Some fun news:
Thing is, I’m not sure of Bradley Walsh as host. I think he’s too nice and it requires someone who can undercut proceedings. I get why they’ve done it, he’s the nation’s sweetheart and he’ll laugh at the obvious innuendo… but when you think about old hosts, they don’t tend to laugh at it, they tend to play it with mock horror for laughs. It’s all very well sneaking into a middle-brow quiz like The Chase, on Blankety Blank where it’s expected it’s a different matter. Maybe it’ll end up being brilliant, who knows.
Do you know who’d be a really good potential host of Blankety Blank? Greg Davies.
A fun aside I had on Twitter earlier today was imagining a reversed format of Blankety Blank where the civilians are the panellists. I’ve since been thinking how such a format would work, and here’s an idea I fleshed out:
Celebrity Contestants play with Civilian Panellists, and the aim of the game is not necessarily to “fill in” the blanks, but to instead be as funny as possible. The Celebrities must write down the most hilarious wrong answer they can think of to every question asked; and the civilians are scored based on how hilarious their own responses are, with bonus points if there is a common link between the Celebrity’s suggestion and their own. The panellists who score the best in a game become the three to match with in Supermatch; and the Celebrity’s score at Supermatch is also added to their own. The funniest civilian over the entire show plays the head-to-head with the winning Celebrity, and a match wins that civilian the prize for the night; a failure still awards the civilian a small cash prize or token consolation prize equivalent to their overall score (similar consolation prizes can also be given to the five losing panellists if the producers want to stretch the budget that much)
As regards the prizes, my idea is that the funniest answers could get up to 50 points each in the main game, based on how many laughs it gets and whether it has a close link to the Celebrity’s answer (it does not necessarily have to match, just be vaguely similar). Then Supermatches are of course worth up to 150, so with two games of four questions and a Supermatch, a perfect player might net 700 points which could easily be converted into pounds or used for a Green Shield Stamp type system. Even if you gave out consolation prizes, a spend of £700 or less per panellist still gives over £5k to spend on a star prize and still fall well within a typical BBC £10k prize budget.
They really are going to keep trying with Blankety Blank until it fits, aren’t they?
To be fair, they bought Match Game back quite successfully with Alec Baldwin in the US the last few years so it’s almost certainly Fremantle pointing to that and getting a commission.
I quite liked David Walliams pointing out that it was a ‘special’ not a ‘pilot’ so they can pretend it didn’t matter if they didn’t do more.
Agree regarding Bradley Walsh – far too predictable and safe a choice.
It’s not that I think he’s safe, it’s just that what he brings to the table isn’t really in line with what Blankety Blank usually needs.
Interesting attempt to rework the logo to match the US version.