A producer has been in touch:
On Tuesday 17th October, we shall be filming a run-through of a brand new high-stakes quiz show. Hosted by award-winning comedian Jason Manford, this is a game that tests knowledge and nerve, a dramatic quiz show format that’s not for the faint hearted.
The event will take place next Tuesday afternoon at The Bedford in Balham.
If you like to join us for an afternoon of fun and excitement, then apply now through this link: http://www.sroaudiences.com/application.asp?show_id=3054
Quite short notice, but if you’ve got nothing better to do then go for it.
And the reboot wheel has landed on Supermarket Sweep
http://www.fremantlemedia.com/fremantlemedia-goes-wild-in-the-aisles-with-supermarket-sweep/
The show now centers around teams ordering a large collection of goods from Amazon Pantry and waiting for the delivery to arrive.
Important to point out that Fremantle have the rights but haven’t sold it anywhere yet, so don’t be expecting it on ITV just yet.
It might actually be quite a canny move, with product placement you can make a much bigger thing about naming the supermarket the goods come from, which has to be worth a few bob.
I can see it fitting in reasonably well on Channel 4, actually.
How likely is it that Dale would host it, though? He’s 62 now – and, of course, he’s been battling depression the last few years.
I’m pulling for Richard Ayoade to host it.
I wouldn’t get too excited. For two months in 2015, Wikipedia claimed there was a reboot in the works, and there was even a Facebook page for a production company who were plugging it. I only found out it was false after I contacted ITV to ask who they’d got hosting it – shortly after which the page disappeared.
http://www.fremantlemedia.com/fremantlemedia-goes-wild-in-the-aisles-with-supermarket-sweep/
However, this is very official.
Meanwhile you can also get tickets for Comedy Central’s Go 8 Bi… Game Junkies I mean for this coming Wednesday:
https://www.applausestore.com/book-game-junkies
Hmm, Jason Mandord doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who should front a “high stakes” quiz show. Talented though he is, I just don’t see how he fits that part. He’s used to more quirky programmes.
Well, if the Price is Right reboot with Alan Carr for Channel 4 fails to gain any traction..
..Freemantle have just brought the back-up vehicle to the car park..
I went to see the aforementioned pilot this afternoon (as I live round the corner).
This is a Glenn Hugill format from Possessed (Cash Trapped, Five Gold Rings etc.) called Big Money Ballers. Glenn was there, and spoke to the audience at the start of the show explaining the mechanics, and even did the warm-up before retreating to the makeshift gallery (bear in mind this was filmed in the back of a pub).
The set was extremely simple – a table with two perspex boxes either side. There are eight players.
Round 1
The contestants play head-to-head, so four random pairs of 2. Each player, stood in front of their own box, is asked three consecutive questions.
– For a correct answer, they’re given two white balls.
– If they don’t know, the question becomes multiple choice (of two) – a correct answer is then only worth one white ball.
– No balls for a wrong answer.
The aim is to collect as many white balls as possible to maximise your chance of progressing to the next round.
Once the other player has answered their three questions, a red ball is added to each of their boxes, which are then covered up.
To decide which player will start drawing balls first, they’re both asked the same ‘nearest to’ question. They can confer with friends/family members for 30 seconds before writing down their answers on cards.
The player furthest away from the correct answer draws the first ball. The first person to draw their red ball is out.
Repeat for the other pairs.
Round 2
The contestant chit chat was left to the start of this round, rather than the previous one.
Round 2 is very similar to the first – two head-to-heads featuring the four remaining players – except:
– If you don’t know your question, your opponent can answer it for two white balls. If they don’t know it, it passes back to you and becomes multiple choice again for one white ball. Get it wrong, and your opponent automatically gets a white ball.
– Each box has two red balls added to it rather than one – first player to draw them both out leaves the game.
Round 3
This time, the two remaining players get 60 seconds of quickfire questions each. There’s one white ball for every correct answer.
Three red balls are added to each box once the quiz is over, followed by another ‘nearest to’ question to decide the order of play. The first to draw three reds is out.
Final
The endgame’s a bit different.
White balls now have cash value – each worth £5,000.
The remaining player gets four whites just for reaching the final (£20k). They’re then asked three questions in the style of the first two rounds – worth two white balls for a right answer (£10k), or one if you need the multiple choice (£5k). Get all three questions right first time, and you’ve got an extra six white balls in your box, worth £50k when added to the others.
