AS a family, we do love a quiz and a puzzle.

My mum completes the quick crossword in a certain daily newspaper every day practically as soon as she gets out of bed, whilst my father prefers the slightly tougher one in the national evening paper.

My other half is partial to a puzzle magazine and a code breaker or two, whereas I am a lifelong fan of logic problems. The special publication full of the latter is becoming quite a difficult puzzle book to find these days.

One of the things we brought back from our holidays with my parents is a new obsession with one of their favourite quiz programmes on television.

Everything stops round their way at 5.15pm when Pointless starts, and the popular BBC One show remains on throughout the family evening meal – we’ve always eaten relatively early, at half past five or so.

Strangely, this TV-watching during the family meal is not at all antisocial, as there’s a constant stream of Pointless-related chatter which continues as everyone eats.

I like the film questions, my husband delights in tackling the football queries and Dad likes the history and political puzzlers.

Mum joins in intermittently, making everyone laugh with her malapropisms when she gets a name of a very famous person or a film or programme title comically wrong.

I realize that we’re a little late to the Pointless party, as it been running now since 2009, but its popularity has increased hugely in the last few years.

It’s not hard to see why – the challenge of trying to think of an obscure answer which will be ‘pointless’, i.e. not a response given by one of the hundred people previously surveyed by the programme, is pretty irresistible.

There are also fun anagrams and picture puzzles dotted throughout the running time.

And even our five year-old gets involved as much as possible, deciding each day which team colour she’d prefer to get through the rounds and win.

As she’s completely obsessed with numbers, she also takes particular joy in the constant countdowns and revelations about figures.

My parents also watch because my mum is also a big fan of one of Pointless’ presenters, Richard Osman. She’s a Red Cross volunteer and heard on the grapevine that he’d responded to an appeal they’d raised.

The charity urgently needed a pair of huge size 14 shoes for an asylum seeker who only had a pair of broken flip flops.

The generous six feet seven inch tall star responded to an appeal on Twitter and donated two pairs of his shoes, attaching a handwritten note reading “from one big guy to another”.

Now that we are back in England, we watch Pointless and feel a warm sense of communion that hundreds of miles away, the rest of our family are checking in with Richard and his co-presenter Alexander Armstrong at the same time.