Show discussion: Drop Zone

3:35pm, BBC1

Right, have a chat about this here, I’ll update it with my opinions after the show has gone out.

Edit: Right, watched it now. I’ll see if I can hide my discussion of it under a spoiler link. It’s certainly worth a watch on iPlayer if you missed it, I reckon. Sorry if it seems a bit rushed, I have to go out.

Right. Basically if you went by the hype, it’s the BBC’s answer to The Amazing Race. The reality is, it’s more like a sort of more reality version of Passport with Anneka Rice, if you can remember that, possibly with more terrain trekking.

• Eight teams begin, this first week the Drop Zone is the Isle of Skye – Drop Zones throughout the series go through Europe and eventually end up in Vietnam. The aim is perform tasks and not be the last team to reach the helicopter. However, it is not task – location – task – location – task – helicopter, the tasks are all seperate, with doing well earning advantages for the third important task.
• In this first episode, task one involves putting together a metal detector then finding cannisters on a beach – at least eight of which have a bottle of whiskey in them with the name of the next location, the others are filled with red herring items. At least one of the teams clearly weren’t listening and tried to move on having found a haggis and a Scottish flag, leading to all sorts of amusing comments from host Steve Jones.
• Location sorted, the teams then have to get there. There are two routes to the castle location – the more direct route through a forest, or a longer route around the coast (about six miles) – the only stipulation is that the teams can’t use tarmac.
• As part of their team packs is a book with “learn me!” written on the front, a history of the location. They must race to the location whilst learning the information in the book. Several teams just ignored it, obviously.
• Each team is carrying a GPS, they don’t use it for their own benefit it’s so the production team can keep tabs on everybody and Steve Jones can fly past in his helicopter and occasionally stop and interview people. This is about 10-15 minutes of people looking a bit lost and arguing with each other, which is less interesting than the actual tasks proper themselves, especially as it will be happening twice, effectively. It is surprisingly low octane to watch but the music is quite good.
• The first team to the location gets an advantage for the third and final challenge, and effectively places second through eighth are worth the same (which is a bit poor I reckon).
• The second challenge starts immediately (apparently, although I suspect not) as each team reaches the location. You know those books the teams were charged with studying? Well now they’re going to give a tour of the castle (admittedly, to people who already work there and the Scots’ Historical Society). These people will fire off questions to the guides, correct answers earn points. The four teams with the most points get a luxury night, and the losers have to spend the night in sleeping bags in the stables after a tough day in the hills. Quite good, in the sort of The Mole/Ultra Quiz spirit… but ultimately filler. But saying that, one person was so incensed with the stables she quit the show, leaving her two teammates to carry on without her.
• The third and final challenge involved transporting cabers across a river to professional caber tossers. Each caber is named, and each team has to work out who to give their caber to. The clue was that each persn had their name written in marker on their backside under their kilt (comedy moment), although this was somewhat anulled by teams who just offered their caber to each one in turn until someone took it. Caber tossed, they were given the map grid reference of the helicopter, three miles away. More trekking and getting lost.
• The advantage that winning the first challenge gave was you got to decide which method of transport (3x coracles, 3x canoes and 2x rowing boats) each team had to use to get across the river, the coracles being the difficult one. This gives the winning team from task one a chance to use some strategy.
• When there are just a few places left on the helicopter, it starts up to alert the nearby remaining teams to get a move on. When the chopper is full, it takes off leaving the one remaining team on the ground without so much as a goodbye.

So there we are. It’s alright, I thought from the opening five minutes it was going to be a bit “youth”, but actually that’s not the case. The music (done by Soundbyte, who I hadn’t heard of before) is neat, the The Amazing Race influence is felt in the reveal of the teams coming in to finish, but the show doesn’t feel like The Amazing Race at all really. There’s something quite late-nineties about it, and whilst I don’t think it would be a massive success if it was on primetime, it’s more enjoyable than its mid-afternoon Sunday timeslot suggests. It could do with more things and less rambling.