Sundays, 5:40pm,
ITV1
It began in Mozambique last Autumn and somewhere between then and now it sounds like it got lost in Editing Hell – we’ve heard a number of interesting stories on the grapevine, our favourite being that ITV decided after filming that obscure TV host Alexander Armstrong turns out is a bit too posh for the ITV audience so they’ve tried to edit him out a little – I reckon the reason he turned up on fellow Endemol show Your Face Sounds Familiar was to try and ITV him up a little bit so they could actually broadcast this. I love these sorts of stories and would be fascinated to see what the original edits looked like. Oh and hey look, the brilliant Emma Willis is here as well, it’s not like the show is lacking talent. But despite this it’s not being advertised but it also doesn’t have much in the way of competition for the first episode, other than an American Football game and the first twenty minutes of Countryfile.
We may never get to find out the full story behind the development of Prize Island but that it’s been treated so badly seems rather a shame because on the face of it it’s Exactly The Sort Of Thing We Like. The press release:
Hosted by Alexander Armstrong & Emma Willis, Prize Island is a new, action-packed gameshow set on a sun-baked tropical island. Here, ordinary couples arrive in an extraordinary place to participate in incredible games and challenges to win prizes. The island is a magical place, remote and untouched by the modern world – it is exactly the kind of paradise where we all dream of being marooned, filled with wildlife, sweeping landscapes, the odd vast shipwreck and tons of prizes.
The entire island is the show’s set, with over-the-top stunts and colourful games scattered across the landscape. A surprise lurks round every corner… fitted kitchens appearing from the ocean, TVs in the undergrowth, even hairdryers with very modern technology that lock in moisture dug from the prize seams beneath the abandoned Old Gold Mine. There is even the wreck of a half-submerged pirate galleon in one of the bays across which the contestants must race to stay in the competition.
In this episode four couples arrive on Prize Island to compete in games like ‘Coconut Superstore’, ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Swiss Family Plumbing’. After each round a team is eliminated, leaving only one couple to compete in the final located at the remote and mysterious Moonfish Bay. In ‘Buried Treasure’ the finalists will attempt to locate and win the ultimate prize buried in the sands – a new car and £50,000.
What’s not to like? It’s difficult to do action adventure in a way that a big mainstream audience will buy into, so I guess we’ll find out. It wouldn’t be the first show that channels have tried to bury but turned out to be quite entertaining – the BBC’s Drop Zone with Steve Jones comes to mind, so keep an open mind.
Edit: For balance, Richard Osman is suggesting the editing hell stories are nonsense.
Edit Edit: Thanks to Ashley, to everyone asking where it’s filmed, it’s believed to be Bazaruto Island off Mozambique.
£50,000 AND a new car. It’s been years since a car was given away on a UK game show. When was the last time? The Price is Right revival?
Childishly simple ungeoblocking plug-in for Chrome and Firefox:
https://mediahint.com/
Even works with things like Hulu.
Intrigued to know if this works on places outside the US/UK.
I believe it does. I think I tried ABC Australia.
Have a go at http://www.pluzz.fr because that’d be a gamechanger.
It didn’t work for me in the US, however Hola! might do the trick. It’s got more international options. It’s on the chrome app store.
If MediaHint doesn’t conflict with FireBug like FoxyProxy does, I’d happily drive off latter plug-in.
I have to say i was not expecting much from Prize Island, but was shocked to find i quite enjoyed it. Yes some of the games had been seen before in The Crystal Maze/Jungle Run but i thought it flowed quite well and was an entertaining watch. I just hope it is not the same games each week.
I will tune in again which i did not for any of the last 3 BBC Saturday night gameshows.
Mmm.
OK, I *love* the setting and the way it’s been shot, the production team do at least know what side the bread is buttered in this case – it looked beautiful. Also I loved the soundtrack, thanks to Twitter for pointing out that it’s basically The Goonies one, I thought I heard some Pirates of the Caribbean in there. Basically I would like a tie-in CD, please thanks.
I thought the games in the main were OK although I didn’t think the editing and shot choices helped in a lot of ways – the Coconut Superstore and the Old Galleon felt a bit too hurried, Swiss Family Plumbing felt a bit dull (the water wasn’t flowing enough for comedy, they probably should have concentrated a bit more on the puzzle element with Crystal Maze style advantageous viewer shots rather than apparently aimless running about).
Endgame was a bit disappointing for me. I thought the Crystal Maze-esque tasks were basically fine, I thought it was a bit of a shame the word game wasn’t about 15 seconds longer because by the time they realised their mistake there was no chance of a hurried dash to catch up. But mainly I thought it was a shame because I had been led to believe it was going to be a bit more Treasure Hunt-y and to have it end on “pick a door” doesn’t have the same sort of feel as something where X Marks a Spot. You could have buried car keys!
