The Chase! Come Dine With Me! The Million Pound Drop!
All shows I won’t get to watch until really late on timeshift. Don’t let that stop you commenting though, I’ll catch up eventually.
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The Chase! Come Dine With Me! The Million Pound Drop!
All shows I won’t get to watch until really late on timeshift. Don’t let that stop you commenting though, I’ll catch up eventually.
Davina revealed a bit more on This Morning.
It’s in bundles of £25,000 in used £50 notes, and players have to leave one drop free for every question, so can only spread it across three answers, meaning there is always a risk of an incorrect answer.
Contestants will also roll over from one show to the next, so if someone does get question one wrong they’re not left with 50 minutes to fill. And Davina has said in the pilots people have got the first question wrong.
Ta for that, bundles of £25k sounds about fair. It will be interesting to see how much faff is involved on a live TV show, though.
and from DS – if you survive all 8 questions you face a final 2 option question where you have to risk it all or nothing
Blimey, they really don’t want to give much money away, do they?
Oh great, a Bit Of A Wasted Journey moment right at the end. I despair.
Let me be the first to say: “THE MILLION POUND FLOP”. I expect you’ll be hearing that a lot in the days to come.
Second prediction: what would be really good is that if they recorded it, then they could edit bits out.
I’d imagine in the latter stages they’d have to break down the £25k bundles. Indeed in theory for question 1 you could just put £25k on the right answer and be left with just that left to play with. They could be asking if anyone has change for a 50 quid note towards the end!
It’s just a shame that I seem to like everything I’m hearing about this show except the time slot – I’m sure C4 could have found a week to air it at 9pm, even if it meant holding it back till the autumn.
I imagine they won’t, they’ll just make it all or nothing if they get down to the final bundle (as ever, I look forward to being hilariously wrong).
Not sure I love the previously hidden all or nothing Question 9 – big ending, yes, but it’s already going to be quite difficult to win big money I suspect.
Now watch as someone wins £400k+ on the first go.
I agree with Brig 97% on the ‘this is going to be an incredibly stingy show’ angle and indeed just tweeted that I’d quote no longer than 4-1 on the entire series giving away nothing.
However, let’s compare with the parent format, which also has an impressive record of not giving away money (I think I’ve seen one winner, and I’m not even sure about that):
SUCESS VERZEKERD
* Seven questions, with n+2 options where n is the question number
* Money can be split any way possible – uneven divides (e.g. €1m between three options) get rounded to the nearest euro, with the remainder thrown one euro at a time on certain options (IIRC from seeing it)
* Money can be split between all possible options thus acting as a guarantee of getting the question
* However, you can only split on three questions – you have to get four right without splitting
MILLION POUND DROP
* Eight questions with four options and one with two
* On the four-option questions, money can be split in £25k chunks between at most three options
* This can – as far as we know! – be done on any number of occasions, although in practice you can only split it equally three times anyway (40 bundles becomes 13/14, becomes 4/5, becomes 1/2) so in practice you have to get five right without splitting, maybe four with one or two others where you just leave a couple of bundles on other options as a reserve
* And then you still have to get the 50-50 final question.
Remember, the format’s international English-language sales title is Risking It All, so we should have known a twist like this was coming. I disapprove of it, because it means the show is going to be sold on a gambling angle when in fact what it is is an endgame within a single-player game: “You’ve survived all eight questions and now have £75,000, and now just one question stands between you and all that money. One question, just two possible answers… get it right, you win the money. Get it wrong, you leave with nothing.”
A gambling element would be to offer a bailout before facing the final question.
Actually if you want to keep the theme (ish) and create a proper dramatic endgame, how about this: unbundle the money (in an adbreak, natch) and place it in some oversized hourglass type prop with a shutter at the narrowest point and all the money starting at the top. (Ideally, the bottom half should be under the studio floor.) Contestants then have to get x questions correct to win the money – every time they get a question wrong, the shutter opens and the money starts falling, but if they get another one right the flow stops. Hence, getting x questions in a row correctly without a mistake wins you the lot. Or you could do that with a time limit – say, 60 seconds, with the flow of cash such that the whole lot disappears in 20.
As for why the show is at 10pm, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s in case there’s swearing 🙂
God – I was hoping the catchphrase “You are live on C4 – please do not swear” would die with Big Brother.
It’s looking like a cross between Duel (the game play) and Deal or No Deal in a way – having that big jackpot which is almost certainly unattainable, but basically having a new jackpot to aim for after every question. Only difference here is there is no option to bail out.
I do quite like the idea of losing money like an hourglass – but heck, Endemol could get a whole other format out of that idea!
Hasn’t ‘Cash Clock’ been used elsewhere, though?
Very good comparison.
Not sure what I think of the whole “atomic bundles of 25k” thing. On the one hand, they make the prospect of the contestants going home with nothing (and thus a big nothing-related reaction) much higher. On the other hand, people starting with a million and taking home fifty quid is quite funny. Wonder if it might work to insist people can’t split until they’re down to the last 25k, and then they can only split the last 25k into five 5k, er, wadlets?
