[By the way, please keep voting in the exciting Poll of the Year 2012.]
Wednesday January 2nd 2013 represnts an exciting day in the world of television and the world of gameshows. Kids programmes now have their own seperate channels so the main networks are filling the afternoons with gameshows (and Flog It!). This is a good time for format developers who can make a good cheap show with a view to being the next Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, Pointless, or The Chase.
The itinerary for tomorrow is as follows:
- Dickinson’s Real Deal (ITV, 3-4pm)
- Perfection (BBC1, 3:45-4:30pm)
- Tipping Point (ITV 4-5pm)
- Deal or No Deal (C4 4-5pm)
- Flog It! (4:30-5:15pm)
- The Chase (ITV 5-6pm)
- Come Dine With Me (C4 5-6pm)
- Pointless (5:15-6pm)
And if that wasn’t enough, Countdown returns to Channel 4 on Monday at 2:40, followed by a new show that finally seems to have settled on Face the Clock as a title (C4, 3:30pm) (Incidentally, an ironic title as facing a clock is precisely the one thing contestants won’t be doing. Anyway, it will get its own show discussion post). These next couple of months are going to be exciting and possibly brutal, it’s particularly interesting that none of BBC1s or ITVs shows share a junction – the hope is you’ll stick with the channel all afternoon. It’s actually a little bit like cycling, if you see Pointless and The Chase as the team leaders, Perfection and Tipping Point are the domestiques trying to get their riders to the finish line as quickly as possible. Something like that. We all understand cycling after London 2012.
WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN? And have they improved Tipping Point for series two? Nailbiting.
Never where the words ‘veni, vidi, vici’ adequate as in Perfection today.
Andrew entered the second game, was picked, nailed all 18 questions and went home with £ 3,000.
I missed the start of Tipping Point due to watching Perfection, but the Mystery counters are an interesting addition – was it announced at the start of the show what they did, and whether they were guaranteed to be helpful?
The “Here’s what you could have won” ending with Ben playing the machine is a cruel twist… I can see why they did it, but it does give a bitter aftertaste to having won a couple of thousand pounds.
If they knock over a counter with a question mark that person wins a mysery prize. They will keep the prize regardless whether they win the show or not.
A prize, but no cash? Interesting. Any hint as to the value of the prizes? And whether they will be used to settle ties? Very easy to imagine a situation where winning the prize actually costs someone the opportunity to play for 10 grand.
No prizes were won, so no hint to the value. A tie for who goes second in the second round was decided by who correctly buzzed in first in the first round.
With the end of game gamble (where if you don’t get the jackpot token down you can trade everything you have for 3 more tokens) it was said that you get nothing from any other token that falls, I’d assume including any prizes from “mystery” tokens.
There was a prize won on today’s show, a break in a hotel. Well, I kinda like the addition of the mystery tokens, as they act like the little trinkets and prizes that a regular coin pusher machine has, tempting people to go for them. They’re a bit sparse, though, only 2 or 3 in the entire machine. I’d have probably gone for at least one on each drop zone.
Ben actually said while explaining the chips that they were worth both the prize and 50 pounds.
I’m guessing they’ve been added as a way of adding product placement to add revenue. Which makes sense.
Didn’t watch it, DoND definitely my choice at 4.
Well any problems the show had it’s still really got – the game hasn’t actually changed, so the show still gets gradually less interesting and round three is still going to be a non-event if someone has anything approaching a couple of hundred quid lead going into it.
It needs a live audience to go ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ and laugh at the banter. And losers ought to get a T-Shirt with ‘I hate ghost drops’ on it. I’d like that shirt.
Is there a case for Tipping Point adopting the Shafted Scoring System and topping everyone else up to the leader’s total between rounds?
It feels like a lot of the decisions made have been made on the basis of cheapness rather than anything else, hence losers going home with nothing, only 30 seconds with no “I’ve started so I’ll finish” in round two, etc. Topping the pot up would increase the potential prize significantly.
But the main problem does seem to be that you can build up a lead with one lucky drop in round 1 and the rest of the game becomes a non-event. A few possible solutions?
– Increase the value of the counters between rounds – £25 in round 1, £50 in round 2 and £100 in round 3. (I quite like this idea, but it could make the final rather expensive…)
– Throw a few red counters on the lower shelf in round 3 for double the money.
