Weekdays, 3pm,
Channel 4
Anita Rani invites contestants to play Dis or Dat whilst avoiding D’other for a potential £10,000.
Teams must try and sort lists into categories, but resident fiends Bobby Seagull and local boy Frank Paul have snuck in answers that don’t belong in either list – answer traps, which our contestants must try to avoid.
This looks like great fun from the trailers – it’s certainly got a great look and front of camera talent. I hope there’s some sort of competition between Seagull and Paul in getting people to fall for their answers. If it’s good I hope it doesn’t get lost in the daytime shuffle – Channel 4 not really the sort of place people go for this sort of thing in the afternoons. It’s being produced by Ben Shephard’s OMG Entertainment, who have done pretty well with Lingo and The Cube. Let us know what you think in the comments.
The trailer has a brief snippet that showed a score counter Paul and Bobby have, so I think their rivalry is a core part of the show!
Ooh I missed that!
That’s me and my sister
A nice show, good theming and nice hard but not too hard questions. If I had one big complaint, it’s the end-game prize ladder being a bit too harsh for my liking, but it’s not going to be impossible to get the £10K on offer here I feel.
This one was the better of the two- sorta like a new version of Wipeout (the Daniels version)…
General breakdown:
-Rd 1, each team plays a board with 9 answers. Seven fit into one of two categories (at least one right answer per category), other two are Answer Traps. They pick an answer and say what category it fits. Right answer puts £50 in their bank, Wrong answer (but it fitting the other category) puts nothing in the bank. Hitting one Answer Trap is fine- hit the 2nd one and you’re done for the round.
-Rd 2 has 2 boards, and now the game is head to head. Two clues are given to the boards, and the teams have to decide who will play one board and who plays the other. 12 answers are given; 8 fit, 4 are Answer Traps. The players selected on each team take it in turns; a correct answer is worth £100, a wrong answer (but not a trap) is worth nothing, and again, 1 Trap is fine, 2 and you’re done (and this time it can give the other team a shot at clearing the remaining answers).
-Rd 3 has one board with 16 answers. This time however there are three categories that 12 of the answers fit into, other 4 are Answer Traps. A correct answer is worth £200; and this time a wrong answer (but not a trap) means the other team gets to guess which of the other 2 categories it fits for a possible steal. Same rules for Answer Traps- 2 and you’re done (and the other team can finish any answers).
-Team with most money in the bank goes to play the final. This is pretty much straight Wipeout; they’re given a clue to 2 possible boards to play and pick one. There’s only one category, and 16 answers; 10 correct, 6 Wipe…er, Answer Traps. To win any money at all, they have to find 8 of the 10 right answers. Get that, they win their bank. They can then try and double it by picking a 9th right answer; get that, they can then go for the 10th and final answer for the £10,000 top prize. And one more time, 1 Answer Trap is fine, 2 and they lose the lot.
I enjoyed it, there are always some obvious answers and some hard ones, and the Answer Traps somewhat relate to the topics (for example, one of the categories in the episode was “UK Game Shows”. Two of the Traps were answers that were close to actual UK shows, but one was a Russian show, and the other was a fictional Gameshow on a soap opera…) The banter between the host and the Trapsetters was good, and the opening titles were really nice. A solid B+ from me (and a ton better than Unbeatable)
Great recap of the format, but on a point of order: the “soap opera” in question was actually long-running sitcom Only Fools and Horses. Apparently they’d asked for permission to use the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ name set and host, but were denied. It was a BBC show and at the time, Millionaire was one of ITV’s relatively new big hit programmes.
The chemistry on this is pretty good, and that goes a long way. Bobby and Frank were used in the right way. Graphics were a little flat and colourless, but served the purpose.
The questions were not as wacky as Dis or Dats (cities Vs cities, nicknames Vs nicknames) so didn’t really make the most fun out of the premise. But the difficulty gradient was good.
Not keen on the finale, which is just Wipeout. And I think gambles leave a bad taste in the mouth these days.
Nice to see a bit of effort put into the set, though it made me wish for a UK version of The Hustler instead. Mechanics work well but it felt a bit flat to me.
Not the most exciting show I’ve ever seen, but it’s alright and has a bit of personality to it, thanks to the three co-hosts and the library-themed set (which is very Channel 4, recalling Treasure Hunt and 1001 Things You Should Know).
If I was stuck indoors and couldn’t do anything all day except watch TV, I’d be very happy with C4’s current daytime lineup, it’s very strong.
Unbeatable is a show I like, but which feels a bit repetitive; The Answer Trap is a show I feel like I *want* to like, but am not convinced by. I honestly couldn’t tell you which is better in my eyes – I don’t hate either, and will probably end up watching both for their full runs, but… I can’t say I find either compulsive viewing.
I thought this was OK. Stretches out the hour nicely, it’s fun to play along, and actually conveys some factual information which is always nice. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for it but I’d certainly watch it if it was on.
Looks like it cost nothing to make compared with the BBC’s effort yet it is far more entertaining.
I quite liked it, but felt a /little/ slow for me at times; perhaps if it was a bit shorter it might feel faster. Nevertheless, I had it on whilst doing something else and it was amusing/interesting/entertaining enough; nothing there put me off watching it again, so that’s a bonus. I did feel Frank and Bobby were sitting there most of the time just making reaction faces – I’m not sure if they could (or should) become more like Osman interjecting more frequently, but it’s certainly good to have a bit of variety and not to just have a host and the computer/questions.
