This films this weekend starting today. A full recording review will appear here over the weekend, but if you go we’re interested in your thoughts.
Right, I’ve seen this now. I think David Howell’s thoughts are perfectly good so I’m going to regurgitate them and add a few things to the end:
* Start delayed. They were still putting a few bits together to be honest, on an oversized set for the show despite an audience of 50-odd. Five didn’t make it to the end.
* Once we got going it flowed adequately for episode one.
* Four parent/sibling couples play the game. Three elimination rounds build up the “inheritance fund” the winner plays for.
* In round 1 (which had a jokey title, think it was “Questions Needing Answers”), it was standard Q&A, but the siblings buzzed whenever they thought their parent knew the answer. Add a grand if right, a wrong answer and it’s a grand to all their opponents. Repeat about ten times, maybe a bit more, I forgot and lost count. Team in last goes out. Cue cheesy catchphrase. (” We’ve lost a team” “It’s the end of a dream!” Yes, we chanted that bit.) ad break.
* Round 2, also with a stupid name, is the round that may decide most games. Four categories on the board, sibling picks category for parent, they have 30 seconds to get as many answers as possible from a top ten in that category. A grand for each right answer, and this was ridiculously swingy tonight. Last place goes out, catchphrase, ad break.
* Round 3 (“Clue – doh!”) works the same as round 1 except there’s three clues for each question instead of straight Q&A.
* The winner plays the endgame and this time it’s the sibling who answers all the questions. Five questions right to win the whole lot, as soon as you’ve got one wrong the money counts down at £100 every 0.4ish seconds but you’re still just trying to get five right, and they don’t have to be consecutive.
* Nearly every game will be played for something in the high teens, I reckon. Wins might vary a bit.
* It’s an hour, and it doesn’t need to be, but Tim is so funny with the contestants that the padding might almost help it.
* It’s certainly much more lighthearted than The Chase or Tipping Point.
* I’d watch it occasionally, but I think it’s more fun to watch recorded because of all the Tim Vine fun that won’t make the edit.
And now a few things I’m going to add:
- Started recording about 2:30, finished about four. So what’s everybody else’s excuse? Good work 12 Yard.
- Tim Vine. I love him, but he didn’t seem a perfect fit here sadly, didn’t seem quite at ease. Also his act works because it’s relentless as stand-up, it gets no real chance to build here.
- Round two is a bit borked. The order of play is determined by money at the end of round one, top scorer first, low scorer last. This is fine where there are potentially an infinite amount of correct answers to be had. In this instance, with just ten answers available, there’s a real chance that the third team will be too far behind to even bother playing. Tension. Should be other way round really, so even if the low team stuffs up you can still build up positional play with the other two.
- Round three goes on a bit.
- Final is fine. I quite like it, starts off slow then could become a hi-octane money chase at any time.
- It’s nice that 12 Yard have done a show which doesn’t require the contestants to think answers out for 45 seconds to a minute. More please!!!!
- The title logo and coins should blow up as a visual segue.
- It’s fine. It’s not a format to get excited about but it’s a show that basically is simple and works.
Someone posted an episode of the UK show Steal (not the pilot, which was up for a while some time ago)…
Ooh, nice find, thanks.
I don’t remember the theme tune sounding a bit like Runway’s, but there we are.
…Could we have a revival of this in place of Eggheads, please?
That’s groovy! I can remember this coming out, and I also remember that I never watched it at the time (Saturday afternoons, at a guess), so I’m glad to have got the chance to do so, 22 years after the fact.
It’s pretty good in a 3-2-1 sort of way. Did Mark Walker stay in the biz called show?
Early evening, as I recall.
I think his haircut did.
Right. Just got out of Studio 3 at TVC for Don’t Blow The Inheritance! – exclamation mark in title.
It’s almost certainly daytime, I’m sensing another trial a la Chase / Fuse as it’s ten episodes.
More once I’m in Westfield…
The best game shows have an exclamation mark in the title. That and the word “Accumulate” before it. #blowsowntrumpet #unnecessaryhashtag
Right. Here we go.