Four red balls are put in the box at this point, as is a green ball.
As before, the player pulls out the balls one by one.
– Pull all four reds out, and you leave with nothing.
– Pull all the whites out before you reveal all four reds, and your cash total is doubled (therefore theoretical top prize £100k).
– Pull out the green ball, and you can walk away with the value of the white balls you’ve revealed to that point. Interestingly if you decide to play on, the green ball also goes back in the box, giving you a further chance to walk should you pull it out again. You can’t stop play unless you have the green ball.
***
Jason Manford was an interesting choice as host – he was perfectly competent, great at the ad-libbing, and genuinely funny, but (as you might expect) not as strong at building tension.
The game itself was OK – they made a big thing out of the ‘knowledge and luck’ combination. There was nothing particularly original about it, though, and it felt very long – especially that first round where you sit through the same game four times on the trot. The audience looked a bit bored in the latter rounds. They’re pitching this as a 60-minuter for ITV, and I can see why they kept the banter and contestant chat to a minimum given they had eight games in total to get through.
The recording as a whole was slightly shambolic – the audience was told to arrive for 12, but we weren’t let into the building until 12:45. We then spent a further 50 minutes hanging around the bar before being let into the studio proper. Stood next to some crew members, there was concern they might actually get kicked out of the pub before the game finished because of the overrun, and there were a couple of embarrassing moments where a contestant who’d already been eliminated was mic’d up for another round, and where filming had to be halted because a projector fan couldn’t be turned off.
Overall some refinement is needed, I think, before ITV will consider commissioning. Not the worst show I’ve seen, though.
Cheers Tom, it’s Tout le monde veut prendre sa place meets Lingo, then.
Sounds a bit dry?
Actually thinking about it some more, I think that endgame needs tweaking. I’m not sure I see many people carrying on with these amounts when they pick a green ball unless they pick it ridiculously early.
Or it ends up being a bit anti-climactic – they played the final a second time after the contestant quickly drew out four red balls on the first go, and ended up picking the green ball three times in four goes.
The odds on either of those things happening is amusingly quite low, so that’s a bit unlucky really. Still though.
I know it’s work in progress, but – that end game. Urgghh.
Glenn, if you are watching – this took me all of 5 minutes thinking in the office to come up with something that flows and works better in terms of tension, and risk and reward..
All the correct answers given by the winner are turned into white balls and put into the box/drum – along with 4 red and 4 green balls. Give em a stir and..
From the start – every white ball picked out wins £1,000 until..
When the 1st Green is picked out – option to bail and take the accumulated money or – carry on, and now it’s £2,500 for every white ball until..
2nd Green – option to bail and take the accumulated money or – carry on, and now it’s £5,000 for every drawn out white ball until..
3rd Green – option to bail and take the accumulated money or – carry on, and try and pick out the final 4th green, and until then every white ball is worth £10,000.
4th Green. Automatic game end. Winner takes the total away.
But, what of the reds?
Glad you asked.
1st picked out red – accumulated total to that point is halved, but game continues, and white ball value drops back to £1,000 and you need to pick a green to get the vaule going up again, but
2nd picked out red – instant game end. Bank zero’ed. Loose it all. Go home ‘reasonable transport expenses’ as your only salvation.
That said, it doesn’t sound like a total write-off, and it is an interesting concept to mix both General Knowledge, with pure pick of the luck randomness. Hope the edit sorts some of the issues out, and it gets the nod from ITV Towers.
Not sure how much I like that either, the thwarting of accumulation in effective hi-score games is one of the most frustrating things in a show as a viewer, let alone as a player – in this case halving the prize fund and resetting the escalator very difficult to enjoy. It also suffers from dodgy back of an envelope odds – worst case scenario your game ends after two draws one in eleven times which I think is too low for weekly primetime. Worst case scenario in the original, someone gets no right answers and picks four reds out immediately, the odds of that are 1 in 126 by my reckoning.
As unexciting as I think the original game sounds on paper, I do at least understand the rationale in that as a game it will tend towards a 50/50 ending (well, 33/33/33) if the game is allowed to get that far. Potentially that’s a lot of drawing to happen and the refusing of several temptations that I suspect people will take though.