It’s a slow news day so here’s some fun for the evening, about ten o’ clock on Twitter I’ll be playing a game called The Conveyor Belt of Death. It is a very simple quiz a bit like a game they play on Schlag den Raab on occasion – a category is given followed by ten answers. Seven belong to the category, three do not. Ignore the first reject, you need to reply to me with the item number of the second thing that does not fit the category – the third item is a back-up in case nobody correctly gets the second one. You only get one buzz so think carefully. The first player to do so in the first two rounds wins a berthing into the grand final third category, a tense head to head play off requiring knowledge and nerve where the winner (if there is one) stands to win The Running Man on DVD. BIG PRIZES. I’ll put the questions here in a comment after the game.
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It’s not a very fast conveyor belt. If we start answering wrongly will it speed up like on Downfall?
The King’s Speech! The King’s Speech! The King’s Speech!
wow victory, this is surreal!
Its slowness just makes it EVEN MORE TERRIFYING.
Here are all of tonight’s questions for those who missed it:
ROUND ONE
THEY WON AN OSCAR AT THE 83RD ACADEMY AWARDS IN 2011
1. The King’s Speech
2. Natalie Portman
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. Nicole Kidman (*)
5. In a Better World
6. Inception
7. God of Love
8. Geoffrey Rush (*)
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (*)
10. Colin Firth
http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/83/nominees.html
ROUND TWO
THEY HAVE NEVER HAD A TOP 40 HIT WITH A COUNTRY OR CONTINENT NAME SOMEWHERE IN THE TITLE
1. George Harrison (*)
2. The London Boys
3. Toto (*)
4. Mike Flowers Pops (*)
5. Pulp
6. Stereo MCs
7. Steps
8. The Happy Mondays
9. The Cure
10. New Order
George Harrison (Bangladesh) – 10 in 1971
Toto (Africa) – 3 in 1983
Mike Flowers Pops (Don’t Cry for Me Argentina) – 30 in 1996
I really really wanted to use A Flock of Seagulls (I Ran), but it only got to number 43 according to my 2005 book of Guiness hit singles 🙁
ROUND THREE
UK SHIPPING FORECAST AREAS
1. Viking
2. Fastnet
3. Murnaghan (*)
4. Malin
5. Dogger
6. Bailey
7. Armstrong (*)
8. FitzRoy
9. Austin (*)
10. Lundy
Wrong answers are all newsreaders, areas from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast_and_sea/shipping_forecast/
Ooh, evidently Brig can edit his own comments… 😉
And others!
Nice one Brig, I enjoyed that. And you’re right btw, the Accumulate! final will be available from Friday.
YouTubin’ it old-school here: heroic YouTube user Sirb0b1 has uploaded a dozen episodes of Late Night Chess from thirty years or so ago, with immaculate video quality. Yes, it’s the fabled The Master Game of lore! Even more impressively, a fan who has audio recordings of the 1981 final – which is only Nigel Short, then aged about 7¼, against Tony Miles – has reconstructed an artist’s impression of what the graphics might have looked like, which starts here.
Or you could always watch it for about a minute and a half to get the form and then skip to Tony Slattery and company ripping it to shreds; rather an obvious joke, but very lovingly and faithfully observed.
Thanks for that. Don’t remember Late Night Chess (but then I was only 5 in 1980 so that’s possibly why)
Sorry, that’s me being “stylistic” and “analogous” rather than suggesting that there’s another show that people should start to look out for. I wasn’t even being accurate: it was Prime Time Chess, rather than Late Night Chess.
From time to time, people keep wondering whether a chess show on a BBC 4 budget (which I think is realistic; the Internet coverage of the London Chess Classic was not at all far off in terms of quality) could draw BBC 4 numbers. If The Master Game was strong enough to draw sufficient numbers to keep BBC 2 making it for six seasons, surely the audience can’t have dropped by more than… ooh… one and a half orders of magnitude in thirty years? I’m guessing that it probably drew 2-3 million in the three-channel era, so high five digits to low six digits would probably be passable by BBC 4 standards, considering the target supposedly originally set for Only Connect.
I’d suggest that some sort of chess coverage would be very BBC4 indeed, especially if they can get a season of documentaries to fit around a televised tournament.
Well there are several ways you could to it- A Rapidplay format probably would work best (12 minutes a side?)….
Do a double round-robin with 6 players (so they would face each other both as White and as Black), 2 games in a 45 minute slot, it would take 15 weeks (30 games). If you wanted to do a playoff for a 16th ep, 2nd plays 3rd in a one-game shootout (2nd gets the choice of pieces), winner plays 1st place in a single game (but using Armageddon Rules- White gets more time on the clock, but has to win outright- a draw is a win for Black).
Mmm… not convinced, televisually. I think that would be too quick for people to follow what was going on, or for the commentators to properly attempt to explain the progress of the game. The Master Game probably had it right; the insights that the players gave, coupled with the variations illustrated with the lighting of the squares, attempted to convey at least a sense of the players’ thought patterns.
I’d reckon on, say, a 13-week series, with an 8-player single elimination knockout. If the game is drawn, replay the next week with alternate colours. If there are more than six draws, just don’t show all of them. If there are fewer than six draws, have some extra one-offs at the end of the series that aren’t part of the tournament. You’d have to be careful not to leak who plays whom too far ahead in the episode descriptions, but this is always an issue with knockout shows.
Now, if only someone would upload this.
With Twitter around these days, there’s enormous potential for game show interactivity that hasn’t yet been tapped.
For completeness, the links to the YouTube videos came from http://ecforum.org.uk/ where The Master Game is sometimes discussed. Some collectors have old episodes of it, but there is nothing to suggest that copies of Your Move survive in the wild.
I regret not recording the show myself, but this was before the time that I started regularly recording shows. I had grabbed a couple of episodes of Interceptor for posterity by that point; redundantly, as it happens, but then again you never know whether it’s going to be redundant or not and that’s kind of the point. Even if I had recorded it then it would likely have been incomplete; I recall it being a stormy night in our neck of the woods, albeit no darker than any other, but sufficiently stormy to interrupt reception, so I went to bed mid-game after reception had been lost for five or ten continuous minutes. (I probably would have used an E180 tape rather than an E240, too, so might not even have caught the entirety of the show!)
I have been in contact with someone who thinks he has a copy of Your Move, but isn’t sure where and doesn’t have the equipment to digitise it but says he’ll run off an analogue copy if and when he gets time and figures out where he put it.
Hallelujah!
*does the thumbs up dance*
Actually, since I don’t have the digitisation wherewithal either, if anyone would like to volunteer then it might be better if I put you in contact directly.