It’s basically Talking Telephone Numbers with Stephen Mulhern (he’s a magician, you see) but you only need to match two of six with your telephone number to be elegible to play for the £250,000 jackpot, although by the sounds of it there’s a significant chance of walking away with nothing. It’s what feelgood Saturday night entertainment is all about!
In fairness, having joked about having to be really unlucky to not be able to call a premium rate number to fill ITV’s coffers, you can enter online for free. Is this the “welcome return” to variety on Saturday nights we have apparently all been waiting for? We will find out in due course. Old-skool!
Near impossible to win £250,000 then.
This is a scam. They say the viewers get to win £250,000 but they won’t even win a quarter of that because of mathematic odds. So unfair!
After giving all 5 answers right, the odds of winning £250k is about 1 in 30,000. Too lazy to work out the odds of winning anything.
Its actually 120 in 30000 or 1 in 252 – the 5 boxes that win the 250k can be hit in any order so
5/10 X 4/9 x 3/8 x 2/7 x 1/6
Though point still stands about the terrible odds
I got a D in A-level Statistics. So…yeah.
Same 🙁
If 5 questions correct, 70%. Which my instincts told me but, no, I had to build the probability tree to prove it.
I think this lowers to 30% with 1 question correct, the higher the amount of questions correct the better in all cases (no pun intended), at a guess.
Interestingly, the odds of the final box being certain of revealing a prize in a five correct answer scenario are 0.025.
So, not only do ITV have (at best) a 30% chance of there new feel good Saturday Night gameshow lucky punter going home with nothing, they have (at worst) a 2.5% chance of an anti-climax with the final case.
Because I’ve never tried giving odds on here before, here’s my stab. If someone answers all five questions correctly and somehow makes it to the last pick without hitting any X’s, wouldn’t that make it a 50/50 gamble to win anything on the last pick? It could almost be as exciting as gambling over a half million quid on how much one knows about when the Osbournes got married. Or not.
That’s correct, yes. Five questions right followed by the first four correct (A 16.7% chance, the largest potential final two for five questions right), and we’re looking at a 50% chance of going home with nothing.
I wouldn’t call it a gamble, however, since there’s no way of walking away beforehand.
End game will probably be ruined by the digital delay too which has seen most shows drop such competitions in recent years.
I guess if you’re phone number ends 000000 you’re screwed!
Good show overall – though I think making it three numbers out of six would be a fairer compromise. Same old problem though of a 30-minute format stretched to an hour – some very painful filler!
I’m not sure general variety show fair (Singing, dancing, magic, etc) in what was in its original format and now in its revival is a general variety show with a game tacked on can really be classed as ‘filler’ myself, however…
How very Dutch DOND, Magic Numbers.
I’m phoning Endemol UK about Magic Numbers ripping off their Deal or No Deal USA format with the identical suitcases. Disgraceful!
Incidentally – On five correct answers there’s a 4.2% chance of bankrupts coming out in that way.
Lol yes Joe, i thought exactly the same thing.
I quite enjoyed the end game
As a gameshow, suffers from an overly harsh end game in which only the last (couple, in cases where less than 5 questions are answered correctly) case matters, and requirements for entry that are so easy to meet as to be almost pointless.
As a variety show… Not bad.
The questions could have been a tad more difficult to be honest but then I suppose they want people to have 5 picks.
Which, despite the annoying “Must play all your picks” rule, which turns the end game from a game (In the Can’t Stop/Pass the Pigs/etc genre) into a random number generator, does give the best odds of winning cash, I think (Though I haven’t worked out the odds for 4, 3 or 2)
As someone who has worked out all probabilities and average prize money for 3, 4 and 5 answers I can confirm you are right. Fairly minute differences though. Each correct answer ups average prize money by about 15K, though depends on which questions you get right, obviously. ITV were fairly prescriptive with their requirements for the end game. We did the best we could to be fair within the boundaries they wanted.
So, any idea why they wanted a non-insignificant possibility of ending a blatantly feel-good concept (Variety show! With viewer prizes!) on a total downer?
Though certainly the most likely of the new Saturday Night formats to get me viewing again.
…Although I note you’re competing with 101 Ways To Cure Insomnia and a piece of pure fluff, albeit an enjoyable one, but… Great choice of presenter for it, though, nice to see Stephen Mulhern’s still in work now that CITV don’t make programs. (…Michael Underwood is still in requirement of a Crystal Maze revival, however) – I’m kinda curious if the moments he seemed to be channeling Schofield were direction or him, mind…
But, hey, yeah, if you’re working to order – Commissioner wants; commissioner gets, in both art and entertainment.
…And was that an infinity sign on the set behind the musical act? If so, cute touch.
