If you’ve been following the comment feed, you’ll note that Cresus is returning to TF1 in the lunchtime slot, with Jean-Luc Reichmann as host.
This is good because Cresus is good and Jean-Luc Reichmann is good.
The reason it is coming back is that Nagui is wiping the floor of Reichmann’s current show (on seven days a week! Blimey.) Attention la Marche! (Watch Your Step!) with the, if I’m being honest slightly bafflingly popular Tout le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place! (Everybody Wants The Seat!), currently pulling in over 3m viewers every lunchtime. The current champion has over 100 wins – Ken Jennings eat your heart out. Thanks to Barry for the link to the official site with the official videos.
With Effervescence looking to sell the format abroad (under Hold On To Your Seat) it is probably about time I did a feature on it, so look out for it at the weekend.
On a semi-related topic, I guess Nick Clegg just finished his DoND game…
Someone smarter than me write a Divided parody with the three party leaders as contestants.
Can’t help feeling that Gordon Brown has just chosen to take C with great dignity – and, I’d say, early enough still to take a fairly repectable chunk of political capital home with him. I really think the phrase “coalition of the losers”, as bandied around so much these past few days, is borne of the “anything-but-A-is-losing” thinking that you see on Divided these days. I’ll always consider the Lab-LD coalition that we didn’t get to be the “coalition of the not batshit insanely greedy”, not the “coalition of the losers”, but that’s not the sort of thinking that gets a big return from game shows.
Lab-Lib coalition would have been a coalition of losers.
As is the Con-Lib one we’re getting.
British democracy requires a majority of seats for your party to win, therefore if you do not have a majority, even if you have a plurality, you have lost.
(Defining ‘lost’ as ‘not won’ here)
I shall thus spend the next five years referring to David Cameron as “our unelected Prime Minister”. More advanced pedants might even so refer to a Prime Minister appointed even if their party had a majority of seats.
Someone on a chess forum I frequent was amused to note that ITV postponed (? possibly interrupted?) an episode of Divided to go to the latest coalition-related developments. Honk!
(Defining ‘lost’ as ‘not won’ here)
No, I’m not convinced by that definition in general or in specifics. Some game show formats set out to find losers – The Door and Mission 2110 are recent examples. Others – The Whole 19 Yards, Four Weddings – are out to find winners. And there are programmes where winning and losing is in the eye of the participants – cf Dating in the Dark, Take Me Out.
For my money, a game show requires either a clear victory condition, or a clear defeat condition, but not necessarily both. Getting trapped in the caves on Jungle Run is the sort of defeat condition I mean – any team that gets out is going to win something, the size of their victory is another matter.
On the specific example of Who Wants To Be A Premier, the victory condition is formally defined as Having the Confidence of the House, which a post-hoc arrangement between the Blue Team and the Yellow Team has achieved. Both teams can point to significant parts of their audition pieces and say that they’ll be in the final routine; neither troupe can perform their entire set in full.
(I would, at this point, like to bring the discussion back on-topic by pointing to a video of Julia Goldsworthy’s interpretative response to the 2006 Budget from The Games, but it appears not to be online anywhere. A shame.)
Oh – Does anyone know if there’s any game content in Charlie Brooker’s new Radio 4 show, So Wrong Its Right, or if it’s just Charlie and three guests discussing Topics?
To answer my own question – Yes, yes it is. Albeit Grumpy Old Men: the Gameshow, but since it’s precided over by Charlie Brooker and the first episode has Victoria Coren and David Mitchell on it, it’s wonderful anyway.