Saturday night, 8:50pm
BBC1
Well this has had a rather interesting past, Talkback Thames have been trying to work out how to put “counting to thirty seconds in your head” into a hit format for a-a-a-g-g-g-e-s-s, first to my knowledge in Dick ‘n’ Dom’s The Clock is Ticking (third story down – christ, over six years ago). Evidently the Beeb decided not to take it series, but Thames were determined to make people count to thirty in their head so piloted Break the Safe in August 2011 (which we were there for) with Jake Humpreys. As a quiz it was OK? But it featured THE single most tedious result reveal in the history of recorded television. In the meantime, The Cube features counting to thirty in your head as a game now as well.
I was mildly surprised to see it get commissioned, but here we are on the edge of an eight episode run. On the plus side, the safe looks much more impressive than it did in the pilot (where it was some sliding screen doors), and the lack of light gantry up either side of the safe suggests someone else thought the result reveal was the most tedious thing in the history of recorded television as well.
The 1st round of Break the Safe is Every Second Counts..
Not really. In Every Second Counts, only one player from each team of two was “in play” at any given moment; and ALL right answers were rewarded until you gave a wrong one, then you were locked out for the remainder of the question while the others continue racking up their scores.
In Break The Safe round one, although only one is in control of the buzzer, BOTH must give a correct answer to bank anything; and while wrong answers DO lock you out for the rest of the question, every question only has two correct answers so there’s no immediate “racking up” potential possible from your opponent being wrong.
I can kind of see the comparisons, though – and I must admit, I did myself think of ESC a little when I saw the players not in control of the buzzer moving behind the ones who are.
I think the final reveal would be a bit better if the show was all or nothing. Knowing that they’ve already won half the jackpot took away almost all of the tension for the last second.
Given Brig watched the 2011 pilot. Can he confirm whether it’s the same formula that if one person times it correctly they secure half the cash.
If not, then I suspect they have brought that in to make the show winnable. Since they want lottery shows to have people win “something”, happy clappy and all that. They tried to be tough with 1 vs 100 but as proven, it didn’t last long.
To ask myself with the current lottery line up
Is Break the Safe better than In It to WIn It – No
Is Break the Safe better than Who Dares Wins – No
Is Break the Safe better than Secret Fortune – Not sure but I think Secret Fortune edges it.
To agree with Brig. If we get a couple securing four seconds in the time final then the reveal will drag on.
Interesting to see how much the show gives out each week. As £13,500 was given away tonight, this is way lower compared to most episodes of In It to Win It and Who Dares Wins that aired this year. I think an handful of episodes of Secret Fortune gave away less than £13,500.
Turns out my mother loved the quiz aspect but not so keen on the timing final. Given she buzzed in way too early. That said, she will watch it again next Saturday.
Ha ha, looks like we both had that same problem, Travis 😀 Guess mums aren’t as good at timing as we think!
The pilot was all or nothing, yes.
Really enjoyed this show, much MUCH better than Take on the Twisters.
Me and my mum played along with the rounds to see how we’d do if we were playing, and we would have done quite well. In Round 4, we got 3 out of the 4 questions right, and we’d have added £20k to the pot and had 1 extra second for the final.
When it came to the final, my mum buzzed about 5 seconds before I did, so I think we’d have just won half of the money. We’ll play along again next week and see if we could do better.
Oh dear… looks like they’ve stuck with the “second by second” tedious reveal after all. Such a shame…
Still, that’s only a minor downer. Amazingly, I very much enjoyed this show – it’s got a good pace and is surprisingly fun both to watch and play along. And even the obvious stalling at the end didn’t seem too boring.
Interesting to read all this about the show.
What you guys probably don’t know is that you didn’t see the original endings. I was there in the audience the day it was filmed and the guys tonight didn’t win!! The original rules were that you could NOT be early and both had to be within you window of opportunity to win the prize. No chance of winning half, it was all or nothing!
I have just watched it and I was shocked to see that the guys won, as I saw them lose. They must have called them up and told them they have changed the rules, told them they have won, and that they would need to go up to Glasgow to refilm the ending!
Happy for the guys though! Easy money
I should add that I can’t verify this personally, but if it’s the truth that’s very interesting.
I’ve been stung with this sort of thing before so didn’t believe it – but it turns out to be true!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bbc-lotto-fix-contestants-accuse-2149380
I am sympathetic, the game hasn’t changed, the payouts did, so I don’t really see the reason why they couldn’t use the original timings.
My biggest problem is that this is really something that should have been picked up at the pilot, in fact they didn’t even need to do a full show pilot just get a few volunteers in a room counting to 30 and see if they got many ‘winners’!
Anyway, looks like it won’t be getting a second series!
In any case, I think the way to have gone is to work out what’s the minimum they can legitimately pay out on a production fuck up, and I do think half the money is reasonable under the circumstance, because now it risks not getting a recommission.
