Null Gewinnt

Before we continue, don’t forget that Fort Boyard‘s on tonight and our discussion post is here. It’s not on next week (and possibly the week after) because of the Olympics so enjoy it while you can. Edit: My bad, it is on next week, not the week after.

Anyway a big thank you to Barry who pointed us in the direction of Null Gewinnt (Zero Wins, I believe), the new German version of Bother’s Bar favourite Pointless. You can watch it online here.

It works a bit differently to our Pointless, it seems to be a primetime weekly show on the German Erste Channel, so if you missed my Twitter commentary this morning, here’s what you need to know:

• Same music as our show but very different graphics and set. The camerawork is a bit trendy, zooming in and out of the column with the answer reveals on a whim.
• However, like the French show the background music mix is slightly too high and so you want to kill whoever is playing that bontempi keyboard sting which you will hear about 300 times during the show quite quickly.
• Hosts are Dieter Nuhr and null gewinnt friend Ralph Caspers. Ralph looks like Richard Osman if he was crossed with David Mitchell. He is taller than Dieter which is the important thing. Also, crucial difference, his computer is turned on.
• Three teams of two play. For each question they can confer so that they come up with one answer.
• Teams get €1,000 for every pointless answer (which I *think* they can keep regardless of outcome) and the end game is worth €10,000.
• First round begins with classic Pointless open ended-questions. There are three of them an each team gets to go first once. They don’t go through the best and worst answers which is a shame.
• After that, the next three questions are “pick from a list”, again each team getting to go first. This is actually pretty good formatting I think as there is more opportunity for swing in these sorts of questions, and a high chance of some pointless answers, an implicit raising of the stakes. Similarly there’s always a reason for playing if you can’t win because of the €1,000 bonus.
• High scorers leave.
• The head-to-head round is best of five, although the questions sound rather more broad than they were in our head-to-head rounds – Steven Spielberg films rather than members of the Famous Five.
• Nice graphic.
• Losers depart it’s time for the end game.
• As is standard they get a choice of three categories. Different to the original, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of time limit to come up with answers – contestants and hosts seem perfectly happy to be having a chat. Hosts don’t seem to know the numbers in advance so it sounds like there’s some general speculation which is quite fun (although I’m only a D in GCSE German so don’t read too much into that).
• Contestants don’t give all their answers at once, they give an answer then we see how much it scores.

I think it’s a pretty good weekly primetime reversioning of the format that feels rather more successful and thought out than the French version (which just seemed to throw everything the format’s got at a wall and hope it stuck). Well done the Germans.