* Start delayed. They were still putting a few bits together to be honest, on an oversized set for the show despite an audience of 50-odd. Five didn’t make it to the end.
* Once we got going it flowed adequately for episode one.
* Four parent/sibling couples play the game. Three elimination rounds build up the “inheritance fund” the winner plays for.
* In round 1 (which had a jokey title, think it was “Questions Needing Answers”), it was standard Q&A, but the siblings buzzed whenever they thought their parent knew the answer. Add a grand if right, a wrong answer and it’s a grand to all their opponents. Repeat about ten times, maybe a bit more, I forgot and lost count. Team in last goes out. Cue cheesy catchphrase. (” We’ve lost a team””It’s the end of a dream!” Yes, we chanted that bit.) ad break.
* Round 2, also with a stupid name, is the round that may decide most games. Four categories on the board, sibling picks category for parent, they have 30 seconds to get as many answers as possible from a top ten in that category. A grand for each right answer, and this was ridiculously swingy tonight. Last place goes out, catchphrase, ad break.
* Round 3 (“Clue – doh!”) works the same as round 1 except there’s three clues for each question instead of straight Q&A.
* The winner plays the endgame and this time it’s the sibling who answers all the questions. Five questions right to win the whole lot, as soon as you’ve got one wrong the money counts down at £100 every 0.4ish seconds but you’re still just trying to get five right, and they don’t have to be consecutive.
* Nearly every game will be played for something in the high teens, I reckon. Wins might vary a bit.
* It’s an hour, and it doesn’t need to be, but Tim is so funny with the contestants that the padding might almost help it.
* It’s certainly much more lighthearted than The Chase or Tipping Point.
* I’d watch it occasionally, but I think it’s more fun to watch recorded because of all the Tim Vine fun that won’t make the edit.
Thanks David!
That actually sounds quite decent (If entirely unspectacular), even without Tim Vine.
…Granted Tim Vine certainly helps.
Thanks for the write-up!
If it was anyone else hosting, I’d complain about how little gameplay there is within a TV hour, but for Tim Vine, I’ll give it a chance. Tim’s ad libs are not actually his strongest point, but he should have enough time to prepare material beforehand and I’m hopeful about this.
Was John Archer (sarcastic bald Northern magician, fooled Penn and Teller) involved at all, perhaps as warm-up? He’s normally not too far from Tim, even if only involved with the writing.
His Twitter suggests he is.
Right, he is around, but he doesn’t wamr up, he comes on between takes to chat to Tim with a pen in his mouth. Script and little more I think.
Ooh, was he the “it’s only goddamn envelopes” guy?
One and the same.
Damnit, how did we miss each other? I was at the second taping today too, and as you probably guessed, was the one who knew the catchphrases and was picked out by Tim a couple of times because of that.
And it should be noted that this recording was held up (pushing the finish to about 4:10) because Tim inadvertently read out a question from the wrong category, causing a frantic rewrite of a new question in the same category, followed by printing out a new cue card when team 3 picked it.
I see the idea of the leaders having the advantage in round 2 (although questions seem a bit varied in difficulty, at least to me) but as they carry over their round 1 totals they already have that. Maybe a better idea would be to not have round 1 money carry over, and compensate by going £2k a question in the third round, which feels too slow and not even that tense or decisive unless it’s close. (Although at this taping, it absolutely was, and it was close in my taping too.)
There was an ‘issue’ at the taping involving a ruling I absolutely would not have accepted, involving the name ‘Kardashian’, and if the other team lost by a question I’d have been pretty annoyed although as it turned out natural justice won out in the end *SPOILER*.
I think there’s a very good chance this goes out on Sunday nights, the chance of the winners leaving with zero is very low I’d have thought, effectively you’ve got 60-80 seconds to get 1-5 questions right, and they weren’t particularly hard. There should be some sort of alarm when the money starts dropping though (your rate is right by the way, £1000 every four seconds).
Don’t worry, I defintely recognised your voice. You’d be an audience co-ordinator’s dream 🙂
I’d not thought of Sundays but for a ten episode series where probably at least eight will end in a £1x,x00 win, it makes sense.
