Saturday, 7:25pm,
BBC1
Lorraine Kelly and Rob Beckett preside as two about-to-get-married couples and their families compete for prizes and to have their wedding broadcast to the nation on primetime BBC. It’s not a bad idea, weddings feel like an untapped entertainment market in the UK, although whether this will successfully capture the feel good of the ceremony – and indeed the drama of the drunken arguments of the reception – remains to be seen.
This is not the first time this sort of thing has been done of course – Love Letters was an enormously successful show in the Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s offering basically the same thing, becoming the rather less successful The Shane Richie Experience/Love Me Do on ITV in 1995. Clips from this suggest a rather more action-orientated It’s a Knockout style experience, one game appears to be a reimagining of Pump Up Your Postie from Saturday night non-hit The National Lottery Red Alert, so there’s that.
Having this and And They’re Off on the same night seems like odd scheduling on the face of it, but we’ll see.
I loved Traumhochzeit (German Love Letters) hosted by Linde de Mol when I was a child. It’s a show that aged really badly, but it’s so much fun and everyone still recalls the biggest games. So this is definitely a show I will look into!
I’ve just remembered I did a feature on Traumhochzeit. Handy!
https://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?page_id=673
And here is a ten-minute edit of The Shane Richie Experience from the point of view of one of the contestants:
https://youtu.be/K5zoYm0C0p0
“Having this and And They’re Off on the same night seems like odd scheduling on the face of it, but we’ll see.”
Gotta fill that Voice-shaped hole, which Let It Shine only partially filled last year. (That gets two Hall of Shame votes from me, BTW, for basically misleading the public.)
Speaking of The Voice, not many people seem to be getting excited about this year’s adult series, which starts tomorrow night. Indeed, excitement seems to have dropped significantly since the show arrived on ITV – viewing figures for last year’s adult series were down a fair bit on those for the last BBC series the year before, the first Kids series was more or less forgotten as soon as it ended, and the reaction to Olly Murs replacing Gavin Rossdale appears to have been generally “Meh.”
Of course, viewing figures always fall after the blind auditions – but last year, only the first adult blind audition episode attracted more than seven million viewers, while in 2016 only the last blind audition episode failed to do so. I suspect the partial Americanisation of the show – and not merely because Jennifer Hudson is from Chicago – hasn’t helped.
Could one compare and contrast with GBBO – or would that be comparing apples and oranges?
The problem isn’t filling the time, it’s having two largely physical shows on within an hour of each other.
Interestingly The Danish Voice (called “Voice – den største stemme” ~ the strongest voice) doesn’t air anymore as an adult version. They are just showing The Voice Kids. And that’s a lot down to the ratings, but I also think it might be cheaper overall. With less judges and nothing to win (I think they really just get the title and some sort of opportunity to record a song when they are grown-ups or something).
Hunted Series 3 also started yesterday, they’ve got the whole ‘make sure we have some suspense just before the break / end of episode’ thing down to a tee now.
They couldn’t even catch the fugitive wanting a footlong Spicy Italian mind…
That’s probably due to the fact that that Subway is two minutes walk from St Peter’s Square.
This was basically very irritatingly edited, the audience sweetening really didn’t help. Editors! It’s OK to have sound pauses! I think the massive studio works against them in many ways.
It all felt a bit family fun by committee, many of the games direct lifts from It’s a Knockout with wedding theming although I did quite enjoy the Getting The Ring To The Rock bit.
Lorraine Kelly felt underused. I know backstory is a key to this sort of thing but it felt too glossy and sickly here really. Perhaps should have had Best Man embarrassing stories somewhere.
This may be of no interest if you didn’t live in the Anglia TV region, but the officiator at the wedding is none-other than Anglia TV announcer Katie Glass:
http://www.edp24.co.uk/going-out/former-anglia-tv-presenter-has-role-on-bbc-show-wedding-day-winners-katie-glass-dr-catherine-tremain-anglia-tv-registrar-marry-in-norfolk-1-5344946
2.22m/11.8%. Don’t go expecting a second series.
Personally, it’s a meh show. Naturally I would make the show a little more exciting and also knock back about the couples familes and only focus on the marrying couples.
