time the contestants have to come up with the correct answers themselves without being provided any choices. The questions continue until a pair of questions results in one correct answer and one incorrect answer, with the correct answer deciding the winner.

In the fifth and final round, the category is always General Knowledge. For this round, the four eliminated contestants, whether they are challengers or Eggheads, are sent to the Question Room and the six contestants who remain in the studio play against each other. In this round, the challenger(s) are playing for the prize money that is on offer, which starts at £1,000 and increases by the same amount every time the Eggheads win until they are defeated by the challengers when it is re-set, while the Egghead(s) are playing for something that money cannot buy - their reputation. The final round is played in a similar way to the first four, with the main difference being that if more than one contestant remains on a team, they are allowed to confer with each other before coming up with their answer.

If the contestants win the final round, then they receive the prize money that is being offered and it will revert to £1,000 on the next episode. If the Eggheads win the final, their reputation will remain intact and the prize offered on the next episode will increase by £1,000.

Over the years, some changes have been made to the regular personnel or gameplay as follows:

SEASON 9

Jeremy Vine begin hosting the series in rotation with Murnaghan. In the first two seasons where this happened, this was done to allow Murnaghan to host the spin-off series Are You an Egghead? (2008). In each season of the rotation, Murnaghan would host the first episodes of the season and Vine would host the last episodes, though the point at which the hosts changed varied in different seasons. These rotations continued after the spin-off series ended in November 2009. After each season of the spin-off series ended, its winner was added as an additional Egghead and the appearances of the Eggheads rotated so that five Eggheads continued to appear in each episode.

Part-way through this season (during the northern autumn of 2008), the subject category of Entertainment is split into two categories, Music and Film & Television, meaning that there are now nine possible subject categories from which four are chosen in each episode. The newly split categories can both appear in the same episode and are sometimes selected for consecutive rounds.

SEASON 16

Vine becomes the sole host of the series.

SEASON 22

The series moves from the BBC to Channel 5 after a hiatus of over 15 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of contestants is reduced from 10 to 8, with four challengers taking on four Eggheads, and only four rounds are played, with three one-on-one eliminations followed by the final (these changes are a consequence of a shorter running time due to Channel 5 including commercial breaks in its transmission of the series).