Archie Bland: I am as weak in the head as a WAG

It all started so well. Had the wives and girlfriends on The Weakest Link last Monday banked at the right moment, they would have taken a perfect five grand from the first round. The questions weren't rocket science, exactly, but the WAGs still got them all correct, and even Anne Robinson seemed becalmed in the face of such relentless adequacy. The opinionators hoping for a bimbo bloodbath must have been starting to worry.

Fortunately for Amanda Platell et al, former Big Brother contestant Charley Uchea broke the spell. "In body shapes," Robinson asked her, "the rhyming name sometimes given to a slightly flabby tummy is a jelly what?" Uchea flapped about a bit, and eventually went for "fish". "You'd have needed an air-and-sea searchlight," Platell sneered the next day, "to find anything between these diamond-studded ears."

My ears are not diamond-studded, and I haven't been linked to Premiership footballers. Still, as a fellow former contestant on Britain's favourite teatime dumbshow, I feel qualified to give voice to what the WAGs must surely be thinking. Mandy, it's harder than it looks.

Like Uchea's, my shame was versified. I was asked to complete the rhyming name of a stitch that began with the word "lazy", and told that the answer was the name of a flower. Now, the lazy daisy stitch may not be high on the national curriculum these days, but even so I am pretty sure that had I been watching at home, I would have hooted with derision and thrown peanuts at the telly; but under Ms Robinson's and the camera's unrelenting gaze, I panicked. I froze. I answered, "Cup."

Cup does not rhyme with lazy, and is not so much a type of flower as a drinking vessel. But I batted on gamely until the end of the round, adding for good measure that the Giant had ground up Jack's thumbs. The game was up. At least the record of my humiliation is confined to the recesses of my parents' video collection; poor old Amii Grove has to contend with the fact that millions of people now know she thinks the author of Emma was one Jane Hawkins.

If your desire for self-publicity is relentless enough to overcome your fear of looking like a wally, you can't complain when people have a laugh at your expense. But is it too much to ask for a modicum of perspective? Blunders there may have been, but the WAGs did absolutely fine, by and large, raising a perfectly respectable £8,950 for charity, and Lucy Pinder and Danielle Lloyd showed off as much brain as the inane questions allowed.

I made my definitive error halfway through the game, and got booted off immediately; Uchea made hers in the first three minutes, followed it with a string of similar howlers, and still made it to the final round. "I am quite thick when it comes to questions," the astute WAG wannabe observed afterwards. "But believe me, I play a good game." She didn't follow the remark with her own version of the Anne Robinson wink, but she didn't need to. For all the audience's hysteria at her mistakes, it was obvious who had had the last laugh.

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