Saturday 7:15pm UK time
Pro Sieben or dodgy internet streaming
Get your Wodka Gorbechow ready, this episode, Bother’s Bar ONCE AGAIN brings you Only Connect‘s David J Bodycombe, Daniel Peake and Lewis Murphy from Fifty 50 and myself guiding you through the evening’s Schlag den Raab – LIVE! Come back here at 7ish for a link to our live stream. We’re hoping to go on through until the close of play which could be any time between 11pm (if it’s a whitewash) and 2am (if it goes to the wire). Even if you can’t join us for the entirety of it, just tune in when you want!
And we want you to get involved! Your best way is either opening up the stream in a new window and making YouTube comments or tweeting with the hashtag #bbsdr. We’ll read out the most worthwhile ones. And some of the not-so-worthwhile ones. And we’ll be doing it LIVE.
This is the stream we are using to commentate. If you have VLC and Firefox, you can get a higher quality stream by clicking on the ProSieben VLC button. The VLC stream is around 10 seconds ahead of the non VLC stream. Our commentary will be based on that one – If you watch the non VLC stream it should work out about right for synching!
Here is our commentary! This is Part TWO, we will be there until the end.
The jackpot was won last episode so it resets to a still ginormous €500,000! The musical guests this evening ate XEVIAS, Max Raabe & the Palast Orchestra AND Ellie Goulding!
If you’re new to Schlag den Raab then welcome! I’ve included a basic FAQ under the cut.
What is Schlag den Raab?
Schlag den Raab (Beat Raab!) is a German TV show on six times a year where members of the public take on TV personality Stefan Raab in a series of games for a lifechanging cash prize – €500,000. If Raab wins, the money rolls over. The action is broken up by musical guests.
Who is Stefan Raab?
Part Jonathan Ross, part Simon Cowell, Stefan Raab is one of Germany’s most popular TV personalities. The show he is probably most famous for is weekly chat show TV Total, but elements of this have spun off into their own shows – annual wok racing championships (it’s going down a bobsled run on a wok), celebrity diving, celebrity stock cars… all sorts of things. He’s also a song writer who has competed in the Eurovision Song Contest and runs the German Song Contest. It was a Stefan Raab show that found Lena, of Satellite fame. And he’s competitive, very competitive.
How does it work?
Five contestants limber up and the public decides who will be the evening’s challenger through a live telephone vote. Contestant chosen, they will face-off against Raab in up to fifteen games – the first game is worth 1pt, the 2nd two all the way up to game 15 worth 15 points. With 120 points on offer, the winner is the first player to reach 61 points. At least 11 games have to be played (that will get you 66 points, and yes there have been 66-0 shutouts) but with the big points towards the end you’re rarely out of contention.
What sort of things do they do?
Literally anything could come up but there are a few things you can bet will happen:
- Three or four rounds are likely to be quiz rounds. The formats differ each time. You can guarantee Blamerien oder Kassieren will turn up starring Raab’s TV Total colleague Elton (this is a quiz they play on TV Total).
- There is usually some sort of driving event, usually in the form of a time trial.
- There will be three or four events based around sports, sometimes straight but usually a variation of something known.
- There’s usually some sort of strategy game.
- Almost certainly a hard test of mental agility and memory.
- The rest defy pigeonholing and are often wildly inventive. You’ll just have to watch and see!
Isn’t this just Beat the Star with Vernon Kay?
This is the show Beat the Star was based on. The main differences are it’s the same opponent each episode, the games tend to go on a bit longer, and the show can be on for five to seven hours. And it’s all completely LIVE.
How did it start?
The legend has it (i.e. we read somehwere) Raab invited a female boxer onto TV Total, and then joked that she couldn’t hurt him. She gave him a black eye. A format was born.
A NOTE ON THE STREAM
As noted above, the stream we normally use has changed and may not work for everyone. For it to work for you, you will need to install VLC from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ – a “recommended” level install is needed, though you can change which extensions VLC will want to open by default, as long as you leave the plugin installed.
It also may not work in Internet Explorer, so Firefox or Chrome is recommended. Ideally, the browser would be installed before VLC, so it can install the plugin correctly. If you have any adblocking software, it may interfere (I’m not sure, but it might) so if you still can’t get it you may need to turn it off or make it ignore the stream site.
I should point out by the way that VLC is a very good media player that will handle 99% of what you throw at it so it not a piece of software to be feared – it’s been my main media player for a number of years now.
If you’re planning to stick around with us for more than half an hour this evening, the VLC download is really worth it.
Most people will get an experience closer to HD television, rather than a poor sub-YouTube effort you get normally.
As of right now, they’ve found another flash player they can use for the stream, so if for any reason you don’t want to use VLC, you can use that instead. However, the VLC option is still there, and is much higher quality as David said.
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I have VLC (have had it for years, it is excellent and fully recommend it). However, when I click on the stream link above, I’m taken to the page I usually see with the VLC cone in a window surrounded by the usual page gubbins (calendar on the right, links on the left, chat below). Pressing play doesn’t do anything. Do I have to install something extra within the browser? (Using Chrome)
Got it to work. After persistently clicking both play buttons (the one at the bottom of the stream window and one that appears when you mouse-over the stream window), give it 5 to 10 seconds and it’ll start.
The burning question is whether I can convince my housemate that he wants to watch Splash! on ITV Player. I’ll be with you at *some* point, at least!
