The Million Pound Drop starts May 24th at 10pm on Channel 4 for six consecutive nights, in theory, in a bid to be an EVENT.
I predict 2-2.5m viewers, rising to 3m by midweek (initial excitement and word of mouth), dropping back down to 2m or less by the end of the run (it’s a bit slow, it’s got irritating contestants and nobody wins very much). What say you?
EDIT: Ooh, I’ve just got a link to Davina’s announcement video sent to us from an agency which doesn’t actually tell you anything we don’t know already, but does mean Bother’s Bar is OFFICIALLY ON THE MAP. I’ll see if I can push for more information for you.
Unless there are lifelines, it’s going to be nigh-on impossible to win a six-figure sum. Eight questions, four options each – you only need to be hedging your bets on a couple of questions and the prize fund drops spectacularly. And I think that’s going to be a problem – when yer average viewer sees that, they’re going to think “it’s a fix” and go off to watch Have I Got Repeats For You instead.
I’m wondering how they’re going to do this, seeing as it’s apparently real money. Is the contestant going to get it in bundles of (say) £25k? Surely they can’t force it to be an equal split, because if they cover three options it’s going to be a logistical nightmare.
If they split the money equally on each question over the four answers (and could use coins too!) then they would walk away with £15.258 . LIFECHANGING!
That eight tenths of a penny is PARTICULARLY important.
They slice the coin into tenths with a hacksaw? Just a suggestion.
EXACTLY!!! and that’s is what has happened. I believe is a fix of some soert. Noone has won anything so far and yesterdays shop was very suspect to me.
It’s a stupid time to put on what is essentially just a game show – nothing “adult” about it like you can say about Big Brother or some of the Friday night stuff C4 have done over the years.
It could easily have gone in the 9pm slot across the week – or 8pm even – or a bit of both to be honest to avoid things like The Apprentice.
I really don’t see why C4 are rushing this out before Big Brother – could easily have waited till the autumn.
Didn’t Unan1mous the last Channel 4 show with a £1 million prize bomb extraordinarily? I’d predict 1.5m to start, dropping consistently to 800,000-900,000 by the end.
I came up with an idea similar to Success Verzerkezerkezkerzekerd completely independently a few years back, but on a more grandiose scale.
Rather than having just a fixed number of questions, you were given one guess to a six-digit combination after each question (questions getting progressively harder as they went along). If you got the combination right, you walked away with everything you had left. If you got it wrong, you would be given (in effect) a higher/lower hint.
Because there would be a significantly greater number of questions required to get to the end, I calculated you could start the contestant off with a £1 billion prize pot – insured to the hilt, of course, but set up as believably as possible so you could push the “you could be one question away from winning stupid million pounds” line to dramatic effect.
Assuming the contestant took a constant 50% loss on each question and repeatedly guessed the combination by halves, my calculations suggested the average player’s EV from each of the individual guesses before they got out would equal around £1,000 for each question/guess pair. I’m sure an insurer would happily take that on for 5x to 10x more 🙂
Million Pound Drop, though: I see eight questions in one hour translating on screen to little more than a tedious H.I. sob story.
The only thing Million Pound Drop has over Succes Verzekerd is the drop feature. It’s a brilliant dramatic device. It’s much more exciting and suspenseful to see some actual activity happen to your money than for a computer readout to just go away. Yeah you’re not walking away with those bills, but it’s still genius solely for the drama. I don’t know if the show will be good, but depending on how they milk the drop it could be exciting nonetheless.
Milking certainly, if they’re only doing eight questions per hour I suspect the drop device will be something people get over.
I’m looking forward to seeing it though.
Wait, are they really only doing one contestant each show and only 8 questions. Man, that’s going to get really old quickly with the enormous pauses then.
Actually, that is supposition on my part (there’s no reason they couldn’t have carryover players), but the point stands – too much deliberating and not enough quizzing is going to put people off. It’s a live show, so there will be no way of editing it down.
Although actually I don’t love the idea of carryover players in a format where it isn’t how much you win but how much you don’t lose. Are you REALLY going to get excited about the prospect of someone coming back the next day with “just” £75k to play with? I’m not.
Sucess Verzekerd had carryover contestants, for what it’s worth.
Although it could go the other, Total Wipeout way, and repeat the drop many, many times to pad space. Which probably isn’t going to happen, but you never know.