The more I think about it, the better-designed Sucess Verzekerd seems – the whole “can only split on three questions” stipulation is very smart. I have a suspicion that a reasonable proportion of games will end with someone splitting their wad 25k-25k-(lots) and then just trying to have to hold on to one 25k bundle for several questions, which is much less interesting than the rest of the show.
Don’t like to see them explicitly saying that the questions aren’t going to be too tough; you know (well, I exaggerate, but it would seem to me to be a very short-odds bet) that that means that they’re going to pick contestants who aren’t too bright and try to focus this as a negative entertainment “he/she lost a million pounds because he didn’t know (relatively common fact)” sort of show. Then again, Big Brother broadly became more and more negative entertainment as the series went on, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
Yep, once £25k remained they should be able to split into 5 x £5k, and then into 5 x £1k if required. Might have to do it from £50k though so at £50k you are not restricted to just two answers.
I’m all the remaining cash needs to be placed *SOMEWHERE* in each of the questions. So with no option to walk it is all being risked on each question.
So the final Q isn’t really a gamble or and end game at all. It’s just a ninth question that plays the same as each of the previous but with a greater chance of guessing the right answer.
It does seem very unsatisfying. Plus I’m not sure SUCESS VERZEKERD is the parent format is it? At least not officially?
No, I think you’re right although if I was Fremantle, I might like a quiet word.
Here’s the linky for the all or nothing question
She also mentions the questions aren’t hard either so it may just be winnable
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/interviews/a221110/davina-mccall-the-million-pound-drop.html
And then on the other hand the publicity I’d read elsewhere, including on TV listings information, talks up ‘eight tough questions’. So Davina might just have gone off-message here 😉
So, I’ve just watched the time lapse set construction video on the Channel 4 website, and around 1.24 in, if you have a look at the led lozenge shaped screen at the back of the set, there if some kind of clock on it. Makes me wonder if Question 8 has a time limit on it…
At least though the set looks more impressive that the ‘millionaire’ lite version Sucess Verzekerd was landed with – but – I don’t like how Channel 4 have labeled up the set construction page ‘The Secret Set’. Makes it sound like a room in the house that is kept away from the Big Brother housemates until week around week 6 – or when ratings head towards less than a million in the first month.
I hope this is not a whole stunt to drum up publicity for the last BB series, and a twist is given to the winner whereby they have to go into the BB house and have to perform tasks set by BB and everyday they stay there they get some of the money won on The Million Pound Drop back…
There are similarites
Made by Endemol from a format originated in Holland – just like BB*
Stripped at 10pm across the week – just like BB.
Hosted by Davina – just like BB
Talks about twists to the quizshow format – just like BB’s twists
Broadcast live from 3 Mills Studios in Bow – just like the first handful of BB series.
(* – yeah I know Sucess Verzerkard isn’t a Endemol NL show in Holland, but that is my only flaw in my case, yer honour…)
I imagine most of the questions will have a time limit to stop one person eating up the entire live show on one question he’s not sure on.
I suspect they’ll adapt what Aussie Multi-Millionaire Live had, by having a stop clock if the host/producer thinks they pondered for too long. Their clock was for 30 seconds.
Had to laugh at Davina claiming it was being done at a “top secret location” when those wanting tickets are told it’s at the Three Mills Studios.
If this is a success (and I guess at 10pm remaining above 2m would be considered a success) I bet C4 will immediately begin looking at how to cut costs for any second season – so the live element will probably go ASAP.
P.S. Apart from the Friday night comedy stuff and Codex, is this C4’s first prime-time quiz show since Grand Slam?
IIRC, when WWTBAM did a live show in Australia, they told the players the producers had the right to throw up a 60-second clock if they thought they were stalling (this was before the Hot Seat format).
Chaps (who might have this entry bookmarked, for whatever reason),
Feel free to speculate on these shows here, but I’ve started new posts for commentary for each show on Excitement Monday to keep the discussions focussed and easy to follow, in theory.
This is an experiment.
In other news, the trailer has been released for Big Brother’s Death Season:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/big-brother/articles/the-big-send-off
Notice that that is as far as I’m aware, the FIRST EVER GLIMPSE of Marcus Bentley ever!
The full thing will be revealed during Drop tonight, in an ad-break so I’m guessing it’s about 3 mins long.
Ever? No, he’s been on Big Brother’s Little Brother loads of times.
As far as I was aware remember…
I never watch Little… and on further investigastion, it isn’t the only time ever…
But still, I found you a trailer…
It was fairly short, but it was fun, and I do like the jazz funeral motif. I did enjoy playing “recognise the old contestants” – particularly Nick Bateman’s “oh, what the hell” shrug. I suppose it poses the question about whether they could do with going out on an all-stars series or not.