There’s actually a quite a lot of interesting things on this evening, BBC1 have Total Wipeout, Doctor Who, Over the Rainbow and Who Dares Wins, whilst ITV1 have brand new series of The Whole 19 Yards and behemoth Britain’s Got Talent.
The Whole 19 Yards is tonight’s pick for me, I think, because I’m quite interested to see how watching it being filmed translates to television. Anyway, if you’ve seen the Spanish show then I’m pretty sure you’ll find this a lot more fun. How many different challenges they can come up with (And therefore how long it’s likely to hold my interest) remains to be seen.
In other news, thanks to Mad Cap’n Tom Scott for alerting me to Puzzgrid, a homage to Only Connect’s Connecting Walls. It doesn’t have the official site’s presentation or quality control (although you get to rate the grids), but it basically works fairly well if you’ve exhausted the official ones, and you can submit your own.
Edit: Some quick opinion:
- Yeah, that was alright. Glenn Hugill’s audition as future voiceover of Come Dine With Me added quite a lot to the early rounds, and a bit less to the later rounds with less going on.
- I was quite impressed with the calibre of the contestants’ knowledge this evening, and wonder if the researchers have come up with anybody with even less general knowledge for future editions.
- End game… not as good as I think it could be, but I appreciate and approve that they’ve not gone all or nothing. Having made the rest of the show quite hi-octane, the rather slow stop-starty nature of it doesn’t gel – I think I would have preferred it if it was all done continuously in one go with Going for Gold style questions and the contestant running to the buzzer and back to the start against the moving buzzer clock.
- It looks like they’re repeating games after one week which isn’t… a great sign. But I’d give the first episode a promising 7/10 I think.
Not seen much of the original, but I trust ITV to show the format of The Whole 19 Yards much more respect than the BBC have shown Total Wipeout.
On the latter though with the Heavy Bag Run and “Sweeper Catwalk” confirmed as featuring later in the series, at least this time they’re using all the qualifier obstacles available to them – but every step forward is pointless once you get to the joke of a Wipeout Zone.
Even with the pointless Tarzan Swing (why anyone, even a TW producer, thought replacing two turntables with a bit of rope was a good idea god knows!) if they’d just reinstate the rule you must complete an obstacle to move on it would improve things significantly.
The Whole 19 Yards is basically a Total Wipeout rip-off. It’s typical of ITV these days to rip-off BBC shows, and they are a creatively bankrupt company.
Like I said previously- why would anyone in their right mind want to watch The Whole 19 Yards over Doctor Who, which is a quality drama.
…eh?
Basically, I’m not expecting The Whole 19 Yards to be any good. The previews make it look like a poor rip-off of Total Wipeout.
Well if TW19Y is a Total Wipeout rip-off, that’s probably because it’s from the same company behind Wipeout so um…
Not sure I agree with that – for one thing we know that TW19Y is going to have a general knowlege aspect to it, which TW certainly does not, and secondly the clips I’ve seen make the physical elements look more strategic rather than just requiring balance and agility.
Hey, maybe I’ll be proved wrong come 8pm tonight…
Apologies if this has been posted before, but:
It’s like the nineties never happened.
These contestants must be the stupidest in gameshow history!
But I quite like the show. I was wrong earlier. It’s not as bad as I was expecting!
Thank God the final does something other than all-or-nothing. All in all I rather liked that. Nice work, Endemol.
I was shocked at how much i enjoyed The Whole 19 Yards, i will be sure to watch it again next week.
So The Hugill is the commentator.
Yeah, I would have been more surprised, but he did the commentating on Sky’s Mission Implausible in 2006 in the same stylee.
I quite enjoyed that – End game is quite good also – Easy to reach the 5k-10k levels Medium for 20-50k and 100k is actually very hard unlike pus the button which practically gave money away
8/10
Even Digital Spy are basically positive! Looks like you might have a minor hit, Endemol.
OH MY GOD!! What an opening question on Who Dares Wins. The 100 Most Popular UK Game Shows Of All Time.
We’ve contributed to a question on prime time TV.
Wait a minute. The only top 100 poll on the site is based on the most visited pages. Hence the X-Factor being on the list.
Bad job by the researchers.
The list was based on a more comprehensive poll-of-polls put together by Iain W, so what they had was correct.
To explain: the researchers used the list published on the Greatest Game Shows page last year, based on visits to UKGS.com between July 2006 and January 2009. It includes all pages on the website categorised as shows (so not people, and not articles). Five shows fell off the list between 2009 and 2010: 50/50, Take It or Leave It (2), Topless Darts, The Murder Game, and The Mole.
Who Dares Wins is about 200th on the shows list.
The fact remains that Nick Knowles has verberally plugged UK Game Shows on primetime television this evening. Although about three people were watching since BGT was on at the same time.
Also tonight I can brag that “I was there” when Simon Cowell made his surprise return from sickness in Birmingham earlier this year.
about three people were watching since BGT was on at the same time
Unconfirmed reports are coming in that you will never find any of these three alive because Ratings Bear has apparently eaten them all as an amuse-gueule.
Made a change from http://www.everyhit.com or Internet Movie Database Pro!
Also this may be the only time, past, present or future, that Fort Boyard will be mentioned on BBC1.
Or that that caption flashed up Dishes, Incredible Games, Naked Jungle and Topless Darts in the same list.
Granted, although Incredible Games was a CBBC show.
Or I’m missing the gist of what you said entirely. Oh dear.
The question was supposedly “The 100 greatest gameshows of all time” when in fact it was taken from the list on ukgameshows.com of the 100 articles that had been most visited. All the polls for gameshows have been top 30’s.