Sounds rather a lot like “Duel” to me in its gameplay as well… Incidentally, whatever happened to that one? Good clean Saturday night entertainment.
Funny you should mention that i was thinking just that, it sounds like a less exciting version of Duel.
You’ll all be pleased to hear Duel is somewhere in the new ALL TIME Top 30 in the recent Gameshow General Election. Which I’ll be writing up at the weekend, all things permitting.
More Lottery quirks:
Anyone else think it’s a bit weird that in the first draw after the coalition government, all the numbers (including the bonus) were either blue or yellow!
That is incredible! Doubly amusing how there were three of each but the ALL IMPORTANT BONUS BALL was blue. 🙂
1 in 1108 chance of all seven numbers drawn being either blue or yellow, by the way. (Or, indeed, any given pair of colours except white, but it was those two particular colours that were of interest in this draw).
There is approximately a 36% chance of the same thing happening again during the coalition’s planned five-year duration, assuming there are two draws per week throughout that period.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2010/05/12/exclusive-cube-director-desperate-to-make-video-game-version/
Found this, figured it may well be relevant to the interests of many Bar regulars.
Oh! I misinterpreted this as the director of The Cube, etc., rather than the director of Cube. Hilarity ensuezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Oh! I misinterpreted this as the director of The Cube, etc., rather than the director of Cube.
Apparently the spam-trap doesn’t like it if you try to post a comment with a word containing seventeen consecutive “z”s.
AMAZING
Since Portal was mentioned in the article, I’ll use that as a segue to throw out the fact that Steam has been launched on Mac, and they’re offering Portal for free on both Mac and PC until May 24th. If you’re a fan of condescending robotic voices talking to you like in The Cube, you’ll probably want to pick this up.
Yes indeed, and here is a lovely link:
http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/
Pretty short game as well, so well worth your time for the price.
Sorry, forgot that. Thanks.
Does anyone else search for “julian grant” scavengers from time to time, or is it just me? Pity.
Anyway, Britain’s answer to Jacques Antoine (*) is now a partner in Creative Action Group Europe; while this may sound like a Mixed Martial Arts competition, it’s actually a format house with some exciting-sounding formats; among their game show line-up, who wouldn’t want to know what the big twist is in $10 Million Cash and Grab – and, from the documentary line-up, which broadcaster would risk missing out on Ice Warriors: the Inside Story?
Oh man, more action than… Action Time!
They do like their unusual-ness, don’t they?
Sharpshooters looks like a football version of Kick Start. Which actually sounds quite good. Especially because I’m also reminded of that keepy-ups part of Under Pressure.
Succes Verzekerd is the best version of the pure format (with the increasing answer options with each question) – but the staging and conceit of ‘Million Pound Drop’ is much, much stronger. Annoyingly – a combination of the two formats would make for the best overall show I think.
Still; Davina is almost certainly the best female game show host OF ALL TIME in the UK (if not the best host of any gender – I hope she does well in the election) – which helps enormously. I’ll watch anything she’s on that isn’t BB.
The feeling I get with the format is that it’s a good game to *play* but less so to actually *watch* and I would agree the increasing number of answers makes for a more interesting game, my argument against shows which feature dwindling amounts of cash rather than accumulation loses its compellingness as soon as it starts to go a bit wrong – never mind that £50k is still a huge amount of money, it feels like small change compared to the £1m they *could* be winning.
That is why I too am very interested in the staging. But saying that, how many times can you watch what is basically some bundles of cash falling through a trapdoor before the novelty wears off? I predict: not very many.
I too like Davina, she has made the Top 30 in some capacity. Er, I think, my copy of the list is on a different computer. Pretty sure, though.
It’s a shame that Davina’s popularity has waned in recent years – ever since that chat show of hers which seemingly very few remember now.
Doesn’t help that she hasn’t had the greatest deal of work besides BB during this time.
I think it could get 10 million viewers. It sounds better than EastEnders and that gets 10 million!
Joe, lots of things sound better than Eastenders.
Talking of Dutch game shows, which we were tangentially, can someone who’s better at research than I am please discover and tell us which Dutch game show was hosted by Tjalling van den Bosch? I quite like the thought of him being the World’s Strongest Game Show Host, not least because he’s still pretty competitive at 10×10 draughts.
aTdHvAaNnKcSe