I would have liked to have attended this last night but I couldn’t. Happily, Friend of the Bar @ogbajoj did, and has sent us a report:
(Edit: Lewis has gone into a lot of detail here, I like detail, but it sounds as though many readers think this is a more complicated show than I think it is. So I’m trying something – if you want to get the gist of the main format points, follow the bold bits and come back for the details – some of the stuff I’ve put in at the beginning of paragraphs is my interpretation I’ve edited in. Let me know what you think.)
- The show will be live on Saturday nights at 8pm. It was split into 5 parts, so I’d guess they’re aiming for 90 minutes. Though this was a pilot, it was pretty much recorded as-live, with minimal pickups.
- The selling point to the execs is the at-home interaction aspect. Instead of MPD’s flash game, Revolution will be using a mobile app to play along for the chance to win some cash. No word on what platform(s) the app will be on, but we were told it will cost “a maximum of £1” so I imagine it’ll be out at 99p in the iOS app store and a similar price for Android.
- The set is hexagonal, with a trapezium shaped screen above each side. The audience is seated in 3 groups, on alternating sides, while contestant podiums are on the unoccupied sides. The main centrepiece is the revolving gameplay area. Health and safety will be happy to know that nobody actually stands on the revolving part, there is just a large pyramid on one point of a triangle. Within the large triangle is a raised area, upon which sits a revolving turntable with 5 “money pyramids”. The entire thing seems quite dark and millionaire-y, though there are plenty of gold highlights throughout.
- Carol Vorderman does a thoroughly ok job as host, though she did make a flub or two that will be more difficult to cover when the show goes out live. She bantered with contestants well enough, and she can read questions well enough, so she’s got the basics down.
- There are three teams, one of one, one of five and one of twenty-five. The contestant setup is possibly the most unusual I’ve seen. On one side of the set is a lone contestant, on another side are a family of 5 with a nominated captain standing at the podium and the other 4 family members sat behind on a set of large stairs, and the third team is a team of 25 work colleagues, again with a nominated captain at the podium and the others sat on the stairs behind. (People have snuck pictures onto Twitter, here’s one, here’s another)
- Before the title sequence there was a recap of the previous game. While this is necessary for shows like The Cube, where we can be starting mid-game, here each week’s game will be self-contained so there’s no real need for this and I don’t know why it’s there.
- There are five money pyramids on a turntable of varying cash amounts. The game starts with five money pyramids being placed onto the turntable, three of which have £0 printed on their bases, and two with money amounts (at the start these are £50k and £100k). The pyramids are made of some refractive material, so colours can be projected into them from the turntable. The turntable spins and is lowered inside the central dais so the pyramids can’t be tracked, then raised again and slowed to a stop. This is accompanied by dramatic music and lighting which gets old fast.
- The game starts with the lone player, who chooses one of the five pyramids, not knowing what amount is on the base. It is placed onto the larger pyramid on his end of the revolving triangle by one of three very quiet guys wearing all-black suits and black gloves. These guys always handle the pyramids very carefully to make sure the amounts are never seen until the right moment.
- To keep the money in the pyramid, the player must get two questions right. If they get one wrong, another team gets the money. The contestant must then get a question correct twice to move the pyramid around the set completely, to regain control of it. Questions are Secret Fortune-esque, for example the first question given was “in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which of these characters does Dorothy meet first?” with three options A: the lion, B: the scarecrow, or C: the tin man (spoiler: the answer is the scarecrow). As the question is first being asked, the set revolves clockwise so the pyramid is now in front of the family team. If the question is answered incorrectly, the family gain control of the pyramid.
- However, if the question is answered correctly, the correct answer is removed and the question is asked a second time. In our example, the answers would now read A: the lion, or C: the tin man. While this is happening the pyramid is moved again, over to the team of 25, who will now gain control if the question is answered incorrectly. If the question is answered correctly twice, the pyramid moves back to where it started, it has “completed a revolution” so the lone player keeps control.
