I’ve been very busy this week so “soz”, and I’m also very busy this weekend. I will try and make it up to you all with a feature or something when I’ve got some spare time.
In the meantime, it’s time for the irregular section that proved so popular last time it came out that I’ve extended it into Friday, it’s (Friday and) Saturday Night’s Alright for Writing, a chance to talk about all of this weekend’s biggest shows in one lazy catch-all post:
- Exciting! It’s Power Struggle aka Mal Al Tayar on JCCTV! I’ve set up a show discussion post for this.
- There’s episode three of Accumulate!
- It’s the grand finale weekend of The Million Pound Drop – Live! (C4, 10pm Friday, 9:10pm Saturday)
- Total Wipeout is on on Saturday, I think! (BBC1, 6pm, Saturday)
- And then there’s Ant and Dec’s Push the Button! (ITV1, 7:45pm, Saturday)
- And not forgetting The National Lottery Secret Fortune! (BBC1, 8:20, Saturday)
- And Let’s Dance for Comic Relief, if you’re that way inclined! (BBC1, 7pm, Saturday)
Amazing.
In other news, Penn and Teller: Fool Us is getting a six part series. Jonathan Ross to host. Great stuff.
And episode 3×03 of Accumulate is live at http://www.ruon.tv/ondemand/video.php?vidid=193 . Seven presenters on the same room. Oh dear. If we got paid by the word, we’d be rich!
The default image when you load that page very much looks like something from The Quiz Broadcast.
STAY INDOORS
It’s Patrice Laffont’s Luggage Lottery!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgfsnpPaOe4
And if you’re wondering what that one says… it’s “I like to dress up like Snow White to make love”.
You can watch full episodes (they’re not geoblocked) on nrj12.fr. I realize the number in the show is to do with the channel, but it’s a shame they couldn’t actually tie it into the show…
Power Struggle *is* on today but at 3.30pm local time. The 6.30pm thing was Qatar time.
It might also help to know that the Arabic name is Maa Al Tayar. There’s something like 48 episodes, and one team’s game is spread over several shows.
It’s repeated at 8.30pm tonight, I see, and there’s possibly a new episode on tomorrow. It seems to be on Fridays after that?
You’ll notice that it’s always all boys or all girls teams.
Aah, brilliant. In which case I’ll give it a special Show Discussion post beneath this one.
Edit: Done.
David Flynn talks Million Pound Drop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18hKizhXQ54
Not the most interesting questions, but decent enough responses.
As he said, MPD is the biggest gameshow hit this year. Absolutely massive worldwide.
When’s Million Dollar Money Drop coming back, Joe?
Also whilt I’m here:
http://www.endemol.com/programme/101_ways_to_leave_a_gameshow
SPELL CHECK. Losing or loosening. Not both.
An automated spell check wouldn’t pick that up.
Shhh.
MPDP is returning in the summer. 🙂
I mean MDMD (Million Dollar Money Drop).
ITV showing Series 1 repeats of THE CUBE 10:35pm on Fridays now it seems in a rather random move!
They were showing Odd One In on Thursday nights of late. This is an interesting new tactic!
A bit off topic: but according to Twitter, CJ from Eggheads is apparently a cross dresser and has come out, it was on Sky News.
There’s been far more salacious CJ gossip than that bandied about over the years.
Is this from the Daphne Fowler comedy account that’s going round? I think it’s someone on the production team, and it is mildly amusing, but I suspect it can be taken with a pinch of salt.
No. Hundreds of people were saying it from here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%40cjdemooi
Interesting, but there’s nothing on his official account to suggest anything. I haven’t really been following this as I’ve been away from a telly all day.
No word one way or t’other from the English Chess Forum, bearing in mind that (a) CJ himself is president of the English Chess Federation and (b) the forum is not associated with the governing body and thus the people therein would not be averse to bringing the matter up.
