I have made some terrible TV shows in my life. I am honestly blushing just thinking about them. I've never actually intended to do this, but from time to time you lose control of the steering and can only watch as your project drives into a brick wall. We all make mistakes, right? But not all of our mistakes end up being presented by Nick Knowles on primetime TV. So, with my own inadequacies in mind, here are some of the most pointless gameshows of all time, each one an example of the different traps well-meaning producers endlessly fall into. It is only fair that I start with one of my very own…

24 Hour Quiz

Photograph: Jim Marks

The lesson: A cross between two wildly successful shows will usually result in one wildly unsuccessful show

24 Hour Quiz was a shortlived ITV teatime show wherein I attempted to marry the reality fireworks of Big Brother with the high-octane jeopardy of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. What I actually did was marry the mind-numbing tedium of a second-rate reality show, with the plodding boredom of a sub-standard pub quiz. Presented by Barry from EastEnders. It really didn't work. I did actually figure out how to fix it towards the end of its short run but by then it had already been encased in lead and dumped into the North Sea by ITV executives. If you listen very carefully on the Harwich to Stavanger ferry you can still hear it screaming. The only good news is that I don't get too much stick for it. Firstly because everyone knows how easy it is to make a bad gameshow, and secondly because I sit opposite the guy who came up with Don't Scare The Hare, so I'm not even the biggest loser on my desk.

Red Or Black

Photograph: Rex

The lesson: Don't rip off Deal Or No Deal

As a simple rule of thumb, if Ant & Dec are hosting your show, and you're giving away £1m every night, and people still won't watch, then your format doesn't work; and in gameshows, format is everything. You need a mechanic: a set of rules which create jeopardy and reward skill. In that respect, a successful format is like a sport. The first series of Red Or Black, however, rested on the central conceit of blind chance. A chimp or a plank of wood would have exactly the same chance of winning as a sentient human being. They might as well have called it Lucky Chimp, or Planks Win Prizes. The producers of Red Or Black are all smart and talented people, and introduced skill into series two, but by then the ship had sunk. You can see where the mistake came from. Red Or Black attempted – as did Channel 5's Heads Or Tails and ITV's The Colour Of Money – to rip off the magic formula of Deal Or No Deal. But Deal Or No Deal is not really about luck. It's about knowing when to quit. It is essentially "stick or twist" in the same way as any job or relationship you've ever had is. What man, when his mind turns to marriage, hasn't thought: "It's a lovely offer, but perhaps I should just open three more boxes?" Even the guy behind Deal Or No Deal couldn't rip off Deal Or No Deal. After Deal … had been such a worldwide success, its creator Dick de Rijk found it easy to sell any new idea. This led to Show Me The Money, the UK pilot of which is the single worst piece of television I have ever seen. And I am including Don't Scare The Hare.

Petrolheads

Photograph: Kieron McCarron

The lesson: Panel shows are much harder to make than they look

Panel shows are the fashionable end of the gameshow market, and are allowed to win Baftas. They require a central idea that will give you endless material, strong comic talent, and a team of great writers. But for every Have I Got News For You or QI, there is a litany of forgettable shows. The most cautionary example would be BBC2's Petrolheads, a short-lived motoring panel show hosted by Neil Morrissey. Through experience, I am willing to bet that before settling on Petrolheads as a title, they will have considered They Think It's All Rover, Have I Got Subarus For You and Never Mind The Clutch Box. Petrolheads should have been a cast-iron hit – the logic behind it was exemplary: people love Have I Got News For You, people love Top Gear, Neil Morrissey is a beloved comic actor. However the highlight of the first show was a round in which you watched Ronan Keating parallel park, and thus the Bafta committee remained untroubled. Other notable Have I Got News rip-offs include Julian Fellowes's BBC4 panel show about punctuation, genuinely called Never Mind The Full Stops; and The Answer Lies In The Soil, an ITV panel show effort that largely involved identifying seeds.

Shafted

Shafted

The lesson: Don't pick a massively unsuitable host

Some time in the early noughties, ITV aired a brand-new quiz show, Shafted. The show was perfectly serviceable, with a neat question mechanic, and an exciting "share or shaft" endgame where you could steal vast sums of money from your opponent. The floor was requisitely shiny and the music suitably ominous and jeopardy-friendly. A hit was smelled by all. But this was the era in which "queen of mean" Anne Robinson had convinced executives that the public wanted their TV shows presented by sneering bullies. So that hit was dashed by just three simple words: Robert Kilroy-Silk. The second the show began, everyone involved was hit by exactly the same revelation: "Of course, absolutely nobody in the whole of Britain actually likes Robert Kilroy-Silk. We should have gone with Brian Conley." The same logic has seen quiz shows presented by Jeremy Kyle, Jerry Springer, John McEnroe and Ann Widdecombe. (Interestingly, three of those four people are absolutely lovely. As is Barry from EastEnders.) The two very talented brains behind Shafted, David Flynn and Adam Adler, went on, separately, to invent two of the biggest gameshows of the last decade, The Million Pound Drop and The Cube. Tellingly, those were presented by masters of their craft, Davina McCall and Phillip Schofield.

Conclusion

I am writing this in a dusty Portakabin on a tropical island, where we are currently making Prize Island, a brand-new gameshow for ITV. Do we have a hit on our hands? Considering I've just watched a couple from Birmingham win a fitted kitchen by bouncing off an enormous inflatable octopus, your guess is very much as good as mine.