- There seems to be a time limit on answering questions, but I couldn’t see any clock to indicate how much time there was, just Carol stating that time was up and she needed an answer.
- No matter what happens, someone now has control of the money pyramid. They get to choose whether they want to keep it, or give it to one of the other teams. Each team can only have two pyramids at the end of round 1.
- Now there is a space on the turntable, so a new pyramid is brought in, this time with a higher cash amount. The turntable spins, lowers, raises, and stops again, to dramatic music and lighting again.
- The pyramid end of the triangle is now moved to the family’s area. The team captain chooses one of the pyramids to play for, again not knowing what’s on the base, and the team is asked another question. The family cannot directly confer, but are all given ask-the-audience style keypads which they must all vote on (including the captain). After time is up, the captain gets shown which answer was most popular among the family. They can choose to go with the family or choose a different answer if they’re inclined to do so.
- The second part of the question is played by the captain alone, with no conferring or voting help from the rest of the team. Since in round 1 the control always moves clockwise, this time losing in part 1 will give the team of 25 control, and losing in part 2 will give the lone player control of the pyramid.
- After the family’s question is over, another higher value pyramid is added, the randomization and dramatization process happens again, and the captain of the team of 25 chooses a pyramid to play for. Again, part 1 of the question is voted on, which the captain can veto if they wish, and part 2 is played by the captain alone. And again the control is moving clockwise, so a part 1 fail gives it to the lone player and a part 2 fail to the family.
- The entire process happens for one more go around all three teams, so eventually all teams have 2 pyramids. The pyramid added after each question is higher valued than the last, and the total of all round 1 pyramids is one million pounds.
- Of course, there is a possibility of a team gaining control of a third pyramid. In this situation, the captain can still choose to keep or pass the pyramid, but if they keep it they give away the HIGHEST value they currently hold.
- At the end of round 1, the team with the lowest amount banked is out of the game. But their money doesn’t vanish into thin air, it gets added to the viewer prize pot for the evening, along with £100k to seed the pot.
- At this point there are still 4 money pyramids left on the turntable. These are not removed for round 2, but there is an empty space that needs to be filled, and now they start bringing out the big money; the new pyramid is worth £250k.
- The two teams now compete to take as many pyramids as they can with no limits, meaning there is no need to pass a pyramid any more as even a zero-value pyramid won’t hurt you. Round 2 has a lot of things I’m unclear on, since nobody managed to answer a single question correctly. I’ll try to give my understanding of it, as it was explained.
- The process is very similar to round 1, and the questions are all in the same format as round 1, with the voting on each team and the possibility to veto all present. However, control doesn’t always move clockwise now, getting the question wrong in part 1 will always give the pyramid to the other team. Since there is an empty gap on one side of the studio, getting it wrong in part 2 will actually put the value of the pyramid into the viewer prize fund, displayed above the vacant podium. Getting it right both times completes the revolution as in round 1, giving the answering team the pyramid and the money.
- Each team answers two questions in this round, and so four pyramids are brought into the game: the aforementioned £250k, a second £250k, a £500k pyramid and a £1M pyramid, bringing the total money introduced in round 2 up to 2 million pounds.
- At the end of the round, again the team with the lowest prize pot must leave the game, and again their money is added to the viewer prize fund. The four pyramids left on the turntable are now discarded.
- In this recording, the team of 25 reached the final round, so the captain was asked to pick four of his teammates to join him for the all or nothing final. I imagine the family would play the round exactly the same, as their team of 5, and the lone player would have to answer all the upcoming questions on their own.
- The money pyramids on the turntable are now replaced with four zero-value pyramids and one pyramid representing the entire prize fund, simply marked £££. The randomization and drama process happens for the eleventh time, so nobody knows which pyramid is worth the cash.
