Monday, 10pm
E4
We’ve been waiting for this for a little while, it’s a dating show meets Jackass and seems to have a high silliness quotient.
Potential suitors in a fairytale land try and impress a lady’s overprotective father through a number of physical stunts and tests, ending in a power ballad sing off to try and win her heart. It’s from one of the guys behind Banzai! We want it to be very good.
Unfortunately the first episode clashes with Black Mirror on C4 so we’ll probably be watching the premiere on +1. Still though.
Judging by Caitlin Moran’s review in the Times its offensive misogynistic and mildly homophobic crap. But I’d hate to prejudge it.
Well the misogynistic part is inherent in the premise – It’s literally a contest for the prize of a date with a woman. The homophobia is the standard ‘lads humour’ of ‘hurr hurr naked men’ – Given the premise, I had more issue with the awkwardly heteronormative ‘the man must be able to protect the woman’ angle on a couple of the games than either of those, tbh.
All in all, better than I was expecting, will happily never watch it again.
First ten minutes. Its got a good sense of humor though first intro game was a little too long. Pretty good so far though
I wanted to like it but I’m not a dating show fan and I got bored after a while with the games.
Whereas I really enjoyed it. Maybe not really *really* enjoyed it, but I thought it was quite well cast (the Dad was great value) and had some funny ideas, although the payoff of watching people fall into the Gift Horse’s latrine wasn’t as funny as the idea of The Gift Horse channelling his best Ronnie Corbett, for example. I thought Terry Mynott did a great job with the commentary. In fact I think the presentation and style is stronger than some of the content – the race to the Gift Shop of Dad was actually much less entertaining than it really ought to have been, and actually presenting the gifts was actually the interesting and surprisingly tense bit. Racing mice was quite good. Power ballad singing not as good as I thought I was expecting, although the choice of Evergreen was quite funny.
Didn’t love pushing the guys into water. Knight bloke drags Prince from village, prince stands on bridge, knight then comes out of the castle and pushes him off. That’s some weird continuity.
It has a lot in common with Banzai in terms of the styling – a soundtrack made up of short bursts of overblown 70s and 80s stuff, excessive use of horizontal panning shots, graphics… It will be interesting to see if people find it *too* weird, Twitter comments were interesting. There was quite a funny one suggesting its a dating version of Raven.
Will watch next week.
Thanks everyone for feedback. Very interesting. Watch show 2 as I think we learnt a lot from cutting TX1. Mainly the race at the start of the show just wasn’t working. It was originally designed as a cool way of getting freeze frames to intro the Princes rather than a game, so we returned to that thought in TX2. I also think the Dad in the first show, although quite a character, lapsed into bad acting too many times. The rest of the Dads are more normal I think.
I don’t think it’s the ideal slot for us to be honest and the ratings were disappointing. Hopefully we can improve next week.
I love Amanaguchi and don’t like Caitlin Moran. I do like the review the Radio Times gave us this morning, calling us the Black Mirror of Game shows. The first review that really gets what we were trying to do. This is an ambitious, relatively low budget show that has many flaws, we were learning on set what worked and what didn’t. Hopefully people we at least appreciate that we’ve tried to do something different to an old game show genre
Would suit a 9pm slot better – it’s not naughty enough to justify 10pm, and probably could be pre-watershed without any major concessions made.
I guess budget is the reason for the same cast each week – I assume you’ll replace the winner with a newbie each week. I also assume each losing prince will fall off the bridge in exactly the same manor every week! 😉
Good effort though – I think anyone who has seen previous E4 efforts such as Tool Academy, Playing it Straight and long due a second series Beauty and the Geek knew what to expect – a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.
I thought his overacting was part of his “charm”, so it’ll be interesting to see how more normal people fare.
I’m also slightly worried that if the catapult game is played every week, and it’s basically the same princes every week, won’t basically the same questions get asked every week leading to basically the same results? Is that ultimately going to be funny or is it going to feel rather lazy? It’d probably be better to just catapult them without the lie detection bit. Interested to find out.
