Magic Numbers host Stephen Mulhern being lined up for The Great ITV1 Catchphrase Revival of 2012, reports are suggesting.
In other news, The Love Machine seems to be returning for a second series for Sky Living, despite the fact the first one was really boring.
Super soaraway series one success Red or Black films in a fortnight apparently, although I haven’t seen any audience call outs for it which is cutting it a bit fine. Edit: Here you are, thanks Lewis, I can’t make those dates so if anyone can and wants to write it up, please let me know.
Three things to look forward to, there.
Red or Black ver 2.0.
I’ve not seen any audience call outs either, which makes me think the thise series could be run on the ‘audience are the contestants and the contestants are the audience’ premise.
A bit like Everybody’s Equal/Whittle, but with a bigger set, prize, and the shadow of the Cowell hovering in the background.
The Catchphrase revival may not be on ITV1. Judging by http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/britain_got_talent/4347939/Britains-Got-More-Talent-host-Stephen-Mulhern-to-host-Catchphrase.html , it’s going to be on ITV2.
Don’t trust The Scum…
It also claimed that there would be an episode of DOND with Noel playing. 🙄 😉
Anyway, it would be neither good nor right if this revival didn’t have Mr Chips, the original buzzer sounds, or the bell in each normal round.
It also wouldn’t be good if it had completely different music as opposed to remixes of Ed Welch’s or Simon Etchell’s works.
And I’d prefer it if the Super Catchphrase used the original “M square” format, rather than the “Gold Run” one of the Weir/Curry era.
Red or Black audience call arrived by Applause Store email (strangely, NOT on their main page) http://www.applausestore.com/applausestore-book-show.php?id=1755&bid=1
Seems like a few changes to the format, including a rollover jackpot…
“This extreme scale entertainment game show returns with 56 contestants, 6 MASSIVE games where trained professional, sports personalities and entertainers compete on behalf of the contestants, giving one lucky contestant the opportunity to win a large sum of money ranging from a min £500k – £3.5million!!!”
Yep, that was revealed a while ago. £500k a pop.
Interesting to see how this is more skill based this time.
Almost sounds a bit like that Lottery show from early on that everyone hated. *Searching…* Big Ticket, that was it.
Sounds like a fine call, but somehow this feels more contextually appropriate to me, probably because of the nature of the first series.
Like the first series, it will probably succeed or fail on the quality of its stunts; fingers crossed that unlike the first series, there won’t be all the duffers wrapped around the small number of really pretty good stunts out there. (If there are only 56 contestants – presumably 7 times 8 – then they hopefully will be comfortable with having fewer rounds of elimination in order to maintain the quality of the decisions that generate the eliminations that do occur.)
I find it hard to believe that this won’t be a better show, not to suggest that it will necessarily even be a good one.
I’m off on one of those recording days, but really put off applying by the 12.00pm recording start time. This smacks of a taping window that could drag on for hours and hours and hours.
They definitely need to get more skill involved, so the ‘competing on behalf of the contestants’ doesn’t fill me with a great deal of hope, but hopefully the contestants will be more involved. Also I’m sure I read that they’ve scrapped the wheel this year so I think there’s going to be a new end game.
6 games per show should mean it isn’t going to run for 90-105 mins a night like it did last year. Maybe it’ll be done all in one show rather than two (one 75 minute show would be about right).
I think scrapping the wheel is a bad idea, it’s the show’s central setpiece.
It was the only part that really worked last year so it does seem like an odd decision, although I wonder if it was prompted by the Gambling Commission’s investigation? If they can replace it with something better and more ‘skillful’ then they’ll be alright.
Admission: I rather liked Mark Curry’s rather shtick-y hosting of the dying years of Catchphrase. If anything, there wasn’t quite enough shtick; it takes quite a bit of gimmickry to get sufficient character and momentum and… well, internal mythology to sustain a show like Shooting Stars or, in the US, The Gong Show (or, as discussed not so long ago, Joe Pasquale’s Price Is Right).
There was schtick?
His main catchphrase was that he didn’t have a catchphrase. That’s all I remember.
But he kept trying different ones, and he wore wacky glasses, and he generally looned around rather a lot compared to the trad. arr.
Well, judge for yourselves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN8U55Ubnnw
The best bit is how they never refer to ‘points’ to make it look less cheap than it actually is.
I’d add our DoND to that list. These days, the shtick is half the show.
