Show discussion: The Million Pound Drop

Don’t forget that lots of idle speculation can be found on this entry here, your comments on the reality of the finished product should go here.

Right, watched this, I’m writing this blind of your comments. Basically, most of the stuff I feared would happen happened, but at the same time I thought it was a better show than I was expecting:

• The general set is teriffic I thought. I like the fact they’re playing up a large tower and they can see the money tumbling beneath them. The spotlights work. I even quite like Marc Sylvain’s mood music, even though it is basically one note with some heartbeats over it.
• What’s the one way to PROVE you’re live? Davina the Talking Clock!
• I like Davina, but here she’s a but more gurn-y Big Brother than The Vault, unfortunately. But she is good at chatting to the contestants, telling them to hurry up and giving relevant facts at relevant points.
• And what of the questions? Fairly interesting, and very up to the moment.
• The players (two play as a pair, which I wasn’t expecting) are given £1m in bundles of £25k. They must answer eight multiple choice questions by placing money on the correct answers, splitting their money across answers if they don’t know but always leaving one option money-free. The first four questions have four choices, the second three three and the final question is a straight fifty-fifty.
• This is where the problems come in a bit – in the early stages, the contestants take more time putting money on the trapdoors (the set designer obviously didn’t consider how big forty wodges of cash were) than they do on thinking about the question. When a quiz becomes more about stacking and co-ordination than answering questions, you have a problem. I thought this might be a problem. It is.
• Each question is timed, the contestants have just over one minute to come to a decision and move the money. What happens if they run out of time before putting all the money on? I don’t know. Perhaps Davina will look at them a bit angrily. I’d have a hole to chuck the money down.
• If they’ve not put it all on one answer, and if time pressure causes them to pile it on a trapdoor without due care, Davina’s got to count it all. Which isn’t very elegant. 
• Wrong answers are then “dropped” one by one in time honoured quite tedious slowly-as-anything fashion. I thought they were always going to drop the wrong answers without any money on first, quickly guaranteeing success, but to their credit they mixed it up later on.
• Are the questions difficult? Yes and no. I think they’re quite well pitched in terms of trying to find the correct answer – the problem is, there’s usually one “gimme” wrong answer, so it’s much more difficult to get knocked out of the game. As such, more people might get through to Question eight than I first thought, but as I first thought it probably won’t be with much cash.
• And what of that cash? Well, in most other circumstances, £125k (for example) is and feels like a life-changing sum of money. But it’s difficult to feel that way about it, as until the final question the money in front of them is basically abstract. If we’re meant to be feeling shock and upset when a couple drop half a million… well I’m not. And I suspect most people playing won’t either, as they’re mainly concentrating on survival. As such, I think it’s quite a decent game, but I’m not entirely sure it makes for a great show. The emotional attachment to the cash isn’t there.
• And as predicted, eight whole questions in one hour. I think it needs to be faster.

So after a pretty poor start I grew to quite enjoy it, but let’s be honest, you’re not getting the same feeling of excitement like the first time you saw Millionaire, are you? Well I’m not.

Tomorrow I should be able to play along on the internet.