THE most striking thing about peak-time Saturday night TV is its sheer loudness.

John Barrowman’s vehicle Tonight’s The Night (Saturday, BBC1, 7.15pm) is a particularly shrill example.

The studio audience were shrieking so hysterically from the opening moments that you wondered whether, instead of being warmed up by a stand-up comic, they had been strafed by B2 bombers.

The show is based on one of the guiding principles of TV talent shows – that to be a performer, you need not just talent but a sad personal story.

The Beatles might have fared well enough on these shows because John and Paul had experienced tragedy in their lives, whereas Elvis would have been told to come back when his mum got sick.

The idea of this particular show is that good people are rewarded by being given a chance to perform for an audience. One woman, who had supported her dad through cancer while running her own choir, was surprised by Barrowman over a pub lunch, before being whisked off for coaching from Dolly Parton – making the show a weird cross between The X Factor and Beadle’s About.

When he initially showed up in the pub, Barrowman pretended he was fleeing a band of paparazzi – as though anyone would buy the idea of John Barrowman shunning publicity.

In fact, his whole performance as host was so over-the-top that you might have thought the public spending cuts had stopped the BBC from broadcasting altogether and he had to project his performance across the nation unaided from Television Centre.

Quiz Trippers (Monday to Friday, C4, 5pm) was a much lower-budget version of reality TV, based on the fact that every night, across the UK, people with phenomenally retentive memories take part in pub quizzes.

The show put together a team of five quizzers and sent them off across Scotland in a camper van to try their hand at winning prizes wherever they went.

From the moment one of the team was introduced as a “holistic therapist and part-time psychic”, you knew the journey was not going to be a harmonious one.

Sure enough, the psychic, Audrey, soon began to resent Lauren, who, when she wasn’t quizzing, was the leader of an improvisational theatre troupe. Lauren’s major crime, it seemed, was not trusting a holistic therapist for the answer to a question about anatomy. But what’s the use of a psychic in a quiz team if they can’t see all the questions coming?

The questions this team faced in their first pub quiz were so incredibly difficult that Stephen Fry might have found them a bit tricky. And that’s what’s so interesting about pub quiz teams – they produce characters who could romp to victory on any quiz show you care to name.

Contrast those questions with the quiz element in National Lottery: In It To Win It (Saturday, BBC1, 8.10pm) – which consists mainly of questions so straightforward you marvel that they manage to find people who could get them wrong.

This time, we listened to a contestant describing his thought processes laboriously as he tried to work out which political party Vince Cable belonged to, from a choice of three.

These were challenges so feeble that you wouldn’t be surprised if your cat shouted the answers at the screen.