Ant and Dec’s Push The Button… I can’t say it feels slow as such, but somehow it feels a bit stretched, a bit light on the content-to-time ratio. The content is pretty bright and breezy stuff – not quite Antan Dec at their finest, but not far off – and the fact that it’s live really doesn’t hurt.
To be fair he performs at panto every year for the past 3-4 years, so nothing new.
Have they changed the voiceover man on Push the Button tonight?
Seems like Push the button are using people from famous Gameshows. its the girl who takes 3 mins jumping from the bungee on fort boyard 2003 vs morris from deal or no deal
Ah, I remember Morris. Exciting game, that one!
Secret Fortune is on now.
So Duncan Bannatyne is worth £100mil more than Peter Jones…
Next question… car colours. 😕
Doctor Who isn’t the youngest, actually… it’s a few weeks older than TOTP.
Am I the only one watching SF then?! 😕
And with Jenni and OJ doing the Lottery draws tonight, has double-headed presentation suddenly become the norm?
Oooh… a £2k v £100k finish…
Good show this week, I thought. Though they rushed the final question without really thinking about it at all. I thought some of the earlier questions were a bit tricksy (I could have sworn black cars were more popular than blue) but the last one was certainly very gettable.
But they apparently binned the correct answer to the last question, they need to be more transparent with the explanation of what needs to remain, they seem to keep changing it from keep to bin in the latter stages. It’s a good show, but this is confusing to the casual viewer, and more importantly I don’t think the contestants were fully clear what they were doing…
If you tuned in to the final question only, certainly it would be confusing.
Also,. it didn’t help when the questions were asking for ‘negative positives’, such as the least number of…
Rough Transcript of the dialogue:
Question asked ‘which is the smallest’ – I won’t say any more to avoid spoiling:
Contestant: I think [Answer] is the smallest?
Knowles: Ok, so you want to bin [Answer]
Cont: Yes
As far as I could gather, the number attached to this answer contained the larger amount, so therefore they won, er, the smaller amount. But logically, their ‘correct’ answer to the question should be the one they keep, not bin. Or at least Knowles’s clarification should’ve been along the lines of, ‘so, you think this is largest’, so you keep the answer that it is your correct answer to the question which may or may not be correct…
Basically, it could be simpler!
Yes, I’ve just watched it, I still can’t quite get my head around it. It is really confusing. I’m fine until it gets down to about four answers and then I become really thick, evidently.
Also I got a bit bored about halfway through Round One. The questions aren’t all that interesting really.
I don’t understand their explanation, which is more confusing than an Escher drawing. So, I’ve had to simplify it in my head.
Instead of “get rid of the fewest”, I now read it as “keep the largest”.
So, flavours of crisp: I think cheese+onion and salt+vinegar are quite popular, I’ll keep those. I don’t think Anchovy and cucumber will be that popular, I’ll bin that.
That explanation would be much simpler.
Also, they could physically put the answers in front of them and move the envelopes around, then they’d have to bin the one they put at the end….!
Million Pound Drop is coming back very soon. Talking about March/April in a similar format (Fri/Sat).
To reiterate, the show will be on screens until at least 2012, so fans don’t need to worry about possible cancellation. Not that it’s even an issue, this series has been the most popular yet. Looking at tweaks to improve the show, anyone have any suggestions?
You’re really coping the old Millionaire transmission schedule, aren’t you? I will confess the weekend schedule does work since it suits people like me who cannot stay up late in the week.
Suggestions
If you’re having celebrities on the show get some that can win something. Only George & Larry Lamb are the only ones that have beaten the drop. I will confess question 5 last night was harsh as I thought question 5 is the standard to question 1 or 2. You might have dropped one answer but the question is easy to work out.
Please have 50/50 (question 8) questions that doesn’t involve music all the time. I notice it came up about 3-4 times this series with it being used at least three times.
Keep the generation couples but it would be nice to see a father/son on the show rather than mother/daughter all the time. By having generation couples you’re not giving the impression the show cannot accept people aged 40 or over.
