So I saw a link to this earlier: an entire episode of The Krypton Factor from its first series in 1977. You’ll need to excuse the quality, and it’s broken up into parts, but it’s fascinating, sort of a bit crap but still good. Of note: the rubbish assault course – I believe that was changed to something closer to what we know and love soon after (although the reasoning behind the headstarts is quite interesting), the Personality round as voted for by the public, and Gordon Burns being a hip young gunslinger.
There’s another episode on the guy’s channel as well.
In other news, I’m afraid there will be no episode of Ben Justice’s Top 100 UK Game Shows Of All Time this Friday as he’s not had time, but hopes to resume next week.
Looking bad for Sunday Night Takeaway — down to 218k viewers, the lowest so far. This week had a particularly bad edition of Read My Lips (couldn’t get “U2” in an Irish-themed list??), and they’re still playing In For A Dollar.
https://southhemitv.com/2019/03/31/snt-1-6/
Talking of, the UK spin off of In For A Penny that… Err.. Steven Mulhern’s agent was waiting for launches Saturday 13th at 7.30 according to ITVs twitter
Perhaps unsurprisingly (and to avoid quickly becoming boring), it looks like the show will also contain *other* games, as well as the, ahem, legendary IFAP.
https://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/penny
“The only game show that can be played from anywhere in the country, Stephen, along with his gold sparkly jacket and portable game show props, can pop up anywhere from petrol stations to shopping centres, surprising people and randomly selecting whoever he can find to take part in games such as Pump It Up, Mum’s The Word and the popular In For A Penny, from Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.
In ‘Pump It Up’ drivers are greeted by Stephen who, armed with his In For A Penny credit card, will pay for their petrol if they can pump the exact amount they’ve predetermined in just two pumps. If they pump a penny over or under the specified amount, they’ll have to pay for it themselves.
‘Mum’s The Word’ sees members of the public call their mums to describe a word in just 30 seconds. If they get it right and have not used any key words set out in the rules, they win a cash prize but get it wrong and they get nothing.
In ‘Check It Out’, Stephen is in a supermarket at the tills, where he presents unsuspecting shoppers with five items on the conveyor belt. If they can correctly guess whether all five item are more or less expensive than the previous item on the belt, Stephen pays for the entire contents of their trolley.
Ready or Not v2 then basically!
So the 10-6-4-2 scoring system was there right from the off, as was the practice of linking each GK question with the answer to the previous one.
The practice of referring to the contestants’ scores as “Krypton Factors” was there at the start, too, although it would be several years before Gordon did it at the end of every round (“The early leader with a Krypton Factor of 10”, “We have joint leaders with Krypton Factors of 22”, etc).
The font for the contestant profiles, the Physical Ability and Personality results, and the closing credits appears to be the upright version of the one used from 1983-91. Mike Moran’s music, meanwhile, underwent at least one revision before being replaced by the Art of Noise’s compositions (and by then, it had already stopped being played during the Intelligence test).
The use of seven-segment displays for the clock during the assault course, and for the remaining time during GK, is also of note – SSDs would have only just been starting to come into fashion at this time. (They also featured on the scoreboard for that year’s Eurovision at the Wembley Conference Centre, as it happened.) Of course, they were used on just about every game show during the ’80s and ’90s, before falling out of favour around the turn of the millennium (with the notable exceptions of Countdown, which held on to them until 2013, and HIGNFY, which sees no need to bow to technology and continues to use them today).
I can see why they got rid of the Personality test- just seemed a bit off compared to everything else (and I’m wondering if they didn’t have an audience that first season or something- otherwise why didn’t they just do an audience poll instead of the special one?)
Well, I suppose the contestants’ previous rounds might bias their opinions, but you could easily circumvent that by playing in the tapes to the audience and taking a vote while they’re waiting for the show to start. The need to do a national poll seems a bit overkill – given that most shows were filmed in That London in those days, you’d get a decent mix of people coming from around the country to see it anyway.
But this is full on Granadaland!
Yeah, sorry, I’ve got a bad headache today.
For those that follow this sort of thing, Q Live (effectively a ripoff of the now-defunct HQ Trivia) is doing its last broadcast tonight.
Any other quiz apps left?
So turns out giving away hundreds of pounds a day with no advertising or subscription fee isn’t that great a business model.
As for The Krypton Factor – if it’s not introduced by the Art of Noise it just doesn’t grab my attention.
This might be a daft question that all but me know the answer to, but how did those apps make money (or at least try to)? When there was a lot of excitement about this kind of thing,one of my friends said jokingly they must be selling our personal details. Obviously that was just a joke,but it could have a tiny hint of truth if it had one of those “by clicking this box you basically allow us to give some of your details to our partner companies” disclaimer-y things that some sites have. I can’t remember if HQ had that.
