A short-lived reworking of the "Eggheads" format, with Egghead C.J. de Mooi taking on a team of contestants by himself. C.J. de Mooi's villainous character proved unpopular with viewers, and the revised format wasn't recommissioned.
In this spin-off from Eggheads (2003), each episode would see five contestants compete against CJ de Mooi, who had last been seen on the series from which this was spun off in 2012, for a chance to win money (unlike that series, the contestants here haven't met each other until the start of the show). Before recording started, the contestants would conduct a draw to decide their playing order.
The main game would see each contestant in turn being asked a question by host Jeremy Vine which only that contestant could answer. If the contestant answered a question correctly, £200 would be added to their prize pot, while an incorrect answer meant that no money was added.
If CJ suspected that the answer given by a contestant was incorrect, then he could press a buzzer in front of where he was seated and then give his own answer to the question. When this happened, there were three possible outcomes.If the answers of both the contestant and CJ were incorrect, the contestant didn't win any money for the pot, but didn't incur any other penalty for their answer (this was similar to what happened if CJ didn't hit his buzzer after the contestant gave an incorrect answer).If the contestant's answer was correct, then in addition to the £200 normally added to the prize pot, the contestants would receive a bonus of £100 in their pot for outsmarting the Egghead.If CJ's answer was correct (the most common of the outcomes to occur), then the contestant had to stand in an area beside the podium called the "hot spot" and face the Egghead by answering a question that CJ hand-picked from a series of questions written. The question would come with four possible answers offered, of which only one was correct, and CJ would often choose a question whose category was the contestant's weak point. If the contestant chose the correct answer, they were able to return to the podium without incurring any penalty, but if the answer that they chose was incorrect, they would lose one of their two lives. If they lost their first life, they could still return to the podium, but if they lost their second life, then they were eliminated from the game and the Egghead would have taken his revenge on them.
The main game goes for about 20 minutes. When the time is close to running out, Jeremy will say that the klaxon could go off at any minute. When it sounds and the studio lighting changes, the remaining contestants will advance to the final, and their remaining lives will be pooled together.
The final begins with Jeremy asking 10 general knowledge questions to CJ. For every question he is able to answer correctly, he will score a point. At the end of his questions, the number of points that he has scored becomes the target that the contestants have to beat.
The contestants are then asked a number of questions (unlike CJ, they are not limited to 10) and begin with one life for each life that the remaining contestants had at the end of the main game (for example, if four contestants remain at the end and three of them have both of their lives remaining while the other has one life remaining, then they will begin the final with seven lives). The contestants are permitted to confer with each other before giving their answer to each question. If they answer a question correctly, they will score a point, but if their answer is incorrect, they will lose one of their lives. If they lose their last life, they will leave the game with nothing, but if they can score more points than CJ, each remaining contestant will win an equal share of the money earned by the contestants in the main game.