The other catchphrase was hilariously weak, it was just us chanting back “THOUSANDS OF POUNDS!” when Tim mentioned that’s what’s up for grabs. Hard to get excited about it when the highest amount it’s even physically possible to win is equal to the fifth highest value on the DoND board (I could see the autocue in the second recording and it stated 15 questions in round 1 and ten in round 3, the first episode had eleven in round three presumably because one question in round 1 had to be thrown out when Tim read out 2011 instead of 2001). But the Sunday evening audience want a feel-good show and this – with an endgame which all but ensures a somewhat happy ending – will give it to them.
The best praise I can give this is that it’s very unlikely to turn up in the Hall of Shame in six months’ time.
I was at one of yesterday’s recordings and I also thought that one or two of the rulings weren’t entirely fair. During the second round (30 seconds to name as many of the ten things in the category as you could) Tim flubbed his words while one of the questions was already displayed on the screen. This was before the 30 second countdown had begun so it meant that the player who’d chosen that category had longer to think up their responses than others did, while Tim re-did his spiel. Maybe only a minor thing but I probably wouldn’t have been too impressed if I were on one of the other teams.
Tim also stumbled over one of the questions during the endgame, while the money was dropping, which meant that the player probably ended up taking home a few hundred quid less than they otherwise would have. But the biggest issue for me was during round 3 (the clues round) when one of the players buzzed in when Tim was only part-way through reading the second clue, and before it had been displayed on screen. Proceedings stopped for a minute or two while they decided whether he should finish reading the clue in full or not before giving them the chance to answer. In my view they made absolutely the wrong call by saying that Tim should complete the clue and that the team who buzzed can then answer. It seemed to go against the spirit of the game (offspring buzz in only when they think their parent has enough information to answer) and turned it into a simple exercise in which of the younger generation can press their button the quickest, regardless of what the question is or whether they think their parent can answer it. Although, to be honest, that’s pretty much what it already was anyway.
I did enjoy the recording, although that was mainly for Tim Vine (and for John Archer who did a couple of minutes for the audience during a short technical delay). I have to admit that I didn’t much like the game though.
Wait so all 3 of us were at the same recording? You couldn’t have planned it!*
* well actually you probably could have.
Ha ha, no way!
Interesting to read; curious how it will play out on screen though.
It’s quite an old-school straight-down-the-line general knowledge quiz really, albeit with kids putting their parents/aunts/uncle’s knowledge to the test. By kids we’re talking 18-25s here, by the way – they talk about the “dream” of what they’d do with the money, as suggested one of the catchphrases when a team gets eliminated is “we’ve lost a team” and the audience shouts out “THE END OF A DREAM!”.
Host stands at a podium in front of a big screen with all the scores on it, on the other side of the studio the four young people sit at podiums with buzzers, their older family members sit at podiums higher up behind them. Final round has host and player standing either side of the big screen, with the money displayed on it.
One quite neat touch is that when a player buzzes in, all the neon lights in the studio turns that player’s colour.
The other catchphrases, for those interested are “you can blow a trumpet, you can blow out a candle but DON’T BLOW THE INHERITANCE!” and there was a third which I forget.
As a half an hour show it’d be good filler. At an hour I’m not sure. But we’ll see.
The last catchphrase is at the beginning of the show…
Tim: Our contestants could win thousands of pounds! What could they win?
Audience: THOUSANDS OF POUNDS!
The ‘Don’t blow the inheritance’ catchphrase would work better if it was a different intro to it each week, like the Whittle £500 jackpot, surely?
Very interesting indeed, thanks Clark! That was the episode I was at, and that very situation in round two struck me as being a little off.
For what it’s worth the first game was a whole lot closer, only a grand in it after round 1 and the second round proved decisive. (And no sign of skewing towards the red and yellow teams.) Different pairing of teams will lead to different types of game, and certainly there were two standout teams in yours, one of whom was very buzzer happy thus freezing you out for the most part. A shame you couldn’t truly enjoy the experience when you felt you were on to a loser before you even took the stage, but it sounds like you basically did anyway.