Balls.
Ian Wright has been announced as the host of The Moneyshotball for ITV which we think is the first gameshow he’s fronted in about twenty years (edit: forgot he did Gladiators on Sky, otherwise it does look like lottery quiz Wright Around the World). Sounds quite interesting from the press release – quite interested by the idea of being forced back into the game if they fail to cashout which isn’t something I think has really been explored before.
MORE BALLS, and yesterday it came to our attention that there are plans for a UK version of Holey Moley, although we don’t know what channel or anything.
This leads us to the question: who should host a UK version of Holey Moley? They bought Rob Riggle to the Australian version (which started airing this week), I figured they wouldn’t bother for the UK, but then someone pointed out he was a host on BBC3’s World Series of Dating, so perhaps? It might be very difficult to do a direct translation, US and UK sportsbroadcasting has a very different feel so perhaps they’ll try another way. Nonetheless, if you had the choice of a) commentator b) comedian commentator c) greenside reporter and d) ‘sponsor’ sportsperson, who’d you pick?
More balls now and somebody uploaded the first networked edition of Lingo from 1988 (as we understand it the first series was regional to Central the year previous):
Finally, and only tangentally related to balls in that some might get used, it’s Schlag den Star on Saturday so do join us for our watchalong.
Whilst I said on the Tweet that I’d like to see Vic & Bob do this (and I still very much would), it feels like there’s a easy trap to fall into here of sticking two comedians on this and calling it a day. Holey Moley’s commentary is so good because it’s got Joe as a compliant-but-authoritative straight man, and Rob Riggle as Rob Riggle.
Tom Flynn’s Twitter suggestion of Jeff Stelling + Tom Davis feels like something along the right lines (and you can see the obvious benefits of Stelling and Kamara). Maybe Dion Dublin as the straight man, and Tom Davis as colour commentary?
I’d be well up for Dion Dublin as the course sponsor because of all the different Holes Under The Hammer gags they can make (one, I think).
Taking a crossbow bolt to the balls would hurt, here’s an episode of Charlie Williams Golden Shot from Cleops’ channel that may not have been seen for the best part of 50 years:
https://youtu.be/rA0aZH6BMHU
It occurs to me that the Digital Delay kills the idea of a live Golden Shot these days if you play by telephone. But. But. What if you played by Skype/Discord whatever with a livestream? It’s probably *about* the same latency as the old analogue broadcasting.
I imagine that’s pretty much the same set up they use to do something like Singalong Live on Saturday Night Takeaway. I hadn’t really considered it until I read your message but they must have to send the programme down back to the contestants to reduce the delay? There’s definitely a slight delay between the studio and the contestants homes but nothing too significant.
Oh that’s really interesting, hadn’t considered that. I wonder how they set it up so as to surprise them then?
In fact the more I think about it, the crazier it seems. Imagine trying to do NTV these days – it’d require masses more work that it would have done when it first started (even then – certainly later on – there were occasions where the stooge would be watching a different feed to the rest of the nation so Noel could clue us in on what’s about to happen).
NTV today would be near impossible. With Satellite, Freeview and Cable all with different amounts of digital delay by decoding and reencoding the signal on the various transmission formats would make it very messy – and if they were watching via Sky, anything upto 6 seconds behind freeview.
Back in the day the BBC One that the ‘victim’ watched NHP on, was a ‘clean feed’ signal direct from Television Centre and sent to the television in the rook via a low powered analogue signal fed from the unmarked OB unit out of plain sight of the house of said victim.
That, was partly techinical, to stop the howl of feedback when they went live – which if the poor unfortunate had the sound up to high would have blown the speakers out of the television if they were watching via normal BBC1, and as you say, so they could feed from the OB van a totally different vt for the victim to watch from the rest of the nation.
For ‘rook’ replace with ‘room’ Thanks.
If anything, all of that is still the way you’d do it today except the equipment required will be much smaller. Clearly whenever they do something like that there is someone in the household who is in on it and helping set the victim up. You could hide all the necessary equipment in the person’s living room but then, thinking about it, if something were to stop working whilst your victim is in the room, you’d be much better off having the bulk of the equipment outside that room so an engineer can fix it before it’s too late?
I know at my work we’ve had live links with Good Morning Britain and they have used both satellite links and a box that send the feed through the internet on different occasions so the two technologies must on a similar level when it comes to quality and latency.
Seems like Ian finally managed to fix his balls as Moneyball starts 30th October at 6:30pm
Not quite sure that is quite “prime time” as previously advertised in the press release but there you go!