Trivia / The Weakest Link

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• The Announcer: Jon Briggs is best known these days as the voice that was sampled for Daniel, the text-to-speech 'Robot Voice' of the Internet.
• Corpsing: Despite her stone-faced demeanor, Anne Robinson wasn't immune to cracking up. One example was when a contestant guessed "Two" to the question "How many wheels on a unicycle?".^note Answer: One She corrected the contestant with no trouble, but she then lost her composure while reading the next question.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The NBC USA airings of the show back in 2001-2002, are generally pretty hard to find. Back in 2016, Rob Homa once uploaded as many as forty episodes of the show on Youtube. But his account got taken down pretty fast before anyone could download many of the episodes. Some other well committed fans on Facebook, work diligently at finding as much of the original NBC airings of the show as possible. Many (albeit in pretty bad quality) episodes can be found on the "Weakest Link 2000-2012" Facebook page.
• Referenced by...: Famously, the Doctor Who episode "Bad Wolf", in which the heroes play the game hosted by "Anne-Droid" (voiced by Anne Robinson herself) where the weakest link is eliminated in a more fatal manner than a typical Anne Robinson barb, namely transmatting them aboard the Dalek mothership to have their genetic material used to breed new Daleks.
  • The "Hole in the Ring" sketches on That Mitchell and Webb Look are a parody of Link, with a Robinson expy who frequently stumbles over his words and dishes out open and unwarranted abuse to contestants.
• Screwed by the Network: Though not really intentionally. The US version did well at first, but then the 9/11 attacks happened—the ratings plunged as no one really wanted to watch a big-money quiz after that for a while; though a bunch of celebrity episodes were aired, that just sped the show further to its demise. The syndicated edition, meanwhile, did well for itself at first, but many of the stations that aired then picked up the syndicated Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? instead, booting this show to late nights or off the station entirely; it ended up rerunning on what was then PAX TV (which had an alliance of sorts with NBC at the time), and that's also where a few unaired primetime eps were run, too.
• What Could Have Been: There were three pilots taped for the US syndicated run—only one of them had George Gray, but who hosted the other two is still unknown. The prime-time version, meanwhile, had two pilots—one with Anne, the other with Richard Hatch at the helm.

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