She’s Rude and Ready to Roll

Can Anne Robinson subdue American TV audiences with her trademark put-downs?

The red-haired Robinson has been dubbed the “rudest woman on television” and last week posed in Britain’s celebrity magazine Heat with a dominatrix whip in her hand. The prime-time version of her hit BBC game show “The Weakest Link” has just begun beating “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” during the 10 minutes they overlap on the air, the first program to dislodge ratings leader “Millionaire.”

Starting April 16 at 8 p.m., NBC will try an American version of “The Weakest Link,” keeping Robinson, who is 56, on as the acerbic host. “She’s just different, and what seems to be working in television right now is not the same old, same old,” says NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker. “If you take her out of it, it becomes just another game show. With all due respect to Reege, she’s not Reege,” he says, referring to the affable U.S. “Millionaire” host Regis Philbin.

In character, schoolmarmish Robinson can be abrupt and shrill; her black outfits--for a recent taping she wore a black coat almost to the floor over black pants and shoes--are unlikely to spawn a clothing line a la Philbin’s monochromatic ties and shirts. The show itself is roughly described as “Millionaire” meets “Survivor”: Contestants take turns answering questions and then vote off one in their midst per round. But rather than Philbin’s mock eye-rolling when a contestant takes too long to answer or his gentle teasing, “Weakest Link” contestants suffer Robinson’s nasty slings. She ridicules their errors, with remarks like: “Obviously, IQ doesn’t equal qualification.” Or she gets even more personal, telling players recently that, once the show was edited, “we might not use a single thing [contestant] Barry said; it might be too boring.” Heat’s list of her “Ten Greatest Put-Downs” includes: “Aaron, you’ve had a surprisingly good round. Was that a mistake?” and “Gordon! You’ve woken up!”

Robinson’s jabs aside, the program’s premise is game-show basic, although Robinson contends that “This isn’t a game show for people who, if they think about it, can put the days of the week in the correct order.”

The nine players (it will be seven in the U.S. version) stand in a semicircle, Robinson in the middle, and answer questions Robinson fires in rapid succession, from whether Emmanuel Kant was an artist or a philosopher to the decade in which Cyndi Lauper had her first musical hits and whether human synapses are found only in the brain. Robinson snaps “Correct” or gives the right answer to wincing players before quickly moving on to the next contestant. The money element is somewhat complicated, but essentially, the more players in a row who answer correctly, the more prize money goes into a communal pot that ultimately goes to the single winner.

There’s “Millionaire”-style faux-dramatic music and searchlights, all of which the BBC insists must be the same in the versions exported to a dozen countries (other hosts are also red-haired and female; Robinson contends that only a woman could get away with such outrageous comments). After the several-minute rounds end, contestants vote on the “weakest link” among them, with some voting for the person who missed the most questions and others voting, “Survivor”-style, for the strongest player, to remove a threat.

Then the main attraction, such as it is, begins. Robinson, peering over one of her dozen pairs of glasses, grills contestants on their votes, ties their mistakes to their professions (“It’s quite good in this game if you find a well-qualified food or health expert who doesn’t know what hummus is,” she says), and then curtly snaps at one of them, “You are the weakest link--goodbye!” The phrase has become as ubiquitous in Britain as Philbin’s “Is that your final answer?” is in the U.S. Several versions of her put-downs can be found on a fan’s Web site (https://www.twlonline.co.uk), although perhaps not for long; a message on the Web site says the BBC is threatening to shut it down.

The loser walks a “Survivor”-style “walk of shame” off stage, a walk that has to be repeated for the cameras, in a further humiliation, and then there’s a taped interview. The process is repeated until a final showdown between two finalists.

How Does the Show Attract Contestants?

The show is not everyone’s cup of tea; one recent critic called the show’s rudeness unwatchable. Why Brits subject themselves to this is the subject of some debate. They don’t win much money: The prize on a recent show amounted to about $3,100 (Zucker says NBC plans to raise the U.S. prize money by an undisclosed amount because “we’re probably a little greedier.”) Many contestants claim that they like to try to hold their own against her, but they often seem surprisingly passive as Robinson attacks.

Zucker says he expects Americans to fight back more, but Robinson gloats about how she “reduced half of the corporate bankers and vice presidents of Goldman Sachs and God knows where to tears before the end,” when NBC taped a pilot in London using Americans working there. “It is quite intimidating” to stand in front of her, and even celebrities are “strangely muted,” she says. “You do feel very exposed out there. Once you’ve answered a few questions incorrectly, the fear creeps on that you might make a complete fool of yourself.”

Contestants at the recent taping didn’t seem at all shaken by the experience, as they sat in the green room after their walks of shame and laughed and exchanged e-mail addresses. Robinson ignored a request to come in and take a picture.

Indeed, the more pressing question for many Brits seems to be whether Robinson’s snippiness is just an act. The Heat magazine interviewer finds her “rather warm and friendly.” Others in the British television business whisper that she’s a tough cookie. Although “The Weakest Link” has only been on the air since August, Robinson is well known as the longtime host of “Watchdog,” where she played a sort-of Arnold Diaz (of “20/20”) role, grilling company executives to wrest satisfaction for aggrieved consumers. She started her career as a newspaper reporter and writes a weekly column, a diary of her week, for the Saturday Times of London.

During a recent interview, she winks conspiratorially and dismisses the BBC Worldwide public relations person (whom she later refers to, not by her name, but as “Worldwide”).

In her magazine-strewn dressing room, trying on a long black leather coat she’s had made for the U.S. show, Robinson says she got into the game-show business because she’s “never turned anything down” in her career. Producers originally pitched her because “she looks as if she would know the answers to the questions and would be able to ease the disappointment of the players as they leave the podium,” she says, laughing. But when the show was launched, she began to “say the odd snarky thing” and players reacted, annoyed that she was taking up their playing time. “I realized that you could start dishing it out a bit,” she says.

Robinson’s view of her role comes across as a kind of intellectual Robin Hood. As it has evolved, the character “is quite a bit of me. What is important to me in the game is that we do begin to expose the people playing it,” she says, and “the chance to knock the pomposity out of people and bring out the best in others. I also see it as a really rich opportunity for people who have not had the equality of opportunity when it comes to education to sometimes shine above those who are educated above their intelligence.”

She says she “didn’t have any difficulty humiliating” two recent contestants, a teacher and a prison officer, “people who are meant to stand in some sense for honesty and fair play,” when they ganged up on a far better, older player.

Her put-downs aren’t scripted; she comes up with them during taping breaks, drawing on her experience of people. As for the nastiness of the comments, Robinson says she’s just a “conduit for the ideas of the viewers, because we all sit at home saying what I say, plus 10 times worse. I feel it’s quite bogus to start being shocked by me.”