Lewis Murphy made the excellent point on Twitter that if you were playing to a team strategy then you ought to have replayed round three as well. I may have more production sympathy if this was the case.
I enjoyed that, maybe Take on the twisters lowered my expectations.
I think they have improved on the pilot in some ways, although the buzz in round went on a bit (limited to two minutes each originally, about double that here), certainly offering money or time in the final is a welcome addition.
Just wait for the seventh or eighth time they have to reveal whether a second is good enough or not.
I agree that it probably should be all or nothing, the whole point is to be a relationship testing game and surely you’ve set the situation up for what should happen if one of them stuffs it up.
Meh, it’s not awful but I’m not going to get all excited about it.
Talkback seems to have a winner this year.
But is it better than Secret Fortune? Yes – just. About.
Some random thoughts then.
Yet again, the discription of the game is hobbled under the waterline when the gameplay actually starts. Nick’s script said at the start, that there is £100,000 ‘locked’ in the safe. No there isn’t. ‘Upto £100,000’ would be factually accurate.
And, again a minor point – but here comes another show that offers a big prize, but after the end of the first round when the collected totals of the two teams through are added together, it becomes rapidly obvious to the viewer that it’s near impossible to win the full £100,000.
So, here’s something. The 35 min clock is ticking during the Thunderball draw. Now that leads to a nice little teaser.
Last night they could get away with it, but next week I wonder if someone is going to make a note of the time on the stage as we leave recorded and enter into live show mode and back again – and see what the time difference actually is?
I can’t believe Endemol are actually going backtime the live insert to the precise second? And what happens if there is some sort of techincal issue with the draw machine meaning we return the show way ahead of time? It’s going to look odd if Nick makes some reference the 5 mins we’ve been away, if we’ve had to miss a draw and come back within a couple of minutes!
Finally, I thought the contestant backdrop looking vaugly familar – things/lines coming out of expanding circle/bullseye shape – and then I remembered.
God bless you, Roy.
http://youtu.be/6QFt1ZeDftk
Hate the show music – cheap and keyboardy.
The ‘we’ve removed all the watches from the audience’ speech by Nick, was distracting in the extreme if you were trying to play along at home.
But it’s not Secret Fortune, so it gets an extra point.
7/10.
The set reminds me of futurism at roughly the same level of Bugs with Craig McLachlan.
And now, possibly the most boring post I’ll ever make, even by my standards. Data comes from my capture card, recording the DTTV stream. On this recording, the clock started at 20.54:43, set to finish at 21.29:43.
It showed 16:42 at 21.11:49, having lost 72 seconds somewhere in the first round-and-a-half.
The cut to the Thunderdraw was at 21.16:39, with 11:30 remaining on the clock. It’s now lost 94 seconds from the original time.
There next shot I have is at 21.20:00, with 8:58 remaining. The clock’s now just 45 seconds fast.
By the end of the final round, the clock has 1:33 left, and it’s 21.26:43. 42 seconds lost in that round alone.
As for the actual game, the most memorable things are the moving contestants, the painfully slow and anti-climactic reveal, and Nick Knowles having to remind contestants that wrong answers are going to remain wrong.
Ratings!
Break The Safe – 3.85m (19.3%)
It beat Thames other show All Star Family Fortunes on ITV. It was the second most watched show yesterday behind Mrs Browns Boys.
Just watched this on iPlayer, I didn’t mind the pacing in the buzzer rounds, but then they seemed to remember that they were making a game show for 2013 and as such every question needed half an hour of dramatic pauses before revealing the answer. The clock counting down throughout the whole show is a nice touch which I can only imagine is a logistical nightmare for the production team! End reveal is horrendous and someone winning half the money before every result is revealed completely saps any tension out of the reveal.
The main thing I’ve got from this comment thread is that I seem to be the only person who doesn’t mind Secret Fortune.
I like Secret Fortune, I think it’s better than In It To Win It, and so do my parents. In fact In It To Win It is the only lottery quiz they don’t watch, which is peerhaps odd given they also call all the different quizzes In It To Win It anyway, and it’s often up to me to tell them if it’s “Dale”, “lists” or “envelopes”. And now presumably “safe”, although at least this one has one of the gaming mechanics in the title.
I liked the frantic nature of the opening rounds, I particularly liked it when the questions were on offer and they authoritatively buzzed in to give the same answer, a la “John!” “Frank?” “JOHN!!”.
The later rounds seemed to drag a bit and I didn’t think the final round with the four questions was that interesting at all as not much really seemed at stake – they seemed happy enough with the money as it stood and the extra seconds didn’t seem to make much difference. Interesting the questions weren’t multiple choice, which must be quite a rarity for a lottery quiz.