Victoria Cohen is on David Dimbleby’s coffee morning at the moment…Sure it’ll be on iPlayer later.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ibrKGO5d4
Hey, remember CITV’s Eliminator? Always loved that show, so simple yet brilliant. My time watching CITV was this, Jungle Run and Globo Loco.
Eliminator and Jungle Run were from my ‘Because these are the best game shows on British television goddamnit’ years. In the same way that Horrible Histories is part of my ‘Because this is one of the best comedy series on British television goddamnit. And BBC3 have just axed one of it’s two competitors’ years.
…My childhood years for CITV, meanwhile, were Funhouse, Finders Keepers, Knightmare and the wolves Bro and Bro.
God, I loved Fun House, Finders Keepers and Knightmare, although I mostly had to make do with repeats on Challenge. They were the best game shows on British television goddamnit.
God I love the title theme to Eliminator. It just fits perfectly
Wow, not quite how I remember it being.
Superb format – dead simple and really good at creating tension. But it just looks so cheap – the CGI’s awful, the set seems like it’s made out of cardboard, the contestants are surly, it looks like the entire series was filmed in one day and the questions seem rigged to avoid paying out prizes (asking a group of nine year olds who composed the wedding march and calling it a medium difficulty question?!). I enjoyed it greatly as a child but just watching a few minutes now and it smacks of wasted potential (like much of CITV’s output…)
But they will have to pry Jungle Run out of my cold dead hands.
The horrible set and CGI was fixed in Series 2, which doesn’t seem to be on Youtube. If I recall the first zone was changed from a Tube station to an Underground Cavern, and the team were lowered in via an open-top lift.
As for the rest of the problems, I think they remained.
To me, Jungle Run is the blueprint that any new Crystal Maze run should follow, including making the dome a series of team puzzles rather than what will now be seen as a fairground game.
Everyone agrees that the Dome was brainless and didn’t make sense. But it was iconic and the first thing the contestants wanted to do when they got on set.
Yes, agreed, I think not bringing it back would be a big mistake.
It’s an interesting balance that I think we saw with the Blockbusters revival – how far do you court the nostalgia audience and how far do you try to innovate in such a way that makes people continue to watch?
The first route’s what gets people through the door (as demonstrated by the first two nights of ratings) but unless there’s a reason to stick around people go away (as demonstrated by the following three nights of ratings). I think Blockbusters got it pretty well right in terms of balance, with the exception of the constant applause whenever someone asked for a P – you’d almost think Stephen Mulhern had appeared on set.
That’s the tricky thing with a revival like Crystal Maze – nostalgia’s going to be what gets people through the door but there will have to be something else that keeps people watching, and I’m not convinced that audiences these days will want to watch a show where the conclusion is six people jumping around trying to grab shiny bits of paper in order to win an adventure day. It’s neat to dip in and out of for a couple of games, which is why it works so well on Challenge, but I don’t feel there’s a huge incentive to stick around.
Not being any kind of professional (and really only writing this so I can avoid revising) I’d say that for a successful revival Richard O’Brien – or maybe some equally iconic figure – and the set-piece dome would be necessary, as well as sufficiently visually impressive sets, but you’d need a more dramatic conclusion (that doesn’t involve whether to split or steal the crystals) that perhaps isn’t quite so Nintendo hard to win. Probably slightly more visually involving and dramatic games, because I don’t know that a modern audience would have an attention span to watch someone fumbling with a tile game for a full three minutes. Maybe I’m underestimating, but I think people would get bored.
The other catch is that it can’t just be revived in a cheap and cheerful way like Blockbusters – the investment requires precludes anyone that isn’t terrestrial/Sky One, and I imagine you’d need to get at least two series out of it for the initial investment to be anywhere near worthwhile. But the kids who watched it now have kids of their own, and it’s not like ITV1 has any better ideas for early Saturday evening…
My thoughts on Crystal Maze revival prospects:
Needs someone who can improvise when the games get dull. You can’t beat Richard O’Brien on this, obviously, but that sort of skill set is needed. I don’t think it matters if the improvisations are in the form of comedy, storytelling, or musical interludes, but there needs to be a variety and they need to be genuinely entertaining in their own right.
Needs enough of a budget to make a set that looks as good to a modern audience as the old zones did to the 1990 audience. That isn’t neccessarially more budget than the old one, I believe much of the expense came from the time scale that they were needed to be built in, and you could probably get some of the cost back by renting out the set to foreign production companies.
