Monkman & Seagull’s Genius Adventures (Monday, 9pm, BBC Two) is an odd show, and I’m not going to tiptoe around that. Come on, it’s weird. It’s weird, to begin with, that the two are even famous: Eric Monkman, a Canadian academic known for answering University Challenge questions with a violent intensity that made us all afraid of him; and Bobby Seagull, his rival-turned-friend, who vibrates with nervous energy while wearing a frankly baffling pair of blue-framed sunglasses. This is all odd.
Then there is the format itself: Monky and the Seag, knocking around Britain, visiting the sites of great scientific discoveries and recreating them. They do this by going to living museums where people who know all about one very specific invention – a handsomely displayed steam engine, a train, a spinning jenny – explain to the boys how it works, who invented it, and why it was important. Then they both pull their best impressions of faces of people learning something for the first time, even though they both know everything already because their whole shtick is knowing things.
That’s the flaw in the Monkman & Seagull format: neither of them is dumb. There are no curious questions to one another, because they know completely how every invention works and why. When experts explain things to them, they nod mildly because they are aware of everything already. The secret ingredient missing from this is a non-genius. Eric Monkman is a blockbuster TV brain. Bobby Seagull talks about maths in a way that makes me no longer hate it. But to really make this format work, they need someone happy to play the fool – the sweetly earnest Dani Dyer, as a perfect example – asking them easy lay-up questions. Explain the concept of traction to Danny Dyer’s daughter, Eric Monkman. Then you’ve got a show.
That’s not to say Genius Adventure is without its charm, because it isn’t, but the best bits happen outside of the living museum set-pieces, when Monkman & Seagull are driving. These are so comfortable, and so different from the rest of the show, that you suspect the production team neglected to tell the pair that the cameras were rolling, and instead captured raw magic and asked for permission to broadcast it afterwards. Seagull drives, always. Monkman is always scurrying around in the glove compartment, looking for sweets. And then Seagull will ask a question – “Would we have had the Industrial Revolution if human beings were the size of rats?”, to take an example from episode one – and Monkman goes off to a distant place. “Is everything else the same size?” he replies. “Wheat? Predators?” Seagull nods. Monkman thinks. For a glorious minute, he takes this question more seriously than anyone has ever taken a question before.
And that is what I want to see more of: Monkman, primed behind a studio desk, while Seagull traverses a live audience to ask him semi-scientific Would You Rathers, which Monkman then answers with ultimate sincerity. Then, occasionally, Dani Dyer pops in to ask what steam is. Make this happen for series three, BBC. I’ll waive my usual fee.