A better format for the show would be this, that there are games on offer however the wedding couple are the captains for the teams, they pick two of the main table team members to take on the challenges. If either team win a challenge not only do they win something for the newlyweds but the newlyweds get to add an advantage for the final game. After 6 rounds the couples and families take on the final task, “Wedding Day Chaos” where the main table and the newlyweds work together to get to the church first. This takes place in an outdoor part of the game. The bride and groom have to get through a massive obstacle course that they have to climb and scramble through in order to get to the church, however preventing them will be members of the opposing team who try and slow them down. The advantages come in as the more games won, the more min table members join in. The winner is the couple who reach the church and ring the bells. We then have the wedding scene after everything that happened.
Seem I have a unpopular opinion in that I liked this better than and they’re off. It’s a fun way to waste a hour. It’s not without it’s problems though.
It felt more like The Rob Beckett show than Rob and Lorraine’s Saturday night takeaway, if you took Lorraine out of it, there wouldn’t be any difference. I think they needed someone that could stand their own, Claudia Winkleman comes to mind.
The team that actually won the most prizes lost in the all or nothing round, I thought why did you just show all the games when they didn’t even matter that much? It would be better if the team that won the most prizes would get a advantage in the end game like a extra step that is already there.
I honestly wouldn’t mind a second series of this (If Letterbox can get a second series, anything’s possible) but it does need some tweaks.
Absolutely loathsome show. Some truly unacceptable moments of “entertainment” (the dancing, the bouncing), horribly edited, sound all over the place, couldn’t care less about the couple’s families which seemed to take up 90% of the show. BBC Entertainment have made some dire decisions over the last few years.
Have got to say Panda TV aren’t exactly making a great name for themselves. Their first commissions are this and Partners in Rhyme and both have been poorly thought-out and poorly made.
Although not a huge fan of the format, I thought it great that this week’s show included a same-sex couple competing for their wedding. The fact that this sits so comfortably these days as part of a family show, really brought home how far the UK has come.
I was reminded of a film review that Dr Mark Kermode gave when ‘Entourage’ was released a couple of years ago. At a press screening, as the opening establishing shot faded up out of the film studio logos, the reviewer sitting next to him leant across and whispered “I’m going to really hate this film”
Mirrored my thoughts exactly, when I read about this show.
I gave it a chance to convince me otherwise, but the forced ‘this is a feel good show, so you are going to feel good watching, right’? got on my nerves around 10 seconds after the end of the opening titles, it lost me. Didn’t take long for the first entrant on my 2018 Hall of Shame Top 5 poll for this time next year.
As of next week WDW is being replaced with All together now. I think it shows the show has been dropped. It will be shown in a low viewer time slot in future weeks.
Apparently it was always planned to have the final 3 episodes be shown at a later time.
I thought there was a contestant call recently?
It really is a shame, though, how the Beeb have treated Who Dares Wins since the draws left BBC1. One *does* get the impression they they were prepared to drop *all* the Lottery shows at once, and *only* handed WDW a reprieve because it was so popular.
Oh, well – at least it’ll qualify for the Long-Running category on UKGS.
No, he means Wedding Day Winners. Who Dares Wins is currently looking for contestants so will be returning. As Callum pointed out, WeddDayWin was apparently always going to be a split series and this came out before episode one, the plan was for All Together Now to start by end of Jan.
My bad…
I’m so used to referring to Who Dares Wins by its initials at this stage – and now we have this show with the exact same initials.
I’m going to continue referring to Kernick’s show as WDW, though – as I said, it’s going to qualify for the Long-Running category on UKGS, and also each word has a single syllable. Wedding Day Winners, on the other hand, is more likely to end up in the Flops category, and the two ‘W’ words each have two syllables – so I too shall refer to it as WeddDayWin. 😉
My bad *again* – it’s in the Flops category already…
Apologies if I confused a few people with my initials shortening. I forgot there was another show with the exact same initials. If it was planned to be shown in two blocks why didn’t the TV guide shown them as 1/3 etc rather than 1/6. It always confuses me when they split plan.