After last week’s brief excitement, not a massive amount to get excited about this coming week really:
- Deal or No Deal – has been moved to 4pm today because of world events in Libya, this won’t be in your listings magazines (4pm, Sunday, C4)
- The Million Dollar Drop – Eddie Mcguire calls the US show what it should have been called in the first place, but in Australian. (8:30pm, Nine, Australia)
- Double Cross – Haven’t had a chance to listen to the episode one edit yet, but Episode two comes along on Monday. (on iTunes, Monday)
- Accumulate – I’m so far behind with this (sorry peeps) but my reckoning it’s the grand final this week? Edit: Second semi-final as it turns out. (Friday, RU:ON TV)
- So You Think You Can Dance? – although I can’t say I’m that excited really. Ant and Dec’s Push the Button increased to almost 6m without Let’s Dance to compete with, so it will be intereststing to see if it keeps its audience with Cat and Nasty Nigel in opposition. Secret Fortune returns after it’s one week rugby break an hour later. (7:10pm, Saturday, BBC1)
- The Bother Series of Poker: Game 6 – I’ve not set this up yet, expect details midweek. (Sunday, Full Tilt)
Also expect a review of the new Minute to Win It app that’s just come out sometime during the week. Does it fall into the same traps as The Cube? (Sneak preview: yes.)
Also! Our very good friends at UKGameshows.com now have a new twitter account that alerts viewers to new articles. It’s run by Auntie Sabrina, although she looks a bit like Robert Robinson these days if the picture is anything to go by. Anyway it’s a great idea so well worth a follow IGNORE THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN, follow the OFFICIAL official account instead.
Thanks to whoever set up that account, but we do actually own @UKGameshows – I nabbed it a long time ago. Staffers can access the details in the usual place.
Intrigue! The problem is the fake account has more people advertising it than the actual account…
It wasn’t meant to be intriguous, it was just little old me and my monstrous incompetence (who else would post as Auntie Sabrina?). I’ll post the UKGameshows address on the UK_Gameshows account and move over to that. At least it’s worked as a proof of concept.
Not really fake – it’s a good idea but I haven’t had time to do anything with it. We don’t do enough on promoting the vast amount of new data we add to the site.
Accumulate is a week behind schedule (sorry!) so the second semi final will be live from this Friday (25th March) and then the final will take place the week after.
I may not be able to remind nearer the time, I have to go to hospital for a minor op. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, but I’ll be away for a few days at the end of the week because of it. I’m hoping someone can post the usual Accumulate! reminder later in the week.
Get well soon, Dan!
I’ve just watched the first five episodes of this season’s Survivor. It’s pretty good; I’m moderately well-disposed towards the show in general, though I didn’t stick with last season’s. I wouldn’t say that the “Redemption Island” twist is identifiably good or bad, but it does make sense given the context of the two returning players. (I’m not wild in principle about random returning players in a non-returning-players show, but here it works well enough.)
At least Dancing On Ice can’t be accused of making its phone-in competition questions too easy: this week’s is “The song Jai Ho features in which film?”. The same question came up on Pointless last week and none of the 100 people surveyed knew the answer. (If you fancy winning tickets to the DOI final, a night in a posh hotel and a thousand quid, free web entry is open until Wednesday.)
Awww, they cut out all of Alexander Armstrong’s hysterical running references to German men in lederhosen (“it must be true, I’ve seen it in a video”) during today’s Pointless. Never mind.
Elsewhere on the interwebs: Remote Patrolled give five reasons why The Voice will flop. Readers will recall this show’s gimmick is that the critical panel don’t see the singers during the audition phase.
I’ve no doubt that Endemol’s spokesJoe will wish to explain why Mr. Patrolled is wrong.
Amazing start to the ratings for Million Dollar Drop on Nine, peaking at over 1.2m, most watched TV show at 8.30pm in Australia.
Averaging at 0.93m if what I’ve read is right. Not a bad figure, certainly.
http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2011/03/million-dollar-drop-debuts-under-the-magic-million.html
It did well in Melbourne. So there we are.