I spotted Paddy Duffy in the credits being involved with the questions again, too…
Enjoyed this, it’s like a modern charming version of Wipeout, and feels like the sort of thing that’ll be an off-work afternoon treat. Anita, Frank and Bobby very strong. Game is fun and set and graphics absolutely lovely (although they probably need to make the warning graphic on the scoreboard a bit bigger than millimetres of red/black industrial tape they’re currently using). I like they don’t drag out the reveals for half an hour. I think the game progresses nicely, although I suspect they’ll be points where one team gets too far ahead to be caught and it’s unclear whether they have a nice resolution for this.
Still think this might get lost in the afternoons though, which would be a pity.
Another question mark: If you get to nine answers in the final with both lives intact, can you walk away if your first guess is wrong?
One last thing, there was an answer in one of the rounds where the contestants put “Mars” in the wrong category, it should have been “associated with Tuesday”. I didn’t hear any explanation for it (not ruling out I might have just missed it) when it actually would have been really useful.
290k for ep 1 (4.8%, for all you share heads).
One number is not a trend. Hopefully it will notch upwards.
Sadly C4 is far from the daytime beast it once was, mainly thanks to CBBC and CITV being cleared off BBC1 and ITV respectively all those years ago and ITV especially benefitting from it. Not quite sure how they get themselves out of that situation either – not a lot seems to have worked for them leaving a fairly uninspired schedule of A Place in the Sun, Four in a Bed and Come Dine with Me in place for probably far longer than any of them should have been.
I can potentially see this game being added to our ever-expanding roster of Discord games, with how simple it looks to write boards for. What does everyone else think?
I was playing with an idea a while back for Wipeout with a ‘Spotlight panel’ writing Wipeouts for a lobby team to play, so the panel were trying to fool as many people as possible while the lobby were playing Wipeout in the normal fashion. This feels like a nice refinement of the idea.
Alright, so two things we learned today which come under “pity but not deal breakers”:
1) When one team can’t be caught, the other team play for pride. Don’t like this, it puts the losing team in a bit of a poor situation – effectively stop the other team from making money for no reason, or just throw the questions. It’d make more sense to just let the winning team finish the board really.
2) They’re wedded to the £10,000 jackpot even if it means the last jump isn’t a double. I don’t think that’s quite so bad when you’re going in with just over £2,500 – I don’t think anyone’s going to risk £4k+ on that final jump unless they know – probably even less in fact – but it’s not a great look, especially if they’re taking around £3k into the final. Would it blow the budget to say £10k minimum, but set at redouble if that would take them past it? I get it, it’s easy to just advertise a big round number, but looks a bit off.
Both of these things are a bit unelegant and are a pity, but don’t do enough to take away from the fact that I’m finding it very enjoyable, and quite sad I’m going into the office for the rest of the week.
On the plus side, surprised Anita Rani hasn’t been given more quizzes in the past, she’s a natural.
The 4 winning totals so far have been £2200, £2300, £2650, and £2200- so it looks like they’re trying to set it up so a winning score of just under £2500 is normal, which would mean £10,000 is just slightly better than a redoubled bank- though I predict in the 30 eps they have, the ten grand will be won maybe twice (unless the team really knows the category, most probably will stop at the 8 correct level, especially if they’ve used their one safe trap- and even at 9 correct with no mistakes it’ll be a big risk)
I’d rather an uncatchable lead than what we’ve seen on some ITV Saturday shows lately where the whole show is made redundant a heavily weighted prize on the final round. And didn’t we all hate Tie the Leader?
Nobody’s saying there shouldn’t be uncatchable leads, we’re saying that in those instances the leading team should just clear the rest of the board alone, there is no material reason for the losing team to continue, they’re leaving with nothing anyway.
Rule very clear – if you have both lives left, you can’t walk away if you choose to play on and get next one wrong.
Episode 7 overnighted with 177k (3.5%). Deserves much better.
A list:
Ep1 0.29m (5%)
Ep2 0.20m (4%)
Ep3 0.23m (4%)
Ep4 0.18m (3%)
Ep5 0.11m (2%)
Ep 6 0.16m (3%)
Ep 7 0.18m (4%)
We could charitably suggest a V shape here.
Ep 8: 152k
Ep 9: 185k
Ep 10: 194k.
Ep 11: 212k.
I have noticed in the final game today and last Friday most of the answers are in alphabetical order. Those NOT in order are all answer traps. It is as if the answers were put on the board and gaps were left for the traps to be added. Oops!
Yeah i noticed that and i wonder if production picked up on that depending on the production order.
Very interesting spot! Will be interesting to see how regularly the board is arranged like that! I’m amazed it’s not just completely random!
Having just caught up on today’s show you’re absolutely right, though you can’t necessarily eliminate all 6 traps this way. Today, only 3x answers were out of alphabetical order (and were indeed all traps) but 3x traps were also buried in the alphabetical sequence – namely Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin and Blondie.
Yes great spot, I’m told it’s a genuine cock up (they hadn’t noticed) and won’t happen if it gets a second series.
Sorry this really is an awful show. The idea is good but the presentation and delivery is really really bad. I like Anita Rani but it seems that Channel 4 has just given her a quiz show to keep her happy without actually thinking is the show any good.
The presentation is in my opinion its strongest point, it’s a gentle take on dis-or-dat, and you need that slower pace to let the Trappers explain their answers. It’s built to be a 3pm show!
Unfortunately also notice this in the first rounds. The answers to all categories are in alphabetical order, so careful scrutiny allows you to work out most of the Answer Traps as you go along. I wonder if any contestants noticed this as they played or maybe the pressure of playing didn’t give them any clues. Watching the program daily I now have to try and avoid noticing the obvious when playing along but it is difficult
I heard that The Answer Trap hasn’t been recommissioned for a second series. A real pity.
Proper shame. Ta.
Shameful from Channel 4
Bad mistake.
Maybe the viewers thought Unbeatable was better.
Not hugely surprising but felt there was a decent show in there.