This one comes from my ol’man. Please stop doing the “we’ll reveal the answer after the break”. It’s doing his head in and saying it’s pathetic.
I largely suspect that until people ACTUALLY turn over rather then just threaten to turn over, the after the break thing is here to stay. DAMN YOU CHRIS TARRANT!
There was an extremely uneasy feel to the questions last night. The one that did for the celebs would have cleaned out most poeple because the Loreal and Maybelline slogans have been used in the US for longer than they’ve been known in the UK.
Then the final couple got some suspiciously easy 3-choice questions (“hey, let’s end the series on a high note…”) before getting an extremely anal question based on one year difference that no-one could reasonably know or work out.
At least the 50-50 of the first couple was a good question because you should know that Hunt was DCI and then you ought to know that Tennison rose up through the ranks on Prime Suspect to a senior level that was likely to be higher than DCI.
How about a wider range of contestants on the show? I’m a white, male 20-40 year old myself and even I’m sick of seeing my own group on there the whole time! It might even help you appeal to a wider demographic?
Don’t be cheap-arses by stopping smart contestants from getting on the show.
I’m not going to say that the contestants aren’t smart and am well prepared to believe it’s a lot more difficult to play the game in the studio than at home, but TMPD is uniquely well-placed to judge how difficult the questions are or aren’t by virtue of the performance of the players at home on the online game, and thus it is possible to compare the performances of the average home player and the average studio player. Without having the data I’m going to take a wild guess here, but it feels to me like the average home player does a lot better than the average studio player. I’ve got a gut feeling that this is deliberate, and that the studio players selected are deliberately not the brightest and the best because (a) this will save money and (b) the producers want to give the viewers at home a feeling of superiority relative to the contestants on screen.
I have nothing against technique b as such; after all, Wheel of Fortune encourages it in its game design by encouraging players to keep spinning before they guess, and Going For Gold encouraged it in the endgame by giving viewers at home optional clues through on-screen graphics if they wanted them. These are fair ways of implementing technique b, that do not pander to viewers’ worst instincts. On the other hand, deliberately selecting relatively weak contestants, so that you can implicitly set them up to fail, is cheap and lame. Stop it.
One thing I’d like to see is the drops made into more of a semi-circle. Right now, despite being on a curved table, it looks to me like they’re in two straight lines, and that bugs me. No clue why, it just does.
I agree, in series 1 they were all evenly angled so that when the overhead shot was all 4 drops and also when it went down to three drops, it was still symmetrical.
Don`t know if someone mentioned this before, but just found out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2V4g_YA2e4
Could it be that Jocelyn is really looking for a new El Gran Juego de la Oca to be made? Notice he speaks in spanish the whole time.
Yes indeed. I think someone mentioned a while ago he was trying to relaunch it. I love the mock up of the proposed set.
Ratings
Total Wipeout – 4.04m (18.7%)
Let’s Dance for Comic Relief – 7.56m (32.3%)
* peak 8.41m (35.5%) at 19:40
The National Lottery: Secret Fortune – 6.17m (26.6%)
* peak 7.69m (32.7%) at 21:00
Push the Button – 4.50m (19.4%); +1: 157k
Take Me Out – 4.13m (17.8%); +1: 126k
The Million Pound Drop Live – 1.97m (8.9%) , +1: 312k
Last week it was close between Secret Fortune and Push the Button but this week it has beaten it by over 1.5 million, thanks to Let’s Dance. It seems that having famillies, including one person who has been on too many shows doesn’t help the viewing figures. If Secret Fortune continue to have 6 million then the BBC will declare it their third popular lottery show to go along side In It to Win It and Who Dares Wins. Combining the elements of two Endemol shows (Deal or No Deal and Million Pound Drop’s question writing) seems to work.
Million Pound Drop did fine since it was against Casualty and Take Me Out.
“Combining the elements of two Endemol shows (Deal or No Deal and Million Pound Drop’s question writing) seems to work.”
I wonder if Endemol could have a case against Wild Rover then? 😆