It’s Action Saturday! The most action-packed day of the year as not one but TWO exciting shows begin new runs this evening:
- 101 Ways To Leave a Gameshow features Steve Jones and Nemone (off of radio) in Argentina pushing people who don’t win at quizzes into a swimming pool in various fashions. For an hour. BBC1, 6:30pm
- Fort Boyard, which will get it’s seperate post.
Edit: Right watched it now:
- Eight contestants up a studio tower, in each round a question is asked with X number of answers, X-1 are correct (except in the final, where the final three battle to find one right answer). Each person picks their answer in secret, if they’re the only person to choose it then they own that answer automatically. If more than one person selects an, a buzzer question (neatly tangentally related to the subject of the main question) is asked, first to answer correctly owns it, everyone else must reselect from unclaimed answers. Rinse and repeat until everyone owns their own answer.
- Everyone lines up in a precarious position, each “lane” representing an answer. After some monster dragging out from Steve Jones, the person who owns the wrong answer is dispatched into the swimming pool in a number of apparently but actually not really spectacular ways. Each round is opened by DJ Nemone revealing the method of dispatch, and ends with Nemone interviewing the dispatched contestant.
- To break up the action, one round takes place at the “emergency exit” – whilst the contestants are strapped into wire descenders on a spinner above a hatch, they are randomly selected by tombola to answer a question. First one to get an answer wrong is sent down the hatch very slowly whilst gunge gets thrown at them, in a bit that’s a bit like the gunge tour of the house on Noel’s House Party.
- The actual quiz element is OK actually, you could take the stunts out and make an unspectacular but solid afternoon quiz out of that format, although the buzz in tie-breakers are a bit easy.
- The main problems is the immense dragging out of the dispatch. Not only do we get to go through everyone’s answers several times, alongside endless questions regarding how nervous they are, the correct answers are gradually revealed slowly, and then the final wrong answer revealed after a five second countdown, then another pause, and finally the answer, and then the Thing happens. If it’s meant to be tense and exciting, well actually it’s very boring.
- The methods of dispatch are meant to be spectacular, but actually are surprisingly dull, most of them seem to involve bungee cords, many whilst sitting in some sort of vehicle which falls beneath you as you leave a ramp (if 50 of the 101 ways are different vehicles, that’s pretty rubbish).
- I like the tower set, and the hosts’ rather contemptous attitude towards the contestants’ experiences is quite funny, and the disconnect between the feel of the studio area and the proper outside-y bit is quite interesting.
- As unusual as it sounds, the US version of this if/when it happens could be quite good, because the adverts will eat up 15-20 minutes so you’d have to assume there’d be a lot less dragging things out. As it is, it’s a show that reuqires a 45 minute slot when it has an hour to fill.
Edit: According to overnights posted on the DS Forums, this started at just under 3m but increased to just under five million as the hour progressed, increasing its share! So there we are, we’re all wrong.
Too slow but why don’t they just state the wrong answer as the first answer. Let the other survivors have some shock.
My GOD, this is slow and plodding.
Also it would’ve been better by having a quick fire quiz, first person to answer can choose the answer from the list they want.
Couldn’t be worse.
I reckon this is good news for Iron Chef UK. Now it’s DEFINITELY not No.1 for the Hall Of Shame.
Way too slow – 30 mins tbh – 5/10
1. Drop contestant into pool
2. Actually, let’s go down the pub!
It made Total Wipeout look pacey. Ridiculously slow and just overall quite poor really. The “exits” need the element of surprise to work, but in their effort to build tension they just take all the tension out of it.
Also a very poor combination of “quiz show” and “physical game show”. The Whole 19 Yards managed to combine the two perfectly, but here both the quiz element and the physical exits all seem rather pointless.
Unfortunately though it’s on BBC1 on Saturday nights – and they’ll lap up anything. Considering the awful In it to Win It has been around forever the only thing stopping this doing the same is the budget.
I’m going to tell you what I think about this format in:
5
4
3
2
1
Actually, no I’m not…
I’m going to eke it out a lot longer for no reason…
The wrong answer is…
….to make the format so slow. Not only was it achingly slow, and not only was there no shock value at all, but surely the best format would have been:
– X answers, only one of them right
– Reveal the wrong answers one by one
– Remaining (and winning) contestant goes into the final
Repeat, say, four times. Other contestants are out.
Play the final with the four winning players. First person into the final gets first pick of answer, and so on down the line.
In other words, dunk everyone but one player, don’t just dunk one player per round. Because this way you’re essentially stretching 20 seconds of stunt into a one hour format.
All I can say is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Is it sad I thought of an idea for a new game from this?
101 Ways to Leave Lottery!
Basically, pick your five exit numbers (1 to 101).
Person who matches the most, wins!
If you wish to take part, email your name and your five numbers to me! kjupepersonal@gmail.com
Thanks!
I loved this show tonight. It was fresh and fun to watch, and had the right amount of brain skill and entertainment. It was so intense when waiting for them to drop, and the actual drops looked well spectacular! This, Hole In the Wall and Total Wipeout are the best light entertainment shows on the BBC in years.