- Each player gets a question, a right answer owns the pyramid (hopefully it’s the one with the money), a wrong answer loses it. The captain is now shown a question category (for example, games) and has to choose a teammate to come and answer the question. The teammate chooses a pyramid to play for, and a question is presented similarly to every other question (for example, “Which of these letters is worth the most points in Scrabble? A: X, B: Y, or C: Z”). Now the captain and their chosen teammate can confer, they have the time it takes for the set to complete one full revolution to come up with an answer. The teammate has the final say on what answer is given, which is then revealed to be correct or incorrect. There is no stage 2 to any question in the final, if it is correct then the pyramid is simply lit green, if answered incorrectly it is lit red. The turntable is not randomized again after each question in the final. Instead, the next category comes up, the captain nominates another teammate to join them, and the process repeats as before. Once four of the five pyramids in the centre have been chosen and played for, the question for the last pyramid is answered by the captain alone.
- Once all five questions are answered and all 5 pyramids are coloured, there is of course the reveal. Each of the green pyramids is a chance to win the cash, and each red pyramid is not. Each green pyramid is revealed after a dramatic pause. In this show, the team won after getting 3 of the 5 questions correct. If the team have won…
- PYROTECHNICS! Fireworks set around the lighting rig go off with some loud booms and everyone cheers. Carol gives the outro, including the numbers for the viewer prizes and the show ends.
- The play-along game, as mentioned earlier, is done via mobile app. The questions are given to you on the app at the same time as they are on the show. Getting every question in the show right nets you a share of the prize fund. Occasionally throughout the show, the number of players still in with a chance are given and a couple of names are picked out MPD style.
- The audience seemed pretty enthusiastic, though there were one or two moments of confusion whether to cheer or not, particularly when a team passed a pyramid: if it’s a zero, do you cheer for them having passed correctly, or aww at the zero the other team has been given? We were told that we should be rooting for the team in control at any given time, though I get the feeling it never really cleared the confusion.
- There are definitely some sticking points here, which could be polished before showtime. The rules were explained clearly enough as and when needed, but the nonexistent question timer still irks me. Carol is sometimes chatty with the contestants in this time too, when they should be given time to think things through, especially the lone contestant.
- Question difficulty varied somewhat. The Scrabble question above seemed pretty easy, especially for a question in the final, but there was an earlier question which was something like “which of these movies sold the most copies on DVD in the UK in 2011?” which was near-impossible to actually know and instead relied on educated guesswork.
- Overall I’d call this unusual: unusual team sizes, unusual play-along aspect, unusual pre-show recap, unusual number of breaks, unusual question format, unusual choice of host quite frankly. The big money and the play-along might keep people coming in, but the complex rules and different team sizes might be a turn-off, especially against whatever’s surrounding the Lottery draws that week.
Thanks very much for that Ogbajoj, I had to read it through twice to work it out, although I think I understand it. If my understanding is correct, if the in studio winner wins then the show will be giving away over £3m – that surely can’t be sustainable from a one-off 99p app so I would think that your entry represents an entry for that week only – also expect Google to crash. I’m sort of amazed and impressed that having such a complex set-up, the end game is as basic as that. Very interesting.
Ogbajoj here…
Not every pyramid is used in the total prize fund: those last 4 pyramids are trashed, and since the million pound pyramid is brought in last, there’s only a 1 in 5 chance it will see the light of day, saving at least a million of that £3 mill on most shows.
Also, I think it took 2 reads to get not because of its complexity but because of my poor writing, and having to explain it all at once rather than as each rule came up.
Other things I couldn’t include for length:
– If by some miracle the three zero amounts and the £50k amount manage to stay until the end and are trashed, then the final team manage to win their prize, the total amount given away could actually reach £3,050,000. Conversely, the worst case scenario is all four round 2 pyramids being left at the end, and the total prize between studio and home being merely £1,100,000.
– Also, because the viewer prize fund is made of two losing teams’ banks, and the £100k seed, there’s a distinct possibility more could actually be given away to people at home than the winning team in the studio. Of course, it would also be split between more people so individual winnings will be more in studio.
– For those curious, or who don’t want to work it out themselves, I think the round 1 pyramids are three zeroes, £50k, £100k, £140k, £150k, £170k, £180k and £200k.