Who Dares Wins was ……………….. not on the list!
No, the list caption said “Most popular” and Nick’s speech said “This is based on the highest number of visits to the website between July 2006 and January 2009”.
Ah, I actually was watching BGT at the time so missed the specific of the question. I stand corrected.
19 Yards wasn’t bad- especially the endgame (it looks like it takes 75 seconds for the buzzer to go The Whole 19 Yards if it went continuously- I clocked it at just about 4 seconds per yard)…and hopefully someone can get a clip of that WDW question…
TW19Y doesn’t appear to be available on the ITV Player yet; do people who know these things think there’s much chance of it appearing during the day, or is it the case that if it’s not on now then it’s unlikely to come on at any point?
The answering-my-own-question department notes that it’s going to be repeated on ITV 2 today at 2:45, and on Tuesday at 7pm, so perhaps I shall catch it then.
TW19Y: pretty good. The presentation was fantastic – I particularly like the buzzers, which are what Push The Button should have used – Vernon Kay is always a good-natured, fun host, the format is inherently sound, the first few nineteen-yard challenges have been the right sort of silliness and the atmosphere was spot on. I reckon it wasn’t trying to be an ITV Total Wipeout so much as an ITV non-celebrity Hole In The Wall. My complaint would be the low ratio of game material to filler: with only seven runs over the course of an hour, the show feels like a 45-mintue show in a 60-minute slot. 7/10, as everyone else has been saying, but probably one of my two favourite new shows of the year so far.
On the whole rather impressed with The Whole 19 Yards – and what surprised me most was the General Knowledge aspect actually really added to the show. I quite liked the how the format of the quiz blended in with the physical aspect ,rather than just being there for the sake of it.
I thought though they could have been a bit clearer with the end game. If the buzzer went the whole 19 yards, did they lose everything or just drop down to the next level, as they’d have done with an incorrect answer. I’d have also liked them to have played on, or at least revealed the next question, once he’d decided to bank the cash.
Really though quite impressed – and it rated fairly healthily too considering it had very little promotion. Better than Ant and Dec’s button pushing game – not sure it’s better than Beat the Star though yet. Or if it would be any cheaper to make.
Right, The Whole 19 Yards then…
OK I suppose, although there is a Icelandic volcano-esque faultline in the whole premise.
It’s nearest DNA equivilant – Total Wipeout – is amusing to watch because you know at least a couple of times you are going to either smile or laugh out loud at the mud splattered planks in the qualifiers thinking they are going for a Olympic gold medal by jumping on to a big red ball.
TW19Y got away with this last night, because of a similar incident with the marshal arts guy who spent most of the blindfold round crouching sideways like a demented crab. There needs to be something like this every week – the tenuious nature of the obsticle courses themeselves are not enough.
Other thing that needs sorting out is on the second run of a game, it would be better to have ‘the better than I expected Caroline Flack’ to point out via a piece of VT what the twist is. Having the exec producer of Deal Or No Deal doing a comedy voice bawlling the change down a lip mic along with a music bed, and braying crowd of 200 and Vernon Kay shouting questions to the other contestants, means it’s getting lost in the overall sound mix.
Also – had I have been part of the development team, I would have fought for the winner in the final game to have some sort of reward whilst playing for the money. I was thinking along the lines of if they won the first run of the main rounds in the game, then starting them on the £5,000 prize level, so if they answer wrong, they fall back to £0 rather than game stops, no money won, ITV/Endemol accountants happy.
Also, is it fair for Vern to repeat the question at the top of the obsticle before they answer? I thought the whole point is that they remember the question and answer, whilst running over the obsticles.
Not bad – 7 out of 10 (but would still prefer to see Duel back)
Ooh, I like that. Change the money tree to zero – 5k – 10k – 20k – 30k – 50k – 100k, with a wrong answer or a timeout (as at present) dropping back a place and ending the game, and start the player off at 5k. This means that there’s 5k at risk even during the first question and still five runs to the 100k, plus smooths out the awkward 20k-50k-100k at the top of the current tree. (If not that, then I really prefer zero – 5k – 10k – 20k – 40k – 100k to the one they have at present, to keep the “factor of increase” issue a bit less crunchy than the present kludge.)
The other way to beef up the endgame is to have some sort of nice effect if the buzzer does reach the end of the nineteen yards. Have the buzzer podium physically fall off the track to its doom, perhaps? (Removing Vernon first, or perhaps he can just step off it for effect…)
Actually I -really- like the 20k-50k leap. Let’s face it, 20k is a big psychological breakpoint, the most common perceived inflection point on most utility functions, and most players won’t have much yardage left at this point. Under your proposed setup almost everyone would stop at 20k. With a favourable gamble in pure pot odds terms (risk 10k to gain 30k) it’s now tempting, though even then not enough when it came up on episode 1.
I like a 20k-50k leap if the next leap is, say, 50k-150k instead of 50k-100k. If a large proportion of people would stop at 20k rather than take a 10k or 40k gamble, then surely won’t people, in practice, stop at 50k rather than have a 20k or 100k gamble? We shall see!
I’m not sure the ‘repeating games’ mention is completely accurate, actually. It looks like they’re repeating *tracks*, but there are some different obstacles on the tracks; the shot of Twin Peaks in the trailer appeared to have a cargo net at the start, for instance, but I couldn’t see how the following ascent should be made.
Yes, that’s Caught in the Net from the pilot – up under a net, followed by a climb through a balloon filled tunnel.
It looks like Walk in the Dark is returning in some form, let’s hope it’s a bit different.