Speaking of zones – It has been mentioned in the ukgameshows discussion group that it was getting tricky to figure out new games for the old zones, and the only reason they didn’t replace them was that would be extra, no such benefit to keeping the old zones exist, so four new zones would probably be the order of the day, but what those would be I have not a clue.
Then you come to the Dome – You have to keep the iconic pentakis dodecahedron. You also have to keep the moat and the electronic drawbridge to get to it. Those are non-negotiable. I share the concern El Condor and Luke the Lurker have about how much a modern audience would take to a climax of a show being six people playing grab-a-grand with gold and silver foil, but if you changed it from the fundamentals of people jumping around grabbing stuff, I do think you’d probably gain more resentment of the TheyChangedItNowItSucks variety than good will due to brand recognition, so if you did change the end game too far – and actually changing it to something that makes sense would be a change too far (Literally playing grab a grand with maybe some negative value notes in there would probably be fine rather than playing for arbitrary tokens that are traded for a prize at the end, but even that’s pushing it), you should be making a new program within the Fort Boyard style of action/adventure genre.
So, I’d love to see a modern Crystal Maze… But if I were making it I wouldn’t call it The Crystal Maze unless the end game was kept pretty much intact, however much I was directly modelling it on the original aside the endgame.
(And, yeah, my feelings about the Dome have basically changed since the last time I thought about this – The last time I think I was thinking ‘as long as you’ve got the iconic set design, people will accept the change’… But now I think the viewers of the classic show wouldn’t unless it was a grab a grand style end game, and possibly unless the end game was basically the same as it was.)
You’re quite right about the build cost – if it could be planned properly and there was a long lead time, the cost may even be less than it was before.
As for NintendoHard to win endgame?
Sure, if you were doing an American revival you’d need one that at least has a 50% chance of victory for a modestly successful team rather than needing the team to actually do well to raise the victory chance to about 50%, but… Britain? We love an underdog, and making every team who enters the maze an underdog – a possible to win end game but one that’s hard – doesn’t seem like it would be a problem to me. We like to see underdogs triumph, and making The Dome any easier than it was originally would spoil the feeling of watching a bunch…
…Don’t forget, we’re the country that made a kids show that had 8 winners across 8 seasons, and didn’t have a winner in S1 and S3, and which in the modern era has Pointless and The Million Pound Drop. NintendoHard isn’t a problem for British audiences like it often seems to be for American audiences.
(David, do you know of anywhere with stats for how difficult the Dome was? Percentage victory for various amounts of crystals and lock-ins?)
As much as I don’t like him, John Barrowman would be a good host for any Crystal Maze revival. He’s an actor, fairly pleasant easy going manner but can turn on a sixpence to bring some order to the team, and capable of winging it and (listening to his interviews with Chris Moyles on Radio One) does a nice line in dry self-depreciating remarks.
The only real issue about it coming back, is, would any broadcaster really want to bankroll the rent of a massive studio(s)the construction and standing for roughly a month of five four waller sets?
Suppose if ITV or Sky could find a big headline million pound sponsor it could happen, or, rent out the set to overseas broadcasters during the (admittedly small) UK recording gaps.
Is this the time to bring back the Bar’s “Get Tim Vine To Host the TCM Revival” bandwagon again?
Not that it really did anything the first time, but still.
I’d prefer Tim Vine on The Generation Game, tbh.
Ross Noble for TCM, natch.
I’ve always thought David Tennant would be a decent host. I mean, Richard and Ed may as well have been honorary Time Lords.
No idea on end game percentages. I think there was one team who got 6 crystals and lucked a win, and there was another team who got 9 or 10 and somehow managed to lose.
Purely from guesswork/memory, I think 7 crystals gave you a 20-30% shot, 8 crystals 70-80%, 9+ crystals 90%+.
Someone has produced statistics. No breakdown of crystals to chances but the headline figure is 17 wins in 83 tries, so just over a 20% win rate. This counts kids’ teams with their raw score, not as auto-wins.
Actually, that’s a bloody good, if slightly scarily comprehensive, site.
When we’d bandied around ideas before, there was talk of some rooms having either more valuable crystals or more than one crystal in the room. These would possibly be the lock-in rooms, so you could choose riskier strategies if you were low on crystals.
For the end game, the way I’d do it is to mark one gold token with a ‘cross’ marked on it in UV pen. Every silver collected means one of the golds collected is taken away at random. All the duds are taken away – the host has one token left at the end wrap-up and puts it under a light to show whether that’s the winning token or a blank. This way, even a team with one crystal has a chance, however small, to win and likewise a 10-crystal team isn’t guaranteed a win.