– And for geometry nerds, each “pyramid” is a tetrahedron, not a Giza-style square base pyramid.
– When giving the at-home stats and names, small videos of the people named (actors for the pilot obviously) were shown on the 6 wall screens. Whether that means signing up for the app will require you to post a video, or whether this feature will be ditched, I don’t know.
Any questions feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer. If I remember anything else I removed, I’ll put up another comment too.
Oh, comments on the pictures.
Picture 1: That’s the lone contestant on the opposite side there, with the team of 25 on the left. The smartly-suited captain of the team is standing at the podium there, it looks like the rest are getting into position. House lights are obviously on here, during play the set is a bit darker. The top of my head is actually visible in this one!
Picture 2: Nice wide panoramic view there. You can just about see that central turntable area for the pyramids peeking over the camera hiding place. It looks like that might have been while they were testing those inner screens for the final round clock, as the set moves around those screens wipe from white to black accordingly.
those last 4 pyramids are trashed
Aha, fair enough.
Given all the money won in the show is given out (except any lost in the endgame) via the mobile game
This will cost a fortune surely?
I should have made it clearer in the review, but the 4 pyramids left at the end of the game, before the final, are discarded completely. There’s a high chance of the biggest pyramids being there, so a high chance of that money not being given out.
There’s also, of course, the possibility of the team in the final losing their share, and even the viewer prize being unwon if nobody can make it through all 15-25 answers entirely correctly. That said, given that everyone wins something, yes there is at least a million going out in prize money each week if the numbers I saw here stick.
On the assumption that this isn’t a piece of 92nd-day-of-the-year hilarity (if so, it’s brilliantly well pitched) – this sounds inelegant but exciting. Not sure that this would get an order of magnitude more participants than Come and Have A Go… or The Million Pound Drop, and perhaps this would still be sustainable and exciting if the prizes were, perhaps, a fifth to a half as big. Fingers crossed, though.
If it was a jolly jape, then ITV had a costly one on me on the 91st day of the year. Rather unsporting of them! Brig actually asked me to keep this serious today, which makes sense since there were already two joke articles here, but this is all based in fact.
The advantage this has over CAHAGIYTYSE is simply that a lot more people these days have a smartphone than had the technology back then. Shows like Britain’s Got Talent have proven that a simple smartphone app can get traction.
I was thinking that – there’s no way they can support prizes that big from an app and the viewing figures for a fairly complex quiz show. If it makes it to commission I predict a zero gets knocked off the prize amounts…
Hopefully it’ll be like some of the other shows (Perfection comes to mind) which didn’t make much sense from the reviews but worked quite well on screen.
re: the prize sustainability, I think it depends. If you’re one small part of the machinery, such as writing quiz questions for a trivia game on iTunes, then no – you’re not going to get rich overnight. Even if it’s a relative success, it’ll still be in the order of a few thousand pounds.
However, if you can be as much lord and master as you can – i.e. you write, code and sell the application, then it could work but there are downsides to having to doing this.
Then, once the app’s written, you can probably licence that for a decent fee to other broadcasters as part of the package.
I certainly think the idea’s a novel one, and if we were able to get £50,000 payouts from a simple phoneline from This Is My Moment in 2001, then why not the possibility of larger prizes in 2012? Yet, it does look incredulous that a £3m jackpot is a possibility. Most TV shows have a 1-5% level of interactive viewers – how this will get the majority of players playing along live is hard to see.
Also, if this is recorded, regarding the viewer competition: what was to stop me taking in a small personal audio recorder into the studio and making a record of all the questions asked?
We were told the show proper is to go out live, and only the pilot here was recorded. That is what’s to stop you.
Additionally, come to think of it – if people at home have to answer all 15-25 questions correctly, and they have to be pitched difficult enough that contestants in the studio don’t run away with all the money, then I’d expect a serious drop-off in players after week one when a lot of people realise they don’t have a chance of winning. 99p a week seems a bit steep to play along with the app for fun when you could use a pen and paper.
