- Some quite good celebs lined up for The Million Pound Drop over the next fortnight, tonight Dermot O’ Leary and Fearne Cotton take on the dastardly drop (9pm), and next week Chris Moyles and Andi Peters play for charity.
- This Sunday is BOTHERSOP Sunday, £5.50 entry hold ’em tournament. Previous weeks have been a lot of fun, you’re all invited to play regardless of ability or BotherSOP league standings. Details here.
- Yesterday we wrote on Twitter that ITV are filming a pilot for a show called My Man Can in Germany (if you live in the Cologne area you can get tickets through Applause Store – filming is in a fortnight). It’s apparently been a hit in several countries but what what we’ve learnt is when the bumpf says “it’s been a hit” what it tends to actually mean is “it’s been broadcast”. This said, this does look like quite good fun and very much in the Beat the Star mould even if my gut feeling says poker chips are too fiddly for Saturday Night:
http://youtu.be/T4Omvd6fnH0
There’s quite a lot of Korean My Man Can on Youtube (linked to at the end of the vid), looks like it’s hosted by the guy who fronted Korean Fort Boyard.
It sounds like it’s not quite setting the world alight, on Sat 1 it’s getting about 30% fewer viewers than Schlag den Raab does but it does indeed sound like it’s been quite successful in China. It has also been on VT4 in Belgium, SBS 6 in the Netherlands and SBS in Denmark, it says here.
And don’t worry equality fans, they did a one-off with the roles reversed.
I’d love to see how much criticism a roles-reversed version of Take Me Out would get.
Probably not that much, it happened regularly in the original Australian version.
i would say i reckon the poker chip nature will be dropped. judging by the 10 round format suggested by the clip, its one of those ‘all nighter’ shows which we’ll be reformatting into an hour. probably still betting based, but pure cash amount, which only the winner gets to take away or something.
Well we’ll find out soon enough. Look out for a feature this weekend!
It does seem the obvious thing to drop – perhaps be reformatted into “how many X will your hubby do?” and the highest bid.
This pretty much has Vernon Kay written all over it.
Watched this now, look out for a feature over the weekend.
It is good fun, but 1hr 50 with the breaks removed is very lengthy for what it is – more time is spent on the poker element than on the challenges. Also it is only seven rounds.
I agree with that- if you take the bid and fail, you’re out, succeed and you get to knock someone else out.
It’s like Mr and Mrs after far too many cans of Red Bull.
I know it’s a bit presumptious to make judgement over a 2 min overseas format flogging clip – but – it really does smack of the next Tuesday night 8pm good production values but rating bomb for ITV.
Given the players of the game are a married couple – why do I think it’s somewhere in the background that ITV may be thinking of Vernon and Tess to present this show..?
I was thinking Vernon and Tess – always assumed that would (again) end up on a BBC show but I don’t think Tess is BBC exclusive (though haven’t seen her elsewhere for years), so as long as it doesn’t air in the autumn it could probably work.
And potentially I think this is better than the likes of High Stakes/Exit List and in the right slot on Saturday or Sunday could rate 4m+.
It comes down to cost though – both Beat the Star and The WHole 19 Yards rated well enough really, but I wonder if it works out more profitable for ITV to be airing their own flop game shows to 2m or so viewers instead.
They may have changed their mind recently, I suppose, but Vernon and Tess have always said when asked that they don’t want to work together, which is fair enough. Matt and Emma Willis have said the same thing.
News from the Emerald Isle: Alan Hughes’ Family Fortunes has hit trouble even before taking to the air…
http://www.herald.ie/entertainment/tv-radio/our-survey-said-play-it-again-as-tv3-consider-rerun-of-botched-episode-3008577.html
If you want to know, Alan Hughes is one of the presenters on TV3’s Ireland AM (which is no better than Daybreak, really) and a panto regular.
Filming of his FF, meanwhile, is taking place at the Helix venue at Dublin City University – the same location as The Voice of Ireland (as RTÉ and Screentime ShinAwil want to call it).
Why is this an issue? If people put stupid answers on the survey, then they do! That’s point of the game!
I recall an episode of UK Family Fortunes where the question was “name a weapon in the board game Cluedo” and there were seven answers on the board! The incorrect answer was poison, which I think a contestant said as well as some of the surveyed people. And yes it was commented on in-episode that the answer was incorrect, but it’s what people had said.
It depends when that episode aired- if it was after 1986 or so, poison is a correct answer because it was one of the weapons in one of the advanced Cluedo versions (depending on the version, along with the standard set of weapons there could be poison, a blunderbuss, an axe, or a horseshoe)
Exactly – it’s not like Pointless where the answer given must also be correct.
Ah, but I think it’s very naughty of them to do it during Double Money when essentially the winner of the round determines who goes through to Big Money.
It’s OK to let through a daft answer occasionally, but they shouldn’t be game changers.
Ah, but that’s the thing, it wasn’t a game changer. The way I read the article, the incorrect answer was guessed by neither the playing team nor the stealing team, so if it had been dummied out (like single-point answers are) nothing would have changed.
