Right, if you’ve been following us on Twitter this afternoon you’d have noticed we were all bashing out a new chat show called Font Chat with Russell Grant and Richard Osman (as “the font of all knowledge” – thanks @OfficialBanker) and that the theme tune was going to be that of The Zodiac Game, but with fonts instead of star signs. Brilliant I’m sure you’ll agree. And I was going to put up the theme to The Zodiac Game on here to jog people’s memories.
However sod that, here’s Connections with Sue Robbie.
It looks like 3 Mills Studios will be making some enhancements to the Million Poun Drop studio as the new series will be broadcast in High Definition. They have also secured a sponsor for the show as well.
I hope the set changes colour, like on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
The whole thing looked like a HD show trapped in a SD world anyway – so all that will happen is whoever does the OB facilities (CTV or Arena?) will park a HD scanner outside the studio, rather than a SD one.
I don’t think much needs changing visually apart from tweaking the desk and especially the screens.
And in other news Jill Wagner has quit Wipeout.
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Jill-Wagner-Wipeout-1031727.aspx
wouldnt surprise me if amanda byram got the gig, she’s done work in america, and has experience in the job.
Mmm, possibly (good old Paradise Hotel), but I get the inkling they’re getting a bit fed up of Brits taking over.
I really like Jill, she’s an underrated part of the Wipeout cast, but I fear this might be a mis-step on her part.
Aw! Jill was quite possibly the best part of the show!
She’s got better and better with each series, but I suspect an easier loss to bear than Anderson or especially Henson.
I suspect it was the pretty much doubling of episodes which forced her hand. As a summer series she’d have had time to pursue other opportunities in the off-season, but apart from the breaks to change the course I think they’ve been filming pretty much continuously since last summer now.
File under – for discussion..
Hey, just found out reading another forum, that this years Eurovision will use ‘dynamic’ voting result reveals for the first time.
This solves one of the problems with the Eurovision in the past few of years where the winner is known to anyone with a basic grasp of maths from around three quarters through the voting jurys (Frau Lena last year was the obvious winner around half way through, and most of the audience in the Telenor Arena in Oslo knew it. Graham Norton – probably under instructions – still kept the ‘it could still change’ act until even he found it insulting).
So, this year as before, the votes are a 50/50 jury viewer vote. However, when the results are announced, they will not be presented in a pre-determined order.
They will be presented after a computer has cruched the results, and worked out which order of voting will provide the best climax and less of a runaway winner.
Jurys will vote after the Friday evening taped ‘incase of disaster’ dress rehearsal, so will give the key pressers at the EBU time to spot potential favorite act trends.
The rest will be fed into the computer after the lines have closed, and let the computer work out the new, exciting ending to the evening.
It’s a start I suppose – Now all they need to do is find a way of reducing the bloc/neighbour 12 point voting..
I think this is a brilliant idea and often idly wondered if something like this would work and is possible.
I don’t know if this will actually work. If anything, it might make it less obvious until slightly later (say 4/5 of the way through instead of 3/4 or 2/3), but unless it’s a very close decision (like it wasn’t last year, and I’m not experienced enough with the ESC to say beyond that), it’ll be clear you’ll have one country shoot ahead, even if “at the very last moment”. Also, doesn’t revealing this plan ahead of time effectively remove any aspect of surprise about the potential for surprise? Unless this is a well-orchestrated double-bluff, I can’t see this changing anything for the better.
Ah, so basically you can now stop watching after the performances, dip in again just for the last five minutes, and not miss anything? How marvellously convenient.
But but but… Voting’s the best bit!
Seems a bit pointless really – won’t it just be obviouis when suddenly the obvious winner begins catching up midway through. It’s not the order that’s the problem, it’s the number of countries – a problem easily rectified by only having those in the final itself vote independently. Other countries could then still vote, but towards a combined Rest of Europe score.
Also wish they’d ditch the jury vote – it was only bought in because the BBC failed to admit their song was bloody awful, and the stats show it is still the publics choice who is the ultimate winner.
Compare with the order in which Jeff reads out the votes on Survivor…
I’m fairly sure that Betfair offered (and offer) betting in running on the Eurovision winner last year even while the voting scores came out, with every 12-point result throwing the odds in a different direction. This has to offer some lucrative opportunities if you can work out how, but I’m not sure I can. Is it just a case of laying each country that has had a 12-point vote cast in its favour early on, on the grounds that a strong early performance does not imply that it stands to receive any more 12-point votes ever again and thus its odds may be temporarily too generous as a result?
On balance, I think this dynamic ordering malarky is certainly not a bad idea, but it probably works better if you don’t know that it’s happening.
Basically, yes.
If you ‘lay’ the first three or four countries to nab the ‘douze’ you should get a (small) return. Likewise chuck a couple of quid on a couple of the no scores by jury four, for a bit of added excitement towards the end.
However, I wouldn’t put it past the EBU, to double-dip the voting. Put one country ahead by say, the seventh voting country, then send on a run of countries who gave them nothing (or very low marks) before a surge of high marks to win in at the end.
To see how the new voting system works in theory, head here and have a play http://www.escnation.com/
Re: Connections – I used to bloody love watching this when I was about six, and still believe Link the Letters to be brilliantly devious and is surprised nobody has thought about including something like it in a show since.
That it was also adaptable to the maths version of the end game made it doubly clever; that and the fact that you could try to have another go at the questions you missed even if you didn’t know where the letter would go.
Of course, I’d dearly love to go through the entire back catalogue of these to see if they’ve spotted ant connections OC hasn’t. Alas, David Elias hasn’t been with us for some years tho the same woman verifies the questions for both shows.
Any connections. Damn you, itouch keyboard.
This is definitely less “news” than I’d like to believe, but for the first time (that I’ve seen, anyway), all of the Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches have been gathered together in one site. They sorta become formulaic after a few sketches, and the “article” attached isn’t that good, but they’re still fun to watch, and I’m surprised there were a couple I hadn’t seen before. All are funnyordie.co.uk clips, which should be internationally accessible, except for the most recent one, which is Hulu.
http://splitsider.com/2011/04/the-complete-history-of-snls-celebrity-jeopardy
I’ve just caught the end credits of an old episode of Funhouse before an even older (*) episode of You Bet!, and the Construction Manager for Funhouse was one Peter Dickson. Does that mean that the Ruddy Well Spoken Bloke was responsible, in a former career, for making sure that the eponymous wacky, fun, crazy, outrageous (etc.) titular house of the show was structurally sound before he ever got into the voiceover business?
(*) or possibly not; I haven’t checked.
I once had the same question, but as far as I can tell, the more famous Mr. Dickson was already well established by then as one of Steve Wright’s cohort.
That said, listening to the Fun House song, the voice of the ‘old colonel’ type that mentions how whacky the show is sounds very much like him, as an example, note the first non singer on this clip.