Right, so friend of the Bar VierkanteO (Twitter, excellent blog when he updates it etc.) spotted this earlier, a show called Money Time heading to Spain:
This looks rather a lot like Channel 4’s upcoming Five Minutes to a Fortune, does it not? I was under the impression 5MtaF would have non-quiz element tasks in it, although I may well be wrong.
Edit: Comments also discuss Israel’s Raid the Cage.
Would you agree that Money Time (as well as Five Minutes To A Fortune) isn’t a particularly great title!
I don’t know whether there’s an equivalent in Spanish but I’d have thought “Time Is Money” or something like that would have been better.
Interestingly the German version of The Vault was called Time is Money. Or Speed: Time is Money at any rate.
Think there are differences between this and the show we’re getting, the blurb suggests five challenges plus the final. Still not entirely sure how it all works though.
Also, the precursor to Run for Money, Chronos, had a tagline of Time is Money.
Funnily enough, the previously alluded-to version of this idea I had way back when was also called Time is Money.
As a bit of fun, I’ve put my format online to download:
Edit: Safe for work or wherever https://truck.it/p/fOxoMFVM43
Please don’t laugh at it, it seemed a good idea back in September 2000.
I’m pretty sure the format you’ve linked to is a completely separate one. Seems like two people have come up with the same gadget for two different formats.
By the way, you might not want to download that at work unless you’d quite like to meet Russian Women, ahem.
(Nothing wrong with the file, just the hosting).
I couldn’t think of a reputable file sharing site to use for free. What do you use?
Dump Truck which I, er, pay £20 a month for as part of a Giganews package.
I don’t think there are many reputable file sharing sites, in fairness.
Edit: I could host it for you if you’d like! Although it would have to wait until I get home.
Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind.
I’ll do it when I get in.
Done: https://truck.it/p/fOxoMFVM43
That looks really, really good to me, and at least the equal of any format that’s made it to the UK screen in the last 2-3 years. I’d love there to be (*) a low-tech no-big-toys tiny-audience office run through, even if not a pilot.
(*) Commission x 1! …on a budget of £0.
And Time is Money was the initial title of Colour of Money (which involved sand timers instead of cash machines). Obviously quite a popular name.
Found a non-geoblocked (at least in the US) video of “Raid the Cage”…I know the link says Dating in the Dark, but it’s Raid the Cage..
http://reshet.tv/Shows/Dating_In_The_Dark/video/.aspx?bo=12349&vml=214998
So the basics (may not be 100% right, it’s based on watching the video and a translated Wikipedia article):
-Pairs of contestants play.
-One person is designated to answer questions, one is the runner who goes in the cage (no conferring).
-Each question has 4 possible answers.
-The first question is worth 10 seconds, the 2nd is worth 20, etc.
-If the answer is right, the runner goes into the cage immediately.
-The smaller prizes (either the actual items or present boxes)
can be taken immediately.
-Larger prizes require more effort; For example, to get a cart full of large appliances out, you have to make revolutions on a treadmill to raise a cover that will give you access to a key to unlock the lock on a chain keeping the cart from being moved. Other things you might have to do include using clues to get codes for a series of safes, opening a set of life-sized Russian nesting dolls, matching pairs of items on a large touch-screen monitor, etc- the more expensive the prize the more difficult the task in theory.
-You can use more than one session to get a large prize (especially since even if you get access to the prize, you still need to push/pull it out), but you can’t go for another event until you complete the one you’re on.
-You can only make one trip in per round- any time you have left when you get out is lost.
-You get a 3 second warning before the door shuts. So long as you have part of your body past the door, it’ll count as an exit (so if you stick your arm out past the doorway to keep it from closing, you can get out).
-If you miss a question or get caught in the cage, you lose everything. You can stop and keep your prizes after any successful cage raid.
-You have two helps- the first help keeps the same answer choices, but gives an easier question. The 2nd help causes the couple to switch places for that question only- so if you think your partner will know the answer or think they can do better in getting one of the tasks done for a big prize, you want to use it then.
-After 9 questions, there’s one final decision; stop with everything you’ve won risk it or play one more question where both partners can confer to come up with an answer.
-No playing for time here; you get question 10 right, you win everything in the cage automatically.
I think it’s interesting- based on the totals the players won, it looked like if they got everything it would be about $100K US (the big prizes included a jetski, a car, a luxury vacation, a couple rooms of large appliances, plus a lot of smaller prizes)- you could easily alter it to fit different budgets, add cash to the mix, etc. I’d think it’d probably work in the US or UK with a couple of tweaks here or there.
That was another idea I had a decade ago. When I pitched it to Channel 4, I got the impression it was the sort of thing that they received quite often.
Thanks for the link, much appreciated!
And thanks for the ‘when he updates it’ comment Brig.. haha. I will try my best this weekend
Hm. The cage raiding side of it, along with the staging, isn’t interesting enough to compensate for it being how you earn prizes in a quiz in a language I don’t speak for me. Might be interesting to see an English language version, but for this format I’m going to have to pass on foreign language versions of it.