Perhaps an “every correct answer gives you an entry into the draw”-type mechanic would be more likely to get people to play, but if it’s going to get a reputation for being impossible for most people to win then people just won’t play.
On the other hand, if they pitch it a bit easier, they could have small prizes to winners (split the jackpot thousands of ways, though that would be an admin nightmare), but it would mess up the in-studio game. Swings and roundabouts.
I’d thought the app was a one-off 99p purchase, that could then be re-used on each show. If nothing else, releasing a weekly app on the iOS app store would be a logistical nightmare unless you had a contact at Apple who could fast-track you through the approval process.
They wouldn’t need to, you could have an in-app purchase good for a ‘ticket’ to a show fairly easily I’d have thought.
Assuming 5m viewers and a 2% participation rate gives 100k people playing with the app, and implied £99k revenue.
Add that to a prize budget somewhere between Red or Black (£500k for two hours) and the typical ITV1 primetime game show (Exit List was on around £50k an hour, Millionaire is probably on about that now) and this works perfectly with a zero lopped off everything – probably £200k every 90 minutes, if that.
I’d imagine they’d be looking for about a 0.1% win rate, which would be 100 people out of the hypothetical 100,000 players above.
I presume that the point of reveal for the pyramid value after the questions but before the keep or pass decision?
I forget the starting number for their fudged-in estimates of home players, but I recall the end number of “winning” players given was 97, so your 100 winners doesn’t sound far off from their own estimates actually.
The point of reveal was AFTER the keep/pass decision. So you don’t know if you’re passing out a 0 or a big amount.
Lots of people suggesting this sounds complicated, but I think you can boil it all down to the following:
– There are three teams, one of one, one of five, one of 25.
– There are five money pyramids on the table, each one with a varying amount of money. You pick one and answer two questions. Get them both right, you can keep the money, get one wrong then someone else gets the money. The pyramids are replaced by ones with higher value after each round.
– Teams with the lowest amount of money leave, all the losers money collected for viewers jackpot.
– Last team standing answers five questions, each correct answer is an extra 20% chance of winning the big prize they’ve built up.
That’s the basis of the format, really.
See this is why I said suggestions of complexity are down purely to my terrible writing. I felt the need to go into too much detail.
No, I think what you’ve done is fine – I like details. Theatre of the mind and all that.
Next time I or someone else does a recording review I think I might bold the key bits, so that you can just read the bold bits and know what the show is.
In fact I like this idea so much I’m going to edit it in.
Edit: There you go, let’s see how that goes down.
Thumbs up!
I don’t know that it really has a unique selling point. The giant turntable isn’t a particularly good visual hook, the idea of players winning at home has been done before (and it relies on the technology working) and the idea of three different sized teams is just a bit confusing. I’d like to be wrong though, because a serious, ambitious quiz show on ITV1 on a Saturday night is A Good Thing from my point of view, and it’s very easy for me to criticise given that I have nothing whatsoever to do with the industry.
That said, I do like the two answer question mechanic, and if someone would like to incorporate that into a daytime quizzer then that would be great.
(Or, if we really want to make David B’s life difficult, a special episode of OC where all the questions have two sets of connections…)
You say the “two answer question” mechanic, but is it not fundamentally “Sort these three things into order”? I’m not sure I see a reason for a participant to particularly care *who* gets the money if it’s not them, so they either sort it right and get the money or sort it wrongly and not get it.
I didn’t think it was good for any strategic reason, I just thought it was novel. But it could be good if there could be two linked questions, one with four answers and one with the three incorrect answers from the first one. (expand up to connecting wall size and you’ve got a money chase final round…)
I don’t think it’s a format with any strategy to it at all, which is a shame but it would probably be slightly too complicated for Saturday night ITV anyway. (see Duel, which wasn’t even that complicated).
sounds to me like the vault meets goldenballs meets secret fortune. which doesnt inspire much confidence in me, sounds like a flop in my book.
and yes, i’d expect 0’s to fall if i see it on air.