More of this please BBC 🙂
Checks sarcasm detector. Smilies confuse me!
Thankyou BBC Employee #3908762
Saw some preview clips on Another Website, and I would have to concur in just about everything said above. S-S-S-S-L-L-O-O-O-O-W-W!
This makes pre-clock WWTBAM? look like ti’s got the pace of “The Chase” or “Fifteen-To-One” by comparison. And ABC is going to run it here?? Considering the bath they’re taking on “Downfall”, I would say they’ve made a bad investment, unless they are going to do some serious tweaking of the presentation and pacing!
*Nods in agreement with the above comments*
I got the feeling the quiz sections were filmed nowhere near the bits where they got dropped into the water. Can anybody confirm this?
This could have been better, as pointed out above The Whole 19 Yards managed to do something far more entertaining with the quiz/action hybrid.
I agree with everyone’s sentiments here. 101 WTLAGS was incredibly slow. This is a massive bugbear for me with shows, where they have to drag things out, for example the losing contestant on X-Factor/BGT where you have to wait about half an hour for the reveal. As Travis said, what was wrong with just revealing what the wrong answer was? Or better yet, just dropping the contestant with the wrong answer with no warning for shock value.
I accept that in a show like this there needs to be an air of tension, and for the contestants there is. But for the viewers it just doesn’t work – you could edit out fifteen minutes of dragging out and it would improve the show immensely.
The thing is here the tension building just removes any tension, whilst on the aforementioned X Factor/BGT however long the reveal, you don’t lose the tension during the pause.
And actually it’s not tension this show needs – it’s surprise. There is zero surprise element in telling someone they’ve got the wrong answer and are about to be dropped into a pool – but just drop them without warning and I’m sure they’ll figure out on the way down they were wrong!
I also think in trying to make this a big stunt based show they’ve actually lost sight of what they were aiming to do. I get the feeling had it been done in a studio on a much smaller scale (and budget) it might have worked so much better because they’d have had to be much more imaginative in finding 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow. It certainly wouldn’t have had five variations of dropping people into a pool from various heights.
They wewre originally building the set near Cambridge, befoere they had an accident with the swimming pool that almost killed someone (apparently). I’d be interested to note the differences between then and now.
I just realized the abbreviation has the word “LAGS” in. How very fiting.
Reasonable concept, and better than I expected, but…
Major. Pacing. Problems.
Absolutely agree. Good concept – decent questions even.
I just don’t like a show in which I can make dinner, eat it, travel to Greece, have another dinner and then return, in between each question.
I’d say a 20 minute show drawn out to an hour. Less BBC, less!
I love the bit on Emergency Exit where they use slowmo on a guy being lowered, slowly, down a chute.
The logic being that if you slowmo something that is already slow, the viewer will assume that it must have originally been faster than it was! Genius!
Still, ‘101 Ways To Be Pushed Into Water Slowly’ is resounding success!
A better title would be “101 Ways To Alienate Licence Fee Payers with Cheap Drawn out Programmes”.
This ranks along with “Hole In The BBC Finances”, “Total Wipeout of Worthwhile programmes” etc.
The BBC is rapidly descending to the depths of making/scheduling programmes that I would try to avoid on cheap satellite channels and ITV.
You know, actually, after watching the whole show, I quite like it. ^_^ Yes, it’s a bit slow, but that can be fixed easily if it gets a second season. And the host! The host is hilarious!
did i hear the question right tonight for the final
which sold for more than 100K
Peles shirt
John Lennons suit
Madonnas Bra
They gave the answer as peles shirt but I believe that only sold for 79.000 whereas John lennons suit sold for 117K
Can someone please tell me if i heard this wrong tonight
QUESTION FOR FINAL
What item sold for more than 100K
John Lennons White Suit
Madonnas Bra
Peles Shirt
They said the right answer was peles shirt. However I believe it only sold for about 80K but John Lennons white suit sold for nearly 120K
Pele’s shirt actually sold for over £157k:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1896673.stm
So did the fast forward trick on this. It says something when for the final round with one question I had to jump six minutes to get from beginning to end.
And the Emergency Exit and final round repeated from last week, so only 4 new ways to drop people into a pool – so on that basis they’ll be at most 34 ways to leave a gameshow throughout the series.
I don’t think the Emergency Exit counts in the 101 count…
get a bloody life you lot, on the weakest link some bloke or bird gets to walk across the studio floor yawn, its called 101 ways to leave a game show, THATS THE POINT, there are better exits to come believe me, now get back to your curtain peeping
there are better exits to come believe me
Let’s hope so, eh.
I’m surprised this was shown in almost every big country without being improved at all. Germany had its own terrible version (it was a one off) with wannabe celebrities. Were there wannabe celebrities on the uk version as well?
No, normal members of the public in the main. Most of them seemed rather surprised by what they had let themselves in for, by the sounds of it.