Cheers for the link, mind. Actually the cage raiding side of it isn’t as interesting in practice as the ‘buy this format’ trailer (Pitch reel? Not sure what the technical term is for that) made it look, oddly. (Only watched half an episode, mind; but enough to see a complete game)
That’s fun! It also feels quite different to what we’ve had for a while, by virtue of being prize-y rather than cash-y, but also being tactile and physical about it. Thanks for sharing, and I do hope that other broadcasters recognise the value of this format.
Admittedly it isn’t so fun that I can watch a whole hour of it in a language that I don’t speak, no matter how fun the atmosphere is (everyone does seem to be finding it all as thrilling as you’d hope and the host seems appropriately chosen and into it) and there is a vague “round of a show” feel to it, but the idea is very cute and they’re definitely onto something. There’s also a cute sense of progression with the mini-events as well, plus it gets a sense of “part 3, part 3, part 3” by interspersing the fun cage-raiding part through the show rather than just having it as an endgame. There definitely are tricks that are being missed; it could be fun to contrive a circumstance to – say – give a player a big ball and chain to lug around behind them to slow down the raiding for one round, or similar physical handicap.
I think I’d like to see this on ITV with half-hour episodes and straddling games, but I think ITV might look at this as a teatime alternative along the lines of Tipping Point, though maybe it would require a bigger budget in practice. Bonus points for the abbreviated version of the game for the third couple… if you’re not going to let a game of naturally indeterminate length straddle, then it’s an unusually cute and clever way of handling the situation!
It’s also quite possible that a reformatting would play to the strengths even better – for instance, wasn’t there some sort of similar “you grab it, you win it” format in a Japanese catalogue the other month? I’m hoping that Prize Island might also get similar sorts of things right to these as well. At the end of the day it’s Double or Drop meets Funhouse but all grown up, isn’t it? Nothing wrong with that at all!
I wonder if there is anything other than coincidence that Israel brought the world both Raid The Cage and The Vault? (Assuming that they are both, in fact, Israeli shows.) It certainly hints at some degree of cultural emphasis, though a sample of two swallows does not make a game show summer special.
Here’s some of my possible tweaks:
-I’d probably go 20-30-40-50-60-80-100, then the last question. (9 raid rounds are too many, and you can’t do much in 10 seconds)
-I don’t like the all or nothing aspect, so I’d give them the option one time to bank what they’ve won after any question.
-Let them confer on each question- and swap positions each time, so both can do the raid rounds.
-I’d keep the “swap the question but keep the answers” help, but I’d change the other help to a “half-time”-they can use it to get the correct answer to any question except the last one, but in exchange they only get half the time to raid.
-Maybe one of the mini-tasks can be something that lets coins out Boyard-style to add cash to totals (give them bags to put coins in since they can only make one trip in per round)..
-Put surprises in some of the boxes; say things like a 2nd chance if you miss a question, a free 30-second raid, an instant bank, etc.
There’s a good, fun game here if you pace it correctly and have the right atmosphere…
I think I agree with lots of this, for me the show has Exit List style fabulous four-minute endgame potential, but doing it as a show in itself doesn’t seem *quite* right – it takes a while for the game to get going meaningfully (certainly the first two rounds aren’t long enough for much in the way of strategy) and when it does the quiz element does rather sap the fun out a bit, although this is a structural issue rather than a thematic one. The main idea is quite a fun ‘would like to have a go at that’ one. It’s already quite Supermarket Sweep-esque, I *think* I might have three couples playing for time with occasional jaunts into the cage to grab some smaller items and have the winners play for everything else with the time earned at the end.
I like the idea of the minigames. They’ve nicked the moving blocks one from Fort Boyard, so they should have tigers guard the cage between rounds also.
I can’t believe the guy was pulling the oven out, have these people never done manual handling training? It’s got health and safety nightmare written all over it.
Probably the one thing that bothered me the most was when people left the cage with half of the time left. Of the episode I saw, the first two guys did it really well, the latter two pairs were terrible at this, and I felt really angry with them. If I could make one tweak, I’d have some sort of clock representation in the cage (beyond the three-second warning). I still think you could get some dramatic last-second escapes (and lock-ins!) with people fully aware of how much time is left. I’m aware that it could mean a slightly larger prize budget for the production company, but it might encourage just enough riskier behavior to be worth it in the end.
Backstage with Lo Iettatore
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=vb.159924160817783&type=2#!/photo.php?v=125919770899846&set=vb.159924160817783&type=3&theater
Was just having a browse around YouTube and a Russian channel has put up episodes of the UK version of The Chair, hosted by John McEnroe. There’s 7 of them up there at the moment and they have a Russian overdub, but everything else looks intact with all the question text still in English. There’s also some episodes of the Russian version of The Chase.
Here’s a link to the first episode of The Chair: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5yeFGtVrhg
The man presenting Money Time also presents the incredible Pasapalabra…and slightly worrying, as the camera pans around (i.e. 1:30) you can see they’ve used exactly the same set! That’ll explain all those irrelevant letters in the background. Well, in times of crisis…