Somewhat related – another “new” Endemol format, premiered at MIPTV , along with a trailer and a flash game (eh, sounds familiar …) to promote it.
http://www.thecodethegame.com/game.php
Not stellar, i’d say.
Cheers, quite fun, although I’m not convinced there’s much of a show there. It works fine on iDevices, by the way.
It’s always fun to see what Endemol Elements have been combined when you get a format like this.
I scored €72500 on my first attempt.
It looks OK to me, looks like it’ll be more fodder for my YouTube page to go with The Colour of Money, The Bank Job and Cleverdicks.
I’ve had a trial run of the game to familiarise myself with how it works and I ended up going away with €51,000. The 4 clue numbers I ended up having were not in the code, so it helped me determine the code in the 3 attempts and won.
A video of my second playthrough:
It’s okay, but at least The Bank Job’s game got me excited for the show. This doesn’t leave me feeling anything.
Also, the voiceover guy’s voice is really ticking me off. Can’t explain why.
Ooh, you din’t get the voiceover on iPad.
On the trailer. Not the game, that was eerily silent on computer as well.
Hold on, where’s the trailer? I think I had better look at this on an actual computer.
Edit: A-ha, the Download Trailer link doesn’t show up on the iPad.
It’s Andrew Castle!
I got €101,000 through. The code was 0123. Hmm.
IT would be good if it had more than about 20 questions, although I guess it’s mainly demonstrative.
But once they’ve cracked The Code, they then have ONE final, life-changing decision to make…
Do they DIVIDE… or do they PILFER?
You missed a DIVIDE or CONQUER trick there!
Sounds a lot easier to see than it does to describe. The viewer response to the first show is going to be “how the heck is anyone supposed to understand this?” The viewer response to the third show, if there is a third show, is going to be “Pass the pyramid!”.
I wonder where in the year this is going to be scheduled? Saturday nights after the mass entertainment event we cannot name for trademark reasons would make sense, but wasn’t that slot promised to Grey or Pink? Or is this going to be ITV’s big hope for Wednesday nights, now the football has moved to Tuesdays?
This show is going to have to be live, or on a very slight delay in case someone mentions a rude word, for instance “The Voice”.
In order for the show as described to be self-funding, it needs a whole Celebrity Juice of viewers playing each week. In turn, that means the show will need at least 57.5 million viewers every week. No show is that popular, not even Impossible?.
Knock a zero off the prizes, and we’re looking at 300,000 players, 6 million viewers to break even. That would be a good score for ITV.
I wrote, when reviewing “Come and Have a Go” in (cripes!) April 2004:
No-one’s going to be on analogue, but the other point remains. ITV risks making their show a test of electronic connectedness and knowhow, which might explain why Carol Vorderman’s in on it.
My gut feeling: it would be worth watching once, I would hope to follow the series deeper. But by not having the technology to play, my judgement would be purely on the show as a show.
Knock a zero off the prizes, and we’re looking at 300,000 players, 6 million viewers to break even. That would be a good score for ITV.
It would also struggle to be event television.
I was at this recording and took the panoramic shot of the studio used in the artical haha. The game seemed quite complicated when explained to us at the start but as the show progressed, the idea became much clearer.
I’m still not sure how ITV could afford this sort of prize fund; they had to shell out well over £800’000 for the winners in the pilot episode alone! Not convinced many people would be flocking to spend 99p a go on the app each week either if I’m honest…
“£800,000 for the winners of the pilot”? Err..really?
Single non-broadcast pilots don’t usually have a budget north of £1 million per episode – as a rule.
No matter how desperate the broadcaster is for the show to hit the ground and leg it towards the horizon.
I thought that in most cases although the game is played as it would when it is broadcast – usually the players/contestants are playing for a
pre-determined flat fee?
Either that or, say, 5% of the ‘real’ winnings. An alternative is that they get a promise to be used sometime during the real recordings.
Unrelatedly: are there any other shows with, apparently, exactly 31 players per game apart from this and Take Me Out?
(Feel free to rephrase this as “What connects this and Take Me Out?” but I’ve given you the answer.)