– Stop giving the leader advantages in choosing when to play in rounds 2 and 3 (not sure this has a huge effect, but they’re there).
– Instead of the penalty pot in round 1, which is just asking for one person to run away with the game, have others buzz in and steal the counter instead.
As for the “here’s what you could have won”, it is mean-spirited, but it’s probably not a bad idea. It fits in with the attempts at high tension/not being overly nice to contestants, certainly.
What if all the discs in the machine at the start were silver and worth £50, but all the discs that get dropped into play throughout the game are black and worth £100 (or 25/50, if you want). That would mean a steady ramping up of the stakes throughout but in a way that seems natural.
I think that might lead to one or two problems:
1) The whole show would be people dropping counters down the same drop zone with no variety in strategy at all.
2) Not many of the black counters would come out (Look how easy it is just to get the mystery tokens out, and they start half way through the machine)
3) The whole machine would be much less visually appealing
It’s not a particularly importatnt find, but we’ve never had a proper full ep on there, so…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQ1LdtB-bY
Some Fort Boyard Sweden 2000 for you.
Nice find, the theme tune remains incredible.
today Avanti Un Altro is back for good.
don’t you think that Bonolis was a little inspired by the Bowling round of Luna Park? (which he used to host!)
Ha yes! I used to really like Luna Park, when my cable package used to show Rai. Particularly on Fridays with the Game of the Moon.
I’m sure Paul won’t mind me reposting this here, yesterday’s quiz ratings:
RT @paul_brassey: CMM 4.6 (20%), Chase 3.5 (21%), Pointless 3.5 (20%), Perfection 1.5 (13%), DOND 1.3 (12%), Tipping Point 1.2 (12 %)
Also Flog It got 2.3m.
Perfection and Flog It really hurt Tipping Point, but the other interesting thing is Pointless is right back up with The Chase.
Also it sounds like a new series of Superstars will be a Thing that is Happenjng.
Well, here’s interesting. A ‘potential’ contestant for Face the Clock on Monday’s show writes the following on Facebook:
“It was a bit of a sham when I filmed because I was cast in the first episode which encountered an enormous amount of problems. Subsequently the production team had a crisis meeting following the first episode being filmed and there appears that a rule change was in place. The rules I was playing with were very loose and inconsistent and also didn’t benefit the game at all.
“Anyway, so because it’s the first episode on Monday I figured I may be on it, but also may not as:
a) they haven’t told me
b) they may scrap the first episode due to their mistakes
c) they may not play the episodes in sequence
“Either way, if you wanna tune in to see this new show and once again see at least one ridiculous answer from me and an awful pun of a joke (if that is kept in) then do it.”
Sounds interesting! Surely they can’t have different rules on shows 1 and 2, so the MUST bin episode 1 – mustn’t they…? Since there’s no need for them to play the episodes in sequence, it’ll be hard to tell what’s actually happened until the very end of the run.
Sounds very exciting! However unless they a week interrupted by horse racing or something it’s going to be difficult to hide because they’ll otherwise be one short.
It seems appropriate to post this in an entry about afternoon game shows: Fifteen-to-One is 25 today.
Here’s the clip from series 2 in autumn 1988 that was chosen by the BFI for their ‘One Day in the Life of Television’ project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlj7KAVjeY8
From 1997, here’s the final of the Champion of Champions – might William G have got the idea for this particular episode after watching Countdown’s Supreme Championship the year before?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g4-sFan4ng
And here’s *that* outtake featuring Ingram Wilcox:
Ah, 15-To-1, how I miss thee. Now this was a good quizzer if ever I saw one. Plenty of questions at a challenging difficulty, a great host and very simple game mechanics. It’s a shame they can’t make quizzes like that any more *sigh*.
Daytime WAR day two ratings:
RT @paul_brassey: Perfection 1.33 (12.1%), Tipping Point 1.37 (11.3%), DOND 1.26 (10.3%), Pointless 3.97 (23.6%), Chase 3.43 (21.4%), 21 minutes ago
Tipping Point’s made up ground on Perfection, huge number for Pointless
That is a serious battle at 4pm. Not a lot in it between Tipping Point and DoND, Perfection (which overlaps with the first half of each) is in the same area too, it’s Flog It! which is proving devastatingly effective for Pointless (that’s a series high for a regular episode and must be BBC One’s highest non-sport rating in the slot for years).