An insult to the intelligence pick of the week Anne Robinson is back to test our IQ, but her show wins the booby prize.

The Experiment

Tuesday, BBC2, 9.00pm

For too long the dumbing- down of British television has been a big concern. Test the Nation is the ultimate quiz show, showing how far the British public has sunk to an IQ low.

Presented by clever clogs

Anne Robinson and Phillip Schofield, who in his time has regularly been outwitted by a gopher, the live programme will put a selected studio audience under the mental microscope, with the results from internet applicants being fed into the analysis. So, will Dundee be filled with dunces or Stenhousemuir crammed with swots? And how much does it matter, anyway?

''People are just intrinsically interested in intelligence levels,'' believes IQ expert Dr Colin Cooper, consultant to the series. ''Whenever psychologists go to parties, they get taken to one side by people asking: 'can you work out my personality type and intelligence level?' It's the sort of thing people are naturally intrigued by. And of course, everybody wants to know whether they are a genius.''

IQ has a rather sinister history. The Stanford-Binet intelligence scale began life in early-20th- century Paris as part of Alfred Binet's efforts to educate children with learning difficulties. Those who obtained a mental-age score below their chronological age were officially branded retarded, and in the 1920s the US used IQ testing to control immigration. Not that the Lottery-slot audience wants to be upset with such trifling matters when its own brain cells are being totted up.

Many of us would love to see Anne Robinson behind bars, but in another kind of social observation we see what happens when a bunch of guys are put into a prison environment and made to play out the roles of controller and controlled. Of course, the whole thing is flawed by the fact that all concerned know they will be out and about in 14 days, so they can get up to pretty much whatever they want.

The nine randomly chosen (though there has to be a suspicion that they were picked for their tattoos) are put in the hands of five guards whose experience of bossing is limited. Some take to authority like fascists out of water, others are less squeamish. All the prisoners get up to japes to upset them; unfortunately, the predictably cheeky Scouser pulls more pranks than most.

All the while the goings-on are observed by a pair of experts in the human behaviour field, who come out with gems such as ''one of the most powerful tools on the prisoner's side is to say: 'No, we don't want a sausage'''. Their austere academic veneer is scratched somewhat by their reminding you of Muppets hecklers Statler and Waldorf.

The series is based on the notorious 1971 Stanford Experiment in the US, in which the guards all too quickly turned nasty. Oddly, here the inmates gain the psychological upper hand early on. Have the producers engineered the series to reflect a society which has gone soft on the incarcerated? But the final, more upsetting conclusion that can be drawn from The Experiment is that the Big Brother school of reality TV has taken more of a hold than any of us could have predicted.