OK, the pilot episode of The Line-Up as well as a producer commentary is now up on The Line-Up page.
I hope you find it mildly entertaining.
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OK, the pilot episode of The Line-Up as well as a producer commentary is now up on The Line-Up page.
I hope you find it mildly entertaining.
Enjoyed it! It could do with even more you, by which I mean the best bits were you being yourself. It doesn’t need less of the contestants, it just could do with more… Brigginess. I’m sure future episodes will be even more so, given time and practice.
For a pilot episode, that was rather good. The game was simple and easy to follow with some nice strategy in place in the final round, and the banter between yourself and the contestants was very witty (even if you had to re-record parts of it). I would most certainly like a go at this.
If anyone *did* think it was rubbish, do please say so. The constructive criticism has been very interesting so far, but what’s most interesting is that it seems to average out at basically what’s there.
Thanks Brig for letting me be a contestant! It was great fun, the podcast was great and comes across really well.
I have got one idea for a format tweak – could we have four questions per category, so that one question doesn’t get used? Everything else is the same, the first two questions are picked before hand, and then one question from each category (and their order) are picked after round 2. I feel like there’s a bit more strategy in that.
Mmm. I’ve spent the last half an hour thinking about this, and this is where I think I am:
I think you are right that it would make a better game. The problem is I’m not sure it would necessarily make for a better *show*, and if it’s something that’s going to effect the bottom line then it has to make it tangibly better for the listener experience. I’m not convinced not asking questions (esp. when they’ve been set so the sets are already balanced) improves the viewer experience, and if I have to start actually paying for them then it adds 33% to my running costs.
BUT.
If you were to take those extra five questions and fashion them into a speed round, you’d have an amazing tie-breaker (for the golden tankard or whatever). The question is how to deploy it. Only in the event of a tie? Lots of wastage. In between two and three? It’d be a nice change of pace but I don’t know how it would affect final round tension. I think you’d have issues with people getting answers right only to tie and still lose.
It’s another thing to consider especially if money and effort wasn’t an object. As it stands I like the economy of the current set-up, and people already think it’d ideally be a bit shorter, and I’d rather not be adding long-term ideas at this stage just to have to take them away later.
A speed round would work better if it wasn’t a podcast show. With Skype being prone to lag and dropouts everywhere it’ll likely be more trouble than it’s worth. And the idea of ferrying everyone to Cambridge wouldn’t exactly work either.
I thought about this also but I think that it only works if you have time for a prove out (“Let’s see if you would have known the question that wasn’t used..”) on which I don’t think you really want to waste any running time. Also – for an audio game – I think it would make the structure much muddier in the listener’s mind, if you work on the basis that audio shows are often half-listened to by people driving, doing the washing up etc.
To wit, as long as the questions are as well balanced as they can be, it’s unlikely to change the outcome.
You’re both right in that it’d bog down the show. As it is, it works well. I did think about having six categories instead of five, thus one category isn’t chosen per person each round. But yeah, tinkering isn’t really necessary with it.
Have you seen Marcus Brigstocke‘s latest? You should challenge him to a Brig-off, or at least get him as a celebrity contestant for your second episode. (And I bet David M. Green would be up for it as an opponent!)