My favourite of those was KO Trivia, which paid out sufficiently many in-game coins to the Crap But Persistent, which were eventually convertible into PayPal, that I actually managed to tickle it into paying out US$2.80 over the years before it decided it was US only. I had to watch a looooot of ads to do that. I don’t know the company made, say, half a cent per ad view (I would have thought it would be within an order of magnitude of that) but if they did then we probably broke about even.
(Their first revenue model was to pay out prizes, rather than in-game coins, and offer the chance to buy those prizes to players, presumably for a cut of inflated prices. Don’t think it worked.)
Your typical online advertising CPM (which is, confusingly, cents per mille or ‘thousand’, not million) is $2.00, so 0.2 cents per impression.
In HQ’s case, the operation was being bankrolled by investors who hoped sponsors would come in and market their products in-game – they flirted with this briefly, but it never took off.
The episode where Dwayne “The John” Rockson came on and co-hosted to shill for the Rampage movie, and the one where Marc Summers came on and co-hosted to shill for Nickelodeon’s Double Dare reboot, both had some silly charm. I would imagine that getting in front of hundreds of thousands of actively engaged pairs of eyeballs didn’t come cheap for Rampage or for Nick. Were they good value? Probably not.
Always said these were flash in the pan. Admittedly, a little bit more flash than anticipated, but still.
I think these days they’re more HTML5 in the pan.
HQ is still going in the USA I believe
Can confirm, HQ still going in the US. They’ve actually branched out a couple of directions, with a sports-themed quiz twice a week, and HQ Words (ten or so hangman puzzles) nightly after Trivia. The game show app trend might’ve died down a bit lately though; while there are still occasionally 6-digit prizes, they’re much less frequent, or at least, fewer sponsors have stepped up to offer those huge prizes.
ProsiebenSat.1 has started a quiz app a few months ago. It is for 500€ a day, I think, and available in the German language area. They have a short best-of-last-night’s-episode clip every day at 18.00 (about five minutes long) on one of their linear TV channels where a hint for that day’s episode will be given. So they definitely try to use synergies between TV and app, but I doubt it’s working. I don’t know anyone other than me personally who has heard of it despite the heavy advertising on telly and on youtube.
In other Groovy Old Stuff found on YouTube news, more specifically from the not-quite-a-game-show-but-sort-of-is-if-you-squint department, a 1983 episode of The Late, Late Breakfast Show with Little Noely.
This week’s episode is more or less devoted to a live air race between BBC Television Centre in London and a counterpart TV centre in Paris – more specifically, a helicopter-to-aeroplane-to-helicopter-to-motorcycle race, though the competitors are actually passengers for a variety of pilots and it’s more a contest of vehicle speed, piloting, transition speed and the teeniest bit of running rather than anything else. (One competitor is an aviator, doing the race in reverse from Paris to London; two competitors from London to Paris are pop stars.) The whole thing is very ambitious and multiple-venue live international outside broadcasting must have cost a packet; it has the feel of an attempt for Golden Rose recognition. All this on a random Saturday night? That’s what the budget stretched to when there were only three channels.
In addition, the show briefly tries to link up with US television for coverage of the America’s Cup and has a singer performing a turn. Both of these are edited out of the YouTube video, presumably for copyright claim reasons. There’s also a very silly Whirly Wheel of Fortune stunt… but the comments suggest that the previous week’s stunt had led to a serious injury, so the level of intensity was evidently dialled way, way down this week. The series certainly had a few hidden camera pranks, but the timing suggests this episode may have forgone them.
Bearing in mind that I have a strongly negative opinion of most of Edmonds’ mid-career and later work, despite a few stray old-fashioned remarks, this episode may be my favourite thing I’ve ever seen him in – or, if not the absolute favourite, certainly not far from it.
Ah, the Great Air Race of 24 September 1983. Enough of a Television Event that Simon Bates gave a plug on Thursday’s Top of the Pops. But the show wasn’t quite big enough to contain the results: Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 completed the trek in 43m07s, followed by Leo Sayer on 46m37s. Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet was billed in the Radio Times, but bailed out when he realised he’d have to be strapped to an ejector seat.
Noel was always one to push technology to the limits and take the show on the road – I remember how he finished a series of Swap Shop by flying from the studio to his old school reunion, all while a long cartoon played. Chris is right to mention the scaled-down stunts: an attempt on the car long-jump record two weeks earlier ended in near-tragedy.
