Sundays, 7pm,
ITV
Gary Lineker invites contestants to a game of knowledge and strategy in order to win up to £100,000.
Contestants choose where to sit on a row of chairs with the person at the front of the queue facing questions. Getting a question wrong means moving to the red chair at the back of the queue and everyone moving up a place. Periodically the person in the red chair is eliminated. In the final round, the final three vie for the front seat where every question is worth £10,000, but only the person sitting in it after ten questions gets to keep the cash. Edit: Apparently this final round might have changed.
Footballing legend Gary Lineker is untried as role of gameshow host, but he has twenty years of TV experience so hopefully he’ll be as good as Ian Wright. I’m sure the game will be fine (even if it all boils down to “don’t get the last question wrong”). Let’s be clear here: whether it’s going to be successful or not is going to be largely down to whether the chairs move or not, or whether everyone’s going to have to get up and swap seats between wrong answers, and the signs are pointing to “no” here which seems like a missed opportunity.
Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Not to be confused with the Brian Dowling one: https://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?p=8191
Or with what Gary famously did in a football game in the early 90s. Amazed though this is his first gameshow hosting role.
The set looks good in the trailer but it does seem to be the Millionaire Hotseat format and fear it’ll be painfully slow if it’s 10 questions over an hour.
No, every round is X questions.
So far so daytime. Is it just me who feels like the chairs should be doing the moving for them?! I just think in primetime I’d expect the seats to be able to fly all over the place but having the contestants stand and move feels so… basic.
No, absolutely this should be the case – that would be visually fun and memorable, right now what’s there is, you know, OK, would have flown twenty years ago, but far too bog standard for primetime 2021. That final round has quite a clever conceit, of course it’s ruined by being seven questions over 25 minutes.
It’s so frustrating, modern formats are fairly watertight in terms of the game working (compare and contrast to formats that have made it to TV clearly broken), but really suffer when it comes to making that interesting for the viewer. It’s not enough to be good *to play*, it has to be worth my time watching as well.
Gary Lineker was OK, but I reckon he comes across as a bit above it – compare with Ian Wright who seems genuinely thrilled by everything that’s happening even if the show is a bit rubbish.
I like the tactics in the final, but wow this is slow-moving, with far too much admin. I wonder if it would have more energy if they were simply standing behind colour-changing podiums in a circle, instead of watching them sitting on those comfy-looking chairs. But then, Standing Behind a Fortune isn’t a phrase.
It’s pretty bad that Gary Linker doesn’t give any additional information about the answers, such as why Brad’s Drink was called that, or correcting the year a contestant gave for the Gunpowder Plot. It meant I was looking at Wikipedia more than the telly!
Agree the chairs not moving up the track was a shame. People switching seats in gameshows rarely looks good, hence it usually involves a cut. Surely they could edit the seats sinking down then reappearing with the contestants in their new position.
This felt like it should be a bit better and they basically took the Hotseat format and tweaked it enough to avoid a lawsuit, though forgot to change the final prize winnings graphic.
I think this might be the first new format since the height of the pandemic that actually looks like a pre-pandemic production. Audience, studio… pretty big milestone.
The “7 questions in 25 minutes” endgame was actually what I was expecting the whole show to be; six players struggling through the chair and building up a pot up to the conclusion. In the end it turned out to be three players and a dwindling pot, but the play-in rounds were fun too. Definitely enjoyed this one; it’s certainly better than Moneyball that’s for sure. We’ll see where it ranks in this “three new formats presented by former footballers in as many weeks” stretch when Alex Scott’s The Tournament starts tomorrow.
I quite liked the bluff and tactics of the finale but the first 2/3rds of the game was aggressively boring. Basically, queueing: the quiz.
I thought the opponent choosing the category worked quite well in the two contestant round with just two questions but didn’t work in the final round with 7 questions and 3 contestants. The idea of it being a tactic to get your opponent to get a question wrong but also that costing you money didn’t seem well thought through.
I liked the idea on the final question of the next contestant answering from the remaining answers and that could have been in play throughout.
Overall though too slow and a bit too convoluted.
1st episode of this got 1.9m on the night, consolidating to 2m.
Curiously the second episode gained 400k on the first (in the overnights). So not out of the running yet.
Also on 30 mins earlier tonight, which may or may not be helpful.
Episode two ended up doing 2 5m, which is quite an uplift.