The unlikely combination of Countdown, Sue Perkins, and Black Mirror Live From Eastleigh means that I’ve not had a chance to see My Little Princess. Judging from everything, I think I might hold off to next week, and see a show I’ll really like first time out.
For an awfully long time, my kryptonite against Caitlin Moran was a battered and dog-eared copy of her semi-autobiographical juvenalia novel “The Chronicles of Narmo” (1992). And then she turned it into the autobiographical polemic “How to be a Woman”, proving she’s completely unembarrassable. As a columnist, she’s insightful and frustrating, often at the same time.
From @attentional:
E4’s new dating show My Little Princess was watched by 123,700/0.7% – less than a third of the slot avg. of 455,300/2.6% (inc. +1) #MLP
Oh well.
Yes but more importantly it came TENTH in yesterday’s tweet leaderboard!
http://secondsync.com/leaderboard.html#Mon-Feb-25-2013/totals
Interesting female skew.
I wonder how much of that took tweets for My Little Pony into account.
Very much in the vein of most E4 reality shows, though not quite as good as I was hoping. I guess going forward it depends on how much they mix the challenges up every week – and I don’t think having the same princes throughout the series will do it any favours.
I liked it quite a bit. Another question is whether I’ll stay throughout the series.
Also whoever decided the theme tune to be Airbrushed by Amanaguchi, I think I owe you a pint.
Anamanaguchi is great. Well done, whoever made that choice.
Should I watch it? I am not entirely sure after reading this thread, haha.
Yes you should. But you might find it weird.
I think calling it a dating show is a bit of a misnomer, men do stupid things and one of them gets to take a girl out, but the emphasis is on the stupid things.
French news.
Two Endemol formats are currently reviewed for France 2 this summer : the first one would be an adaptation of “8 out of 10 Cats” ; the second one is called “Next One !” – most likely Avanti Un Altro!
Ooh, how exciting! Pity it’s the wrong channel for Vincent Lagaf, it’d be perfect for him.
There’s definitely a good idea behind this! But as usual, 15 minutes worth of show is dragged out to an hour. Plus, at least other E4 shows in this vein such as Playing It Straight, have realised that even if the show’s awful, if you get the guys to go shirtless often it is at least good to look at.
well i was a fan. i quite like the idea of returning contestants, it means we dont have to waste as much time with ‘getting to know yous’ each week. i generally liked it though, would have done a couple of things differently, but it’s all individual taste, i like what they are going for overall.
i liked the gift horse game, it seemed almost a waste that half the people statistically will only make 1 question though.
Did one Prince mysteriously disappear this week or were there seven last week as well?
Basically the same criticisms and praise as last week – enjoyed the practical joke with the wall. It’s a shame it looks like they’re going back to exactly the same games as week one next week.
Haven’t found a figure for last night’s yet.
Seems to have done, though based on the insider comments earlier in the thread I wonder if they just edited out Round 1.
Does seem very little point in watching next week if all the games are the same as last week featuring mainly the same people.
It did very badly. Somewhere just south of 90k. Can’t open spreadsheet on my phone, but will confirm later. Have only managed 10 minutes of TX1 so far. Thought it wasn’t as funny in reality as it was in theory.
Next weeks episode might not even air then. It is completely the wrong slot for it – I thought when first announced it would probably air at 8pm.
124,000 seems to be the final figure. Still poor and I’d be surprised if it survives the series in the slot.
I have 84,300 (0.51%), which I guess means a further 40,000 people watched on +1. I know E4 tend to take a holistic approach to assessing shows, and take into account things like “noise” (i.e. does it get in Heat magazine, and do people tweet about it), but even so they’ll be disappointed I should think.
Well. Episode 2, which I caught up with over the weekend, was a suitably sarky antidote to over-earnest dating shows. Not convinced it’ll keep me watching every week, but there will be a viewer tonight.
Sadly, I may be alone in actually liking this silliness; next week’s show has been moved from 10pm to 1am, and the Thursday repeat is replaced by yet another chance to miss “Rude Tube”. FFS!
I’ve quite enjoyed all the episodes, episode three’s sing off is hilarious.