Secret Genius review: The intelligence test that bypasses your brain and goes straight for the heart
I like to think I have quite a good mind – I can remember birthdays, mostly, I’m good in a pub quiz thanks to my nerdy childhood habit of reading encyclopaedias for fun – but Mensa and I really don’t get on.
I'm not very good a spotting sequences or thinking laterally, and anything to do with numbers gives me conniptions.
All of which would make a very bad contestant on Secret Genius (Channel 4, Sun/Mon, 9pm), a new show which aims to discover the beautiful minds inside people who previously might have discounted the idea.
People like Ollie, a 32-year-old ambulance crew member, who cheerfully admits she has no idea where her prodigious memory comes from, and underestimates herself at every opportunity.
Effing and jeffing her way around 'Secret Genius HQ', she still manages to ace the various tests set by Channel 4 in association with Mensa.
“I used to know everybody's reg plates on the estate where I lived,” Ollie says, “bit I didn't show any passion to progress. Some people know what they want to do, I never had that.”
And her story is no exception, and nor is her reason for taking part in the programme.
She says: “Am I actually good at something, or am I just dim-witted but good at remembering stuff?”
It's a theme common with all the participants in this first episode – the idea that circumstances at birth and a certain reticence born of a lack of confidence has left them marooned, far from where there intelligence should have taken them.
Take drag queen CJ, for example, who had an offer from Cambridge but “it wasn't the right thing at the time”.
His family think his decision to turn down the place was a mistake, he says, but “it'd be nice to show them that I'm talented in different ways”.
Or Jo, a diffident sports management consultant, who is clearly super-intelligent, but is defeated by her own habit of second-thinking herself.
While her brother “has achieved great things”, Jo tells us, she has been hamstrung by a lack of confidence, but also the way that society values obvious intelligence less in women than in men.
She says: “This is really interesting, to have some sort of internal validation that I might be clever.”
It's heartbreaking at times, to see people who should be inventing things, or teaching the next generation, or running the country, doubting themselves and their enormous brains.
Thank heavens for Nathan, then, a very sweet savant, who turns into a one-man hype squad for Jo – a relationship that should very much be moved on to a First Dates special elsewhere on Channel 4.
You may have noticed that the games do not feature large in Secret Genius.
No, for quizzes, and sequences and seemingly nonsensical links you'll need to watch The 1% Club or BBC2 on a Monday evening.
That's because Secret Genius is not about the games and the puzzles, it's about the people.
It's about seeing them blossom and grow, right in front of our eyes, in barely more than 10 minutes.
It's about Ollie finally realising that she really isn't a dimwit with a good memory, but someone whose brain works in incredible – and mysterious – ways.
Its about Jo getting a jolt of confidence, about her reaching “a turning point... how to trust myself and go for it”.
It's about finding something in your eye when people who have been dismissed and discounted in favour of people with different accents or louder voices find they're just as good – if not better.
In short, Secret Genius is a show that bypasses your mind and goes straight to your brain – and heart.