Sundays, 7pm
ITV
Philip Schofield returns with a new series of visi-quiz 5 Gold Rings and its pretend hi-tech floor.
There have been a number of changes since the first series – new set (the last series was filmed in the Netherlands on their set, this one was filmed at Elstree) and new gameplay mechanics – this time teams only get one crack at each question, and if they get it wrong their opponents can come in and steal the money for themselves, so it’s no longer effectively two solitaire games leading up to a final – the advantage for the final feels better earnt. It also means more questions as everyone is guaranteed five plus a floor flip.
I went to a recording back in December and you can read about the experience here.
I reckon the changes that have been made are solid and good. I don’t know if they are enough to break the show out into proper ‘hit’ status. You can still appalong, or at least could at the time of recording, but like most appalongs I just find it too much hassle for not enough reward whilst trying to watch a TV show.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
So, new 5 Gold Rings.
I really enjoyed it – it looks absolutely stunning. I don’t remember the exact format of S1, but the new format works much better, interleaving the two teams’ questions. Good questions, taking a simple idea – geography question for example – and having clean graphics with lovely animated backdrops (the sea around GB) was great.
think there’s a couple of things that could be improved. To me, 30 seconds felt rushed for the contestants, I would have preferred 45 (but keep 15 for the steal). Also, nice new music package, but I do miss the sting that went before the answer reveals in S1.
All in all, I like S2. As Nick says is it enough to be a hit? Not sure, but I hope it is. I was shouting at the screen for bits of it (the geography and moon questions). Regardless, I fear it will suffer from Pointless Syndrome, in which finding many more questions for future series could be tricky.
Earlier my mum noticed something about this show that I hadn’t thought about before. Whereas on most shows you can actually know the answer, on this it’s mainly just rough guesswork. I do like the changes from last season though.
Interesting mix of improvements and “un-improvements.”
The Good
As Dan says it looks amazing.
Really like the steal idea and them taking it in turns.
It works better as a game of accumulation and coupled with steals should make ties quite rare
(interesting choice to make the overall prize fund a precise £52,000, though!)
Also good simplifying it to just one go per team per question.
Overall flows a lot better as a show than Series One
The Less Good
I do miss the right/wrong sting from the first series even if it was a bit repetitive – there isn’t really one, now.
A couple of the rounds seemed to have a bit of an uneven question difficulty, in particular Round 4 – surely “show us 2/3 of the way down this lemonade” is considerably easier than “how big is the Ashes relative to the FA Cup”
(you could have even used the fairly distinguishable square panels on the floor to help calculate the 2/3 question if you were really sneaky)
Interesting decision to leave on the friends’ virtual rings for the 30 secs this series – you had to memorise them last series. This seemed almost “too helpful” for the tractors question as it meant they could just sit there and check that all the tractors passed through the cluster of virtual rings.
One of the interesting things that comes across on telly that you miss at the recording is that the physical ring melds with the team rings quite well/badly in that top shot.
This was the recording I was at.
That Louvre pyramid question was the one where they had to stop tape and reshoot it. IIRC it was initially classed as wrong, the other team had a go and then someone noticed the yellow diamond was just touching the original team’s black hole, so they reshot it. I thought the hi-tech floor was meant to know even if it’s just a pixel in? Strangely unimpressive.
The team use apps similar to the playalong one. The cars don’t appear on their screen I noticed when I glanced across at them.
Fun recording and a long day for the production team as they started hours late. Pretty much everyone you saw in shot was the entire audience, there’s also proper audience seating bit behind the cameras but as it was so snowy out nobody bothered coming.
Judging from one of the questions I’m surprised Rick Astley didn’t turn up!
2.24m I’m reading. So yep, solid show, no real audience for it.
I think it’d be a pretty good show to have in daytimes, where solid-but-not-must-watch shows tend to stand better.
2.5m for Ep 2.
A board game version is coming out – http://www.argos.co.uk/product/8523417. Quite cleverly done, though some might be disappointed that there’s only 49 actual different pictures, with each one being used five times for different variation questions. A smaller card-game version is also coming out.
Interesting – how does it work with checking if your answer is correct? If you have to flip the card around to see, you’d surely have to hold the ring in place as you turn it over, otherwise it would move/fall off and you wouldn’t know, which sounds a bit awkward.
I think the printed card goes under a plastic sheet. When you remove the card to flip it over to the answer side, the rings stay in place on the clear plastic.
Have they done celeb specials before? The ones on tonight had two celebs each helping a civilian, but not really helping at all. Seemed a bit of a fudge really and no better for it.
No, first one.
Quite impressive how they managed to turn up viewer interactivity to volume 11 by slotting in a few LIVE Twitter picture submissions throughout the show!
That makes sense as a much better way of doing that than just showing the results from the app.