How kind of the schedulers of the world to hold off the SdR games until Britain’s Brightest finishes!
I’ve got the stream working fine for me. Full picture. Is everyone watching ok?
For posterity, here’s part one of tonight’s commentary: http://youtu.be/9lWpVMmTTTI
It amuses me that there used to be hundreds and hundreds of comments on one of these posts, but in these commentary days all the chat is on Twitter and the comments section of YouTube and this poor page is left bare.
Great fun as usual, but it’s getting a bit less Test Match Special and a bit more Top Gear, not that the differences between those two are as big as some might think. I reckon Brig is the resident Clarkson with his amazing (and ironic, considering) forty-year twenty-a-day-habit wheezy laugh, which makes Mr. B. the James May of the piece replete with all the technical insight. Dan Peake has the knack for gags that translates to Richard Hammond, thus Lewis completing the quartet as The Stig, who the others all want to be.
Ha ha, I’ve never been compared to Jeremy Clarkson before.
I apologize to fellow commentators I may have cut off abruptly once or twice, when a game begun I did think it was fairly important to get back on topic, seeing as that’s what people were probably tuning in for.
Seriously, buy the Phoenix Wright games – they’re funny, clever and the music is awesome. “Justice for All” probably has the best cases but you really need to start with “Ace Attorney” for difficulty and overarching saga purposes.
It’s on iPhone!
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/phoenix-wright/id372166015?mt=8
Steal at £3. Also available on WiiWare, Nintendo 3DS shop. Android version coming soon.
“Some say he’s the only person in the fandom who doesn’t like The Chase. Others say his Twitter name was gifted to him by a Mayan who knew we’d make it to 2013. We just call him… the Murph.”
Good point on how TMS and Top Gear aren’t that dissimilar. And the commentary does seem to be evolving a little bit now you say it. Still an absolute hoot when it happens, and I’m looking forward to the next one, during which I’ll be in a position (courtesy of living in a detached property and not a flat) where I can actually shout at the screen if we get an epic Game 15…
I have had my teeth whitened, so I appreciate the comparison to Richard Hammond! That and we’re probably about the same height.
Thanks for the compliments, we enjoyed the show and we hope you did too.
I’m looking forward to the next one, but glad there’s a bit of a break until then!
Low ratings again for SdR
2.95m (12%) with 1.87m (18.5%) in the key demo.
There are 2 things that I can think of that could cause the ratings to decrease;
The presenter. Steven Gatjen just isn’t the same as Matthias Opdenhovel. He doesn’t seem that enthusiastic about the show, and there’s very little banter. He’s quite monotonous. In the time Matthias hosted, the show dipped twice below 3m (2 times in five years). In the year and a half since Steven took over, it has been below 3m four times! I think that says something.
The music guests. There are more and more German music acts, and whilst it’s not a bad thing to promote home-grown music acts, when you are aiming the show at a young audience it isn’t really the route to go down. I mean, last night, Max Raabe was dreadful. I’ve seen better X Factor acts than that!
The length of the show is fine, as when you look at some of the end times from the past, the audience was still large. I think Gatjen and the music acts are the things that need sorted!
I think you’re probably right on all counts here.
I think it’s not really about the show itself. There were Andrea Berg (German Schlager singer) on Das Erste/ARD, Stubbe (great tv series about a presenter) on ZDF, which caused old people not to watch SdR. In the key demographics there was the (two week old) new season of DSDS (German Idol), then the (to us) new show Take Me Out (set was alright, women were meh and the host was better than expected) AND (most important) the second episode of Ich bin ein Star – holt mich hier raus shown on RTL. This was quiet a tough competition for SdR, I think.
I think it is to do with the show. If it is good enough, then people will choose to watch it over other channels. Ich bin ein star has begun with record highs, so I was expecting it to do well. Das Erste and ZDF did provide good competition, but SdR has been up against tougher competition over the years.
But you have to admit, the show has lost something. The atmosphere seems muted for large parts of the show. When Elton came on last night, he got the biggest cheer of the night. I know he’s popular, but I’ve never heard a cheer as loud as that for him! I think Gatjen sucks the life out of the show, and the music acts are about half decent.
I wonder why Elton doesn’t host the whole thing?
There always seems to be quite tough competition for SdR these days, but at some point it has to have a proper go at fighting back.
Agreed. Better production and organisation are needed. Raab, the games, Elton, Corinna, audience and contestant castings are fine. The host and music acts are the problem.
Last night I noted who was advertising on the show. Big companies like Sony, Apple, Ford didn’t advertise at all (they have done previously, like Xmas 2012). Having said that; Mercedes Benz, Red Bull and McDonalds did. When the big companies stop advertising on your big shows (Raab’s shows are the biggest on Prosieben), you know something isn’t right.
Wasn’t there a long advert that basically turned out to be advertising… advertising on ProSieben? I’m sure I remember one of those.
Yep. SevenOne Media (ProsiebenSat.1’s advertising agency). It was basically an advert saying ‘advertise with us’. I was surprised as I thought they might of sold all of the available slots.
I should’ve added that DSDS is hitting lows, which has been caused by The Voice of Germany. It beat SdR last night in the key demo, which surprised me slightly considering that SdR beat Das Supertalent in the key demo in Autumn last year.
This needs to be noted here: a Molkky set is available for £30 here:
http://www.prezzybox.com/molkky-skittles-game.aspx
If I had anywhere I actually could play it, I’d be all over this.