Saturday, 6pm,
BBC1
I forgot to watch the pilot episode ages ago but the BBC have made a four-episode series of this, where contestants compete for A PLACE ON THE PLANE! tickets to go to Las Vegas.
Suspect this is more about having a vehicle for the nation’s sweethearts Brad and Holly on BBC1 than being a top class world beating format, it is rather giving off Totally Saturday! vibes from what little I’ve seen of it. Still, though.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Incidentally, in what feels like a bit of a waste of episodes in this heat, the new series of The Wheel starts tonight at 8:30pm also on BBC1. I don’t think the second series is going to be different enough to warrant its own Show Discussion post, so here’s a link to the original one.
The pilot was largely terrible so will be interesting to see if they’ve made anything watchable out of this.
It doesn’t really feel like it’s been thought through as a whole. Each individual segment is pretty good, but as a whole programme it’s a bit of a mess, not in a fun Saturday Night Takeaway/Noel’s House Party way but it’s just disjointed.
I’ve found what could be the inspiration of the Avanti Un Altro! final game:
Disney Club in Italy in the 90s was presented as a game show whose last game was the “Reverse World” where contestants must answer yes/no questions quickly and WRONG or face points deduction.
http://www.hashcut.com/v/xJQo6pj
Heh, big punishment for being wrong!
Well… it’s fortunate they’ve got Bradley and Holly because the features are otherwise pretty underwhelming, like someone watched Saturday Night Takeaway, came up with the first thing they thought of and went “that’ll do.” And is the big grand finale ending really watching some people guessing a number into a keypad?
The funniest part for me is when the first game went into a tie-break and this was thought so exciting it got its own sting.
The option to swap passports in the passport pickup round threw me into a probabilistic quandary. My immediate reaction was that it’s a Monty Hall problem (you know, the two goats and a car thing) and therefore you should hold onto your passport. But surely it can’t be right for both contestants to swap? Took me a little while to realise the flaws in my reasoning.
You’re not alone there. I was originally going to make an argument that this was a classic example of the Monty Hall Paradox; but on closer reflection, it’s actually the exact opposite. Monty Hall assumes there is only one favourable outcome of the three choices; and it is one of the bad choices that gets removed. However, here there are TWO good passports and one bad; and we can assume that we’ll always see one of the good ones removed as otherwise, the trade is redundant anyway.
I thought the same, but this leads to a pretty paradox. Monty Hall reasoning would suggest that you had 2/3 chance of starting with a Vegas passport, and since the reveal of an opponent’s Vegas passport provides no new information, that probability is still 2/3. Therefore you shouldn’t switch. However, your remaining opponent could similarly calculate the probability that they hold a vegas passport as 2/3. These can’t both be right – only one of you has a Vegas passport, so those probabilities should add up to 1. So either we’ve just proved 2/3 + 2/3 = 1, or there must be a flaw in the reasoning, right? 🙂
You ain’t going to believe this, but some newspapers are now branding this show as the worst ever.
That can’t be fair, the pilot pulled in decent numbers and let’s not forget that the company that does the Wheel and Michael McIntyre’s big show is involved in this.
Alas, those particular papers – I won’t name them – can (for the most part, anyway) get away with saying whatever the hell they like without giving a stuff about whether it’s fair or not. 🙁
No disrespect intended towards those who *do* enjoy reading those particular papers, of course.