It’s not that ITV don’t want winners, I’m actually pretty certain they do, it’s more a case of trying to strike a balance between a big and exciting top prize and an average weekly giveaway that fits the budget. Anyway, while I’m itching to get involved in the statistical analysis I fear my employers may not appreciate it, so will bow out gracefully at this point!
If that’s the compromise they want, they should get a British version of Pasapalabra set up already!
I personally think it is about time we had a harsh end game. It is not like the caller has spent an hour answering hard questions or putting themselves through physical challenges to get to that stage.
Yes the £250,000 jackpot is not likely to be won, but that did not spoil my enjoyment, knowing that it was unlikely to be won.
Great choice of host btw, it is about time Stephen was given a chance on a primetime Saturday night show, that did not involve clips of animals or old men losing their trousers.
I think there is a time and a place for harsh end games, but shiny floor shows on Saturday night prime-time really aren’t it. Can anyone honestly say “ooh, that was good television!” rather than “well that was a bit of a waste of an hour”? It’s a similar sort of trap Who Dares Sings fell into, trying to inject tension into an atmosphere where it’s not really warranted.
The rest of it was OK I suppose.
Agreed entirely – Harsh endgames are fine, as far as they go (Although I’m pretty much bored of them by now), for the most part, but… Not in a show that’s been pure feel-good-fun for the past hour or so.
I see your point brig, about how maybe the harsh end game did not fit the show, but don’t agree that it was a waste of an hour.
For me it is very much the type of show i want to see on a Saturday night. Compared to say Push The Button i had far much more enjoyment from this than i did PTB. I certainly did not feel like i had wasted an hour, but in the same breath would not make a special effort to watch.
It’s also not really a game. Would be better if, as someone alluded too earlier, the player could opt out and bank the cash won at anytime rather than had to play all five cases.
Well, there is a game there – The 90 second slow-fire five questions.
Then there’s a random number generator, which determines the prize… And takes about the same amount of time as the questions.
(tl;dr: Fun show, and even the endgame felt like it worked, but something still feels fishy.)
Hm. So I watched the majority of a show (I skipped some bits because YouTube was randomly slow on loading some portions and I don’t care much for the musical interlude), and on the whole, it’s very interesting, and somehow rather watchable. It didn’t really try to pose itself as a serious show until the very end, and I must admit that I laughed quite a bit at some segments. It was just fun to watch. Again, I’d echo the sentiments that I wouldn’t clear my schedule to watch this (even if I could see it live), but it just came off as a fun show.
What probably surprised me the most was that despite knowing the mathematical odds, the end game really wasn’t that bad to watch. Heartbreaking, yes, but still watchable. It felt natural mixed in with the rest of the show. Knowing what I know from our discussions, it did still feel unfair, and no doubt people are now calculating the perfect number of questions to answer correctly to maximize their potential prize winnings. Still, it just seemed to fit, and I’m sure that even if the top prize is never reached, the eventual win of 120k or so could still be quite exciting.
Actually, what bothered me the most was the games themselves. When “random” (yes, I know they didn’t call it random once throughout the show) numbers are based on human error, it just feels like you’re going to get a lot of middle-of-the-road numbers. Memory-based games will probably get the classic “seven plus or minus two” and Hammer Time (assuming it’s used regularly) will likely get something in the 5-8 range. The only game that really felt random was the phone/shoe race (although it seems to have been missing a 0?), since every number really does have an equal chance, rather than looking like a bell curve with 5 in the middle. While I know there’a always the chance that the celebrity could be thick as a brick and consistently score low numbers or everyone could be on a roll and get high numbers, it just feels like everything could, nay, should gravitate toward the middle numbers. I’ll gladly eat humble pie if someone would like to prove me wrong (I know at least one of you is already keeping track of the numbers and what sort of game won them), but something just doesn’t feel right about how the numbers are picked. If it means anything, I sorta felt the same way with the clip of one game from Talking Telephone Numbers that was posted a while back. Granted, I know that since only two numbers need to match, the odds really favor anyone who owns a phone to get in, even if the numbers are central-centric, but something still doesn’t feel right about it.
No I was thinking of bring up a similar point – later in the run of Talking Telephone Numbers, the games were dropped completely – the acts would come on, do their turn, then stop a flashing random number generator wheel thing to generate numbers. I idly wonder if that was introduced because of “around 5” element.
How much it spoils the show, on the other hand, is open to interpretation.
Yeah – For the last series, they ditched the games and went for random number generator in TTN.
As I said on here earlier – Fairer that way, but not as fun.
I think there was no 0 on the phone/shoe thing as the whole thing was on a 90 second timer. If nobody did it, it’s a 0. I reckon.
Also it’s probably here that I say the font selection is quite bad.