According to Endemol Joe, it’s the 1,000th Wer Wird Millionar? this evening in Germany, so well done it.
Well done indeed. Given that all the episodes aired in primetime over 12 years they have kept the original music and fifteen question money tree (except for the currency conversion from DM to € in 2002) since day one.
Although, bizarrely, the logo and typefaces have been different from day 1 – one of the few territories where this was allowed.
Does Conduit ITC even have characters for umlauts? Because if it doesn’t then that would be a bloody good reason for allowing a change in typeface.
Looking at the ratings for last night. Million Pound Drop Live could only muster 1.38m (5.8%) with 170k (0.9%) watching on +1.
I might be wrong but I think that is one of the lowest ratings it had on a Saturday night. Compared to Friday night it got just above 2 million. I put it down to the reason they got 2 million was because they had celebrities on the show, while others said it was down to being no Celeb Big Brother on Channel 5.
Would the folks on here say the show is now running out of steam, although it’s not even two years since it started? This time last year it was getting around the high 2 million mark and was regularly beating BBC2 and Channel 5 and sometimes on a Friday it was second behind Graham Norton but now it’s being dumped in either fourth or last place. After watching it on Friday and Saturday, I thought the show at the moment is crap and it was a mistake getting Dermot O’Leary on the show.
I would say that MPD is running out of steam, normally I would drop everything (no pun intended) to watch it, but I just haven’t bothered with it for this latest batch of episodes. I don’t know exactly what has made me stop watching it, I just have.
What turns me off is the endless “what story was in the paper today” questions – arbitrary and not a test of general knowledge.
As a television show, I think stopped being event television around the end of 2010. I confess that I’ve only seen one episode from the present run, and that was viewed under cold medicine.
However, there’s an interesting piece in today’s The Observer about MPD and . To precis: it’s all about the demographic data that helps target adverts, interactivity has to feel natural, and we’re promised changes on . Not including a new presenter, sadly.
I wish newspaper journalists would do some research
“David Flynn, who created The Million Pound Drop, a 10-question, multiple-choice quiz played by couples”
I was a regular on the interactive game since the second series (Autumn 2010) but gave up after the series that aired in January/February 2011 and turned to making sarcastic commentary on twitter.
Endemol keep giving these online game figures but they’re forgetting that both websites aren’t geo-blocked. Meaning, people around the world can play either game online. Interesting what the percentage ratio is for UK/Rest of the world players as the games have been mentioned on Buzzerblog.
I would expect even with the mighty Buzzerblog people playing outside of the UK will account for 1% or less.
If I get 5 people a night playing, I’d be stunned.
I haven’t watched MPD in months. It’s just become predictable at this point. Teams get to question 8 with about £25K, they ask some, “Who’s older?” question, and there we go.
It’s a pity really because they are capable of writing good, interesting questions.
I have no real problem with questions based on official statistics – there is room for debate on them which makes for interesting decisions, and you might have read the answer somewhere. Questions based on polls are rubbish. I don’t mind the occasional oldest/first/longest question, but when the question stack is full of them it feels *really lazy* and a bit boring.
Questions based on something in the paper that day doesn’t bother me because you tend to be able to rule answers out using common sense and the process of elimination.
Tonight’s show took the biscuit by having not one but two questions based on YouGuv polls.
Also having a celebrity game running for 70 minutes for the full 8 questions for only £25,000 doesn’t make great telly.
I noticed that too.
I also noticed an article suggesting that The Winner Is… may be coming over here, with John De Mol “in early discussions with UK broadcasters”.
I’d be predicting Channel 5 myself; it’s very obviously not a BBC show, ITV still have the Cowell shows for the forseeable future, and I can’t see Channel 4 wanting it. Which leaves Channel 5 or Sky if it’s going to be picked up, and I see the former as more likely after the Big Brother pickup.
TWI ratings and reviews overall are really really poor for the first three episodes. First episode was around 1 million, losing to the other two big broadcasters (NED1 (De Mole) and RTL4) on prime time, second episode dropped to 640,000 and last nights ratings were 800,000. Still losing on prime time and not rating what it should be. De Mol wanted at least 1,2m – in comparison, the second season of The Voice was averaged on 3,5m over the whole series.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvv6tuj17Zs&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Entire series of UK Duel just uploaded. *drools*
All but the 12th episode, sadly 🙁
More Boyard 2012 stuff:
– More cell themes!
– TEN episodes this year, instead of the usual seven as of late. But only seven will be shown in summer. Why’s that?
– For the first time since 1997, there remaining three will be Halloween and Christmas specials.
CAN. NOT. WAIT.
AMAZING.
Just heard that France 2 and ALP have only confirmed 7 epsiodes.
F-B.fr have only just edited that part out, now it says it’s 7 with the possibility of specials.
Whether the specials were wishful thinking or not (like the October Kid Boyard idea knocking around a few years back) by the site remains to be seen.