And as mentioned, that final reveal will be unbelievably boring if they have more seconds. Seemed a bit confusing, too, I didn’t realise they were doing it a second at a time until rather late in the day. But I still think it’s better than In It To Win It, which is the one format I can really take or leave.
BREAKING NEWS: Oh, apparently my mum thinks it’s better than Secret Fortune.
I’m not sure that’s quite true, they said their strategy was to go fir one extra second then go for the money, which would have more than doubled the pot if they got the questions right. Which they didn’t.
I guess, but 27 grand still seemed enough, though. Normally in these kinds of shows the final would probably be to avoid having money removed from the prize pot.
The locks were a hilarious addition, weren’t they? HIGH DRAMA as Nick Knowles activates six locks, only to unlock four of them himself for some reason.
Thinking about the proveout, I was hoping for a slowed down video of each second; they could play out side-by-side and stop for a bit of chat after each second. That might make it a little obvious if we can see someone moving to the button, though – and it doesn’t really work for situations like tonight where someone presses early.
But you’re right, a slomo replay would’ve been far better. Lighting up coloured blocks on a board doesn’t have the same emotional effect, and I dare say a lot of people will find it baffling.
I really don’t understand how unlocking half a safe gives you half the money. Is that how safes work these days?
On which note, I do think half the money is a little too much as a consolation prize. Maybe a quarter?
It’s hard to get too excited about a team [i]doubling[/i] a five-figure sum; much of the jeopardy has gone at that point.
My adapted idea for the proveout:
Have five shots; one centrally with the safe counting down, two with close-ups of each podium button with a light dictating if it was pushed, and two close-ups of faces so we’re not staring at electronics throughout.
Also have a bar in the middle representing a few seconds before zero and the five seconds after, with a number of the five seconds after coloured green depending on the performance in the final quiz round.
Proveout starts, and the bar counts down. You’ve got a clear indication that the red segment is the *danger* zone. If a player hits the button, the game freezes and that player is commiserated with. One nice tweak is that you can take some liberties with what the red bar above *actually* represents to ensure it captures the moment that the player pushes the button (in case they push it ten seconds early or something absurd like that).
On hitting zero, the game freezes, Nick does a bit of chat, then they play through each second in turn, heavily slowed down, with the bar denoting that second emptying. Repeat for each second (if they go in with a lot of seconds, speed up the individual proveouts)
The viewer gets something visual, particularly if you see them flinch towards the button with .8 of the second elapsed; gives a nice ‘photo finish’ aspect to it… although that doesn’t quite work if they have the following second lined up.
Which makes me think of another possibility: what if they aren’t informed how they performed in the final quiz segment, and so don’t actually know how many extra seconds they’ve got.
And taking about 5 seconds to reveal a second’s worth of result for half the team is tedious to the point of ludicrousness. A second at a time wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t the Dreaded Cliched Pause For Artificial Tension for each second.
I thought the boxes for each second would have worked if they used them as if they were the visual representation of time and volume in sound editing software, actually. Which is basically the same idea as a slow mo playback.
The entire premise of the show doesn’t make sense.
If they lock the safe at the start of the show, how are they managing to put money in the safe to win out of the safe at the end ;).
On a totally unrelated note, on Dealfest today when introducing the ‘headline act’ before they do the Walk Of Wealth, was the voiceover none other than Mr Glenn Hugill?
A big slot in the top, and some runner hastily feeding lots of 10ps into it.
In the pilot inside the safe was a big table and pneumatic pistons would push bundles of cash towards the middle after each round.
I’m not sure that completely makes sense either, but still.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it is Glenn Hugill. Definitely sounds like him.
I’m always slightly fascinated when you see a basically simple quiz and you look in the credits and find it took six people to devise.
3.75m last night, down a little, nothing to be too upset over.
I’m baffled as to how you’re meant to play along at the end given you get no verification until both people have pushed the buttons.
Ah I’m nitpicking, it’s a better show than the pilot in a few small ways. Just wait until they’ve earnt five seconds and both buzzed early.
I’ve been trying to work out how you could earn the full £100,000. There’s 24 questions in the first round – 12 at £1,000 and another 12 at £2,000. (Total – £36,000) But the lowest scoring team and their cash earnt is eliminated – so you would need them not to answer a single question and the other two teams to get every question right between them. Then in the next round you would need to pass every question and answer at the higher money level (Total 24,000 – I’m interested to see how a tiebreak would work if the opposing team did the same). That would take the bank up to £60,000 – and so you would need to answer all four questions right in the final and elect to receive the final £40,000 and no extra seconds giving you just one to win the jackpot in!
My main criticism of the show is the pacing after the first round – 24 questions in the first 10-15 minutes and then the final 35 minutes (including the lotto draws) has all of ten questions and a game of time freeze. I prefer the first round – that’s where most of the humour as being pointed out above comes from. That being said, I did enjoy the second episode more for some reason.