To drag this nostalgia-fest more on topic, I was waiting that weekend for the result of Puzzle Trail: two weeks down, one to go. Puzzleton’s Pennies have been pilfered: which bold fraud was the culprit, and in which box were the coins put? What is the secret of the black rose, how did it take me so long to work out the pun in the name of the nun, “Rosa Ree”?
Here’s your Provocative Proposition to discuss: Clive Doig did more for television than Noel Edmonds.
I move an amendment to my Rt. Hon. colleague’s motion, which I would be happy to support: Clive Doig did more good for television than Noel Edmonds.
This will almost certain get stuck in a spam trap, but… it seems there’s been more clips from the early series of Krypton on YouTube all along. It’s just that it’s been on the ITV Classic (WTF?) channel, which seems to consist of someone splitting their entire back-catalogue into HUNDREDS of 3 minute segments, many of which have low-to-zero views. What a waste.
Anyway, here’s the links for those of you who want more Classic Burns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVhTgUZUIhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9iymCGcQNs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U42GNvKS5-Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHeAC5kkKOo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lDNUOLJ6Hw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElmaaTpSX88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWwVe9K8WiE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUz5VlTh4gY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT-c8iyv8RM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ncs_nibRxds
The thing that struck me is that we don’t *hear* from the contestants at all until round 3, and then it’s only on video!
Two more observations (no pun intended) from ’77:
– If you were 28 then, as Pauline Valsler was, you’d be 70 now. Brrrr. (For the record, Gordon was 35.)
– The Intelligence test in the other episode was really a Mental Agility test. (MA became a round in its own right the following year, and was still using a knockout format in 1987.)
Meanwhile, Brekkie says, “If it’s not introduced by the Art of Noise it just doesn’t grab my attention.” Geoff Moore was the man responsible for bringing in the AoN theme (as well as the Response round and the morphing ‘K’ logo); he reveals in this interview that he made these changes because Granada had become bored with the show:
http://www.granadaland.org/geoff-moore-recalls-producing-the-krypton-factor/
Makes you wonder, then, if they had become bored again come 1995. “Upstart caterer” Gerry Robinson had arrived in Manchester by then, and he was more interested in things such as taking over LWT. (Unless I’m mistaken, he also considered making Granada a publisher-broadcaster at one point, i.e. having most of their programmes produced by independents rather than by themselves.) And, of course, the ITV of 1995 was *very* different to the ITV of 1986…
No ageism, or offence of any kind, intended in that first observation, BTW.
Thanks for the extra info. I know Granada bought Yorkshire at some point in the 90s but had they by the time The Krypton Factor was axed. You’d have thought it be in their interests not to open the slot up to Emmerdale unless of course even pre-merger they could make more from airing a popular rival regions programme than the network airing one of their own.
Granada took over Yorkshire in 1997; Emmerdale only started airing on Monday nights in 2000 (when it went five nights a week).
NBC officially picks up Small Fortune for 6 eps in the US:
http://thefutoncritic.com/news/2019/04/03/nbc-comes-into-a-small-fortune-with-six-episode-order-of-youngest-medias-delightfully-pocket-sized-competition-series-831011/20190403nbc02/
(I actually liked the show- though I thought if they emphasized the comedy a bit more and lowered the stakes a little it would work a little better)
Who would the cultural counterpart to BRI-AN BLESS-ED be in the US, as his big voice is an integral part of the joke? As a starting point, I might guess at Gilbert Gottfried…
William Shatner.
Ooh, the guy’s uploading a 1978 Xmas Special starring people like Ranulph Fiennes and Chris Bonington. The mental agility and intelligence rounds are separate now.
https://youtu.be/f6pHQ1H0oRM
This is quite interesting – Music Magpie for some reason have compiled (or nicked from elsewhere I suspect) some stats on chances of winning The Chase, Pointless, Millionaire, Eggheads and Deal or No Deal (well, that last one is 0% now surely!).
https://musicmagpie.co.uk/tv-game-shows/
Well over here in the States Million Dollar Mile is officially a flop- they’re moving it to Saturdays, and starting the new Amazing Race season a month earlier than scheduled. Twist for TAR this season is its TAR vs BB vs Survivor- 3 teams that have former Survivors players (either one or both members), 3 teams of past Big Brother HG’s, and 5 TAR alumni teams.
Not sure if you already discussed it – Patrice Laffont will be back on board for this season’s Fort Boyard, acting as a man from ancient times (Hibernatus, reference to a famous Louis De Funès comedy) and will throw back some contestants into famous trials of the Fort from the ancient times. Could be interesting..
Yes, had heard he was on board. I’ve not looked up any FB news properly yet although have heard rumours, will ramp up over the six to eight weeks inevitably.
Naturally the logo’s going to be a ‘30 ans’ one because they forget how anniversaries work.