For those who have The Face Book, WWTBAM have now launched a new app, and it’s a pretty slick game. I very much enjoy it.
The UKG Twitter feed mentions that the BBC are casting for a new Saturday night entertainment show. The application form gives the format’s twist away:
23. Participants will be chosen on the basis of the unusual feats they claim to be able to achieve and the ability to demonstrate such feats. The BBC reserves the right to establish what will demonstrate such feats to its satisfaction and in compliance with all health and safety requirements and to modify or alter any demonstrations proposed by Participants deemed necessary.
24. Participants will be set a challenge to demonstrate their feat and a ‘pass/fail’ level will be set for such challenge which will be communicated to the Participant prior to their undertaking their feat.
25. Participants who pass their challenge will receive commentary from the judging panel and the judging panel will make a decision as to what they feel the feat is ‘worth’ in cash terms. This decision will not be known to the Participant.
26. The Participant will have the opportunity to decide what they believe the judges felt their feat was worth from an increasing cash number presented to them. If the Participant chooses the exact cash worth or a lower cash worth than the value chosen by the judging panel, the Participant will receive this amount as a prize. If the Participant fails to choose the exact cash worth or a lower cash worth then the Participant will receive no prize.
So it’s You Bet! – betting – forfeits + The Bong Game. Well, a quarter of that is good, at least.
What an awful idea. And sounds more like C5 or Sky than BBC One.
I’m a lot less down on it than perhaps I thought I might be, despite the fact that I started getting irritated by some elements of the UK game show fandom at around the time those elements started considering The People Versus v2 to be the second coming.
While The Bong Game is inherently pretty negative entertainment (it’s “fun” because you almost always either get to see someone being too greedy and winning nothing, or being insufficiently greedy and winning “too little”), this particular interpretation at least has a clearer and thus fairer chain of cause and effect because you can see that the judging panel has come to a decision as to what the talent is worth to decide the level of bong, and may even have heard why, rather than it purely being down to the programme makers wanting to save a dollar.
Besides, there’s a fairly clear history of gently abrasive treatment to people who think they’re sufficiently “it” to go on a talent show; compare with Let Me Entertain You, or – worse – the braying of the Britain’s Got Talent crowds. If the game is played for Let Me Entertain You stakes, then I’m relaxed about this as frothy end-of-the-pier fun where nobody gets hurt. If it’s played for Saturday night stakes and offers the spectacle of people losing high four or low five figures at a turn, that’s much less fun to me. If the stunts are sufficiently fun, there’s sufficiently much attention on the stunts and sufficiently little on the prizes and the hosting is sympathetic then I think I could get along with this… though, yes, in a “Why didn’t they just shell out for the rights to You Bet!?” fashion.
Besides, I understand that three-time World Memory Champion, and generally smashing bloke, Ben Pridmore has been tapped up to appear already by the show’s producers. (Source: me asking him on his blog.) They originally wanted him for the first pre-pilot run-through but he was busy at work – and now he’s not. He suggests he’ll probably be memorising bar codes. Points off the show if it ends up reprising all the family-friendly stunts from, as you compared it to, House of Astonishment, but probably everyone but us will have forgotten.
Ah, The People Versus 2.0. A great rapid-fire quiz spoiled by an endgame that wasn’t so much out of place as was a whole other colour of show.
Anyway, television’s famous Mr. In Yet Another Browser wrote,
So it’s You Bet! – betting – forfeits + The Bong Game. Well, a quarter of that is good, at least.
It’s got summer filler all over it, really. People doing spectacular things on a low-budget show, it’s enough to fill six or eight hours betwixt So You Think… You Can Dance and Strictly Come Brucie without being as unsupported as Totally Saturday.
On that basis, I would project that the prize pot for each show isn’t going to be spectacular, perhaps one-to-three grand per stunt. Which is going to invite comparisons to what The Weakest Link was offering in the last millennium, but there you are.
Bluntly, if the focus of the show is on the stunt, I’m in; if it’s on the prize, I doubt I will be. See also: Push the Button, which I think works if and only if one treats it as the competitors being given silly things to do, with DAVE setting some of them to music.