Not keen on the idea of multiple crystals/more valuable crystals in a TCM revival, at least – not in the first series of one. In the second, maybe, in the same way that the original added automatic lock-ins and then the very occasional reverse-game [game to get out rather than win crystal], and played a bit with the concept (With a game where the crystal wasn’t a gimme but getting out was at least as hard as getting the crystal, and a game where the crystal and getting out required the same task) – I could see it growing out of the game again, but doing it in the first series might risk alienating people who are tuning in for the nostalgia.
Wa-hey! You’ve invented Jungle Run.
I don’t like that Dome idea, it will have viewers wondering if it’s a fix every time.
The truth is, I don’t think it matters if the Crystal Dome is a great endgame or not. When was the last time you heard anyone suggest they only tuned in at the end to see if the team won or not? Content really was TCM’s trump card.
Similarly I think any revival that doesn’t begin with the original zones is doomed to failure – start familiar, you can get creative once everyone is drawn in. Remix some old games for the first series if you have to (physical and skill) – it’s not stopped Fort Boyard running for almost 25 years has it? That’s only just got round to theming rooms!
I don’t really understand why you’d blow £500k on creating a set that got broken up 15 years ago. I think creatively it would be better to have four new zones, and it would offer more game theming opportunities.
In any case, the standard six-cell zone format could also change as you might want to do slightly larger set pieces that you can’t do in a 9’x9′ cell.
I guarantee if you don’t bring back at least most of what people remember, they’ll just whinge. I don’t see any reason why you would need to stick to the original set designs, studio space notwithstanding, as long as the theming was correct and the computer still talked.
Anyway we don’t need Crystal Maze now because we’ve got The Doo… Oh.
If anything is different people will winge; the trick is to keep it similar enough to keep the winging to fans of the original. I think people would be able to accept that the zones change over time, thanks to Industrial Zone changing to Ocean World during the course of the show. And I don’t believe it would be a cost anyone would relish building a set with the intention of rebuilding at least a quarter of it after a single year. (Though making the set with ‘cycling zones out over time’ in mind seems reasonable, just not after the first year)
David – You’ve said in the past about it being tricky to come up with games for the zones after six years, hence why Ocean Zone got most of the best games in Ed’s tenure. On the other hand, I do actually agree with Brig to a certain extent about… Well, you need to keep some continuity with the past. Would it be feasible to bring back the Industrial Zone and Ocean Zone, come up with two new zones, and if the show’s still going into a third year cycle out one or both of the returning zones? From a ‘designing games for the zones’ perspective, that is. (And that’s with the assumption that you’d redesign the sets to give more options for designing games for them, which Ocean Zone wouldn’t need as much of as from what I recall of watching the show; the Ocean Zone set seemed to have lots of, including some cells that appeared to be used in different ways depending on what door was used to enter it)
But, yeah, The Crystal Maze And The Magic Carrot, while increasing tension and keeping, may be too fiddly on camera and cause suspicion of a fix, which lets not forget even having all the questions written on the same card in Eggheads rather than a card with question set A and a card with question set B on seems to do.
Stuff The Crystal Maze, let’s bring back The Magic Carnival and have done ;-).
Seriously, I’d have thought that if Challenge thought that new epiosdes would outweigh the repeats, this would have been commissioned already.
Stuff The Crystal Maze, let’s bring back The Magic Carnival and have done ;-).
Seriously, I’d have thought that if Challenge thought that new episodes would outweigh the repeats, this would have been commissioned already.
There WAS almost a Challenge/CITV co production at one point.
Don’t think Challenge would finance it on its own – it’d still not be peanuts to make.
Compare and contrast: the buzzers from Takeover Bid (and other shows?) and one of the noises made by a Raleigh Vektar. I think the latter is perhaps ten years older.
I don’t know if this has been discussed here or not, but Fox is apparently debuting their own The Voice rip-off called The Choice (yes, really) with four celebrities in spinning chairs, but picking potential dates based on voice alone. Said Fox in an interview, “There was a bandwagon, so we decided to blindly jump on it.”
First thing I said in Twitter about it was ‘where do they get their crazy ideas from?’
…And seemingly accidentally hit the Blind Date bandwagon instead of The Voice one…
Blimey, this is a pretty disgraceful rip-off, even for Fox – just look at the set:
http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/05/08/fox-choice-celebrities/
This feels like a parody…