That’s Yer (Pi)Lot: Treasure Tag

Right, back from Covent Garden, what did I think about Treasure Tag, then? The show will not be going out so I’m happy to spoil.

• Cat Deeley’s hosting and she suits the format very very well.
• The set is very minimal – a big screen, a podium for the contestants to stand behind and several hanging red flourescent lamps.
• The game is fairly simple: A pair of contestants filmed three treasure hunts earlier in the week each one worth progressively more money. At the end of the show, all the money the contestants have banked is played for keeps.
• Unfortunately there’s a bit of guesswork coming from me here, as theey hadn’t actually finished editing the footage for the final two hunts. Cheers then.
• For each hunt they are given five clues via their Nokia mobile.; The idea is, the first part of the clue tells them where to go, the second part of the clue tells them what to “tag” – ie take a photo of with their phone camera. Once they’ve ‘tagged’ something (using Nokia Point And Shoot Technology apparently (this is only mentioned once)) the next clue on their phone is unlocked. Or more probable, someone off camera sends them a text.
• Once during the show they can use their “wildcard” and look a piece of information up using the phone’s features, but this costs ten minutes.
• Hunt one is the easiest, today set in and around Wembley Stadium. They have one hour to tag all five items, although they won’t know if they’ve tagged the correct items until they’re in the studio. At this stage, the location clues are reasonable but the things they have to tag are a bit boring – at the location there will be three pictures or objects and the contestants have to work out which one to take a photo of. The treasure hunt becomes a rather dull Q and A. Each correct tag at this stage is worth £1,000.
• Once during each hunt is a “spot prize challenge” where the contestants are tasked with a task which will win them a super prize – tickets to the World Cup Final in this case, and all they have to do is play keepy-uppy with none other than special celebrity guest John Barnes. Whether they can choose to abandon this is if isn’t working out I don’t know.
• The Q and A feel is heightened with Cat turning up at the locations doing the “ooh, are you sure it’s that?” schtick that’s become rather tiresome by now. Cat Deeley is brilliant, but her involvement in these bits are rather unneccessary I think. If you want to use her on the footage, have her start the team off and catch up with them to tell them their time’s up, pop up in the background, do the voiceover for the footage if you want (the guy who does it currently wasn’t particularly interesting) but leave the rest up to the contestants –  it should be their adventure. The footage is edited in rather T4 ‘entertaining’ fashion.
• Footage shown, it’s back to the studio to see if our contestants are correct. Every clue is gone over (apparently several times in the footage isn’t enough) and the money banked. But what about the money the team fail to win?
• That’s right! A lucky viewer who registers to play gets phoned up and is asked an observation question to win the money. If they get it right, they steal (*) the money from the team, get it wrong and the money is lost into the ether.
• The next production company to use the word “steal” to mean “take something nobody owns that’s just floating about” rather than “take something that already belongs to someone” will get their show slagged off regardless of quality. Look, you’ve all got fucking english literature degrees from ‘trendy’ polytechnics in television land, learn to use a sodding dictionary. Nothing is being stolen from the team, they had not earnt it in the first place. i.e the viewer is just winning money that the team had not mopped up, it does not come from the team’s winnings.
• No-one knows what happens if the team get all five correct regarding the viewer competition.
• So part one done and dusted and I was feeling rather meh. However, I think I like the direction the show takes in parts two and three and whatsmore I’m liking this based mainly on guesswork. As I said, most of the footage for hunts two and three hadn’t been edited together, so we’re left with the results from back in the studio.
• Hunt two is five things in 45 minutes at £5,000 a pop, whereas the final hunt is five things in 30 minutes at £10,000 a pop. Neither of these two hunts were completed in full.
• Now for the interesting things inferred: the hunts seem to take place in a much wider area, with the tactic of just running from one place to the next apparently not enough. Proper strategy = good. And much better, the three options thing is dropped and the clues could relate to anything in the location they’re asked to visit. That is not to say they are all difficult, but they do require a modicum of knowledge and common sense (going to Millennium Bridge and tagging the building done by the man who invented the red telephone box (it’s the Tate and not, for example, St Paul’s Cathedral), or going to Hamleys and tagging “the biggest Dumbo” (A stuffed elephant named Nigel who costs £1,500)). This is much more fun.
• Given that the team only managed to tag three things on hunt two and only two things on hunt three, I think the time limits could do with some looking at. I understand you want to make it hard, and you want some money for the viewers to phone up for, but if you’ve gone to the trouble of writing the clues then you might as well use them. I suspect if teams were allowed to carry any unused time from the previous hunt that would make the balance about right – the first hunt was completed with less than ten minutes remaining.
• Three hunts over, the team now has to win the money that has been banked. The fifteen correct tags are bought up on the screen in 3×5 grid formation. Taking it in turns, the team pick one of the objects and are then asked a question very loosely and laterally based around what it is. The idea is to get one correct from each column in sixty seconds – if they get acroiss the board they win the cash. If they run out of time or they blow all three questions in the column they win absolutely nothing. 
• After all this, Cat recorded the Nokia product placement bits that hadn’t actually been mentioned up until this point, presumably for dropping into the show once the all clear is given.
• Here’s the interesting bit: as well as the viewer observation questions, registering to play the game when the show comes to a town near you, there will also be details on the website of a £1m viewer treasure hunt. Cat Deeley’s very own answer to Masquerade, no doubt.
• So the show is being pitched to go out live on Saturday nights on Channel 4. I’m not sure that’s particularly a wise idea, but there you go. I do think there’s a good show in here potentially, but not being shown most of the footage it’s difficult to tell how well it’s going to translate on screen, I think.

Was anyone else there? What did you think?