Some people like to watch operations, others love a good murder, and we all used to form a ring in the playground sometimes, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

None of us are exempt from this curiosity we have with the darker sides of the human condition, but I am fascinated by something even darker: people who give ridiculous answers on quiz shows.

I have written about this before, and recently too, but now I have it even worse because I have been seduced by a programme called Tipping Point, which my wife and I have taken to watching most weekdays.

It’s not something we are proud of.

Part of the hook of the programme is the big machine into which the contestants put tokens, hoping that more will drop out of the other end, paying out £50 a time.

Probably because I am so sentimental about the happy hours I spent shoving pennies into similar machines on the pier at Great Yarmouth in the 1960s and 1970s, I find the machine quite hypnotic.

But there is more to the game than that, because the players also have to answer questions to win the counters to put into the machine, and one thing is very clear on Tipping Point: the vetting process for prospective contestants is not exactly as rigid as it is on Mastermind, Countdown or Only Connect. I am not saying the contestants on those programmes don’t prove, sometimes, that it’s possible to know too much, but you don’t have to watch Tipping Point for too long to get an insight into some of the things that some people don’t know.

Several answers, last week, had me thinking that there are a lot of people around who need to stop watching Tipping Point and get out more.

One lady had apparently never left home or seen a map of Britain before, because she thought Bournemouth was in Kent. Another was asked to name the string of chalk stacks standing off the coast of the Isle of Wight, and had an idea they might be the white cliffs of Dover.

But geography is not the only blind spot when it comes to quiz show contestants, as Tipping Point demonstrated later in the week, when another lady was asked how many old pennies there were in two shillings.

Now, for those of us who are of a certain age, that’s a question that isn’t about knowing, but rather remembering, and therefore easy.

If you are too young to remember shillings and pence, then you can be excused for getting it wrong, but the lady’s response, which she delivered with no hint of shame whatsoever, is less forgivable.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I wasn’t born until 1984.”

She said it in a way that suggested nobody should be expected to know anything about anything that happened before they were born.

I may have laughed (but would have forgiven her) if she had guessed wrongly, but found her answer shocking.

There is little justice in this world, so even though she knew nothing about anything before 1984, she somehow managed to win through to the final, and even scooped the £10,000 jackpot. I was disappointed, but at least we got to find out what she was going to spend the money on. She said she had decided to treat herself to a holiday, and had already thought about where to.

But I have been left worrying - as you should, too - about all those people in the world who are so sure of where they are going, yet have absolutely no interest in where they have come from or how they got here.