It does seem a bit mean to suggest you’ve won prizes and then take them away from them.
I would actually watch this again to see what else it has to offer, although if it started repeating games I’d probably wouldn’t be bothered missing it. Not an awful show, but does feel like a missed opportunity.
Looking at next week. Shipwreck is played again but there will be two new games.
I quite enjoyed the show as well. I really liked the tropical island setting and I thought the hosts were fine, even though I think Emma Willis is on FAR too much at the moment.
The games were OK and as Brig has said, they felt like games used on things like The Crystal Maze. Out of the 3 that were shown on this episode, I thought the Total Wipeout-esque obstacle course was my favourite. I also liked the bonus games to act as a transition between games like the hoopla (in which I spotted an editing error. When the third couple threw a green hoop at the vacuum cleaner, a BLUE hoop went over it) and the tablecloth pulling, even though both couples used COMPLETELY the wrong technique. You’re not supposed to pull the cloth towards you as everything will come flying off, which is what happened, you’re supposed to yank the cloth downwards.
I also echo the sentiment that having the couples amassing prizes, then to have them taken away because they came last in a game seemed very mean-spirited. Maybe if they let them pick a prize up to a certain value as a consolation prize, it would have been better.
I liked the variety of games used in the final, and again, echoed by Brig, the word game was VERY easy to mess up as they had used both vowels in each of their 3 words, leaving none for the 4th word, and by the time they spotted it, it was too late to do anything about it. The arrow game was OK even though it seemed too easy, judging by their first shot, and the digging game with the co-ordinate clues was the most fitting game with the setting although the clues were too easy to decipher. The final question for the car and money seemed a little tacked on, and like Brig said again, they could have maybe had a large grid of squares in the sand and have them use a metal detector to find car keys with one to unlock the car and the rest dummies.
Overall, I would be likely to watch again and see if they have any other games up their sleeve. If it wasn’t so mean-spirited with the runners-up getting nothing of the prizes they supposedly amassed, it would have been better, I think.
What is quite interesting for me is that everyone involved seems hugely embarrassed about the fact, nobody who worked on it seems to want to acknowledge its existence. Intriguing!
1.4/1.5 with +1, I’m informed.
I concur that this was a lot better than expectations and, as long as it doesn’t run out of material by show 3, it could be seen as a decent effort. That you can film something this polished in a former African no-go area is pretty impressive.
Games were above average, although some of them could have been made more sympathetic for tracking cause-and-effect. It was hard to see whether the coconuts were going into the baskets on the first game, for instance. And the problem with races like the water channel one is that once one team gets a lead, it’s very hard to catch up since the problem gets exponentially easier.
Editing wasn’t the best, though, I agree. If some bits weren’t added in later, they still *looked* like they were.
I was a bit disappointed the wrong answers in the final didn’t blow up or something. And having a dark-coloured door open into blackness wasn’t the best visual effect.
It’s lacking a certain something on in terms of atmosphere that the music’s struggling to paper over. Is it lack of people around?
I don’t think it deserves a rating as bad as 1.4. That’s a bit unkind.
I enjoyed it, although I didn’t really get the point of the podiums they kept returning to, would have made no difference if they were just stood in the same places but without the podiums. I also thought that the grid reference digging game would have made for a far better endgame than the single question and tedious reveal.
I remember a good while ago Endemol were advertising for staff to devise games for this, they were wanting games that somehow encorporated the prizes rather than a game with an arbitary prize at the end so I was expecting a little more imagination in involving the prizes in the games than they ended up with.
On the whole though, good fun and looks like they will keep it nice and varied
This has to be one of the most ‘by the numbers’ gameshows I have ever watched – for me the seemingly random parts of the show didn’t meld well together at all. Being on a desert island – win a hoover! Thats got to be one of the bizarrest set ups for a program ever. The hula-hoop but to be honest I couldn’t believe I was watching, I’ve seen fetes with higher budgets then that.
That said, it wasn’t particularly offensive, just desperately average fare. It completely lacked any kind of imagination, and nothing have we not seen before – the games of Wipeout and Crystal Maze, the theme of Survivor, the prizes of Price is Right, absolutely not one thing is new – and for me that makes me wonder how it got on the tv in the first place.
Relaxed product placement rules, is the likely answer.
I don’t think anyone’s referred to “Prize Island” as “Prize Turkey” yet, so well done everyone, I think.
Oh wow, I finally have the old bar problem: I feel like I should like it, but I don’t really like it. Okay the hula-hoop game was bad objectively, but subjectively I didn’t really like a lot of the show. I didn’t like the podiums, I thought the first game was a normal quiz since I didn’t really listen and saw the podiums, but suddenly people were catching coconuts (and unfortunately didn’t catch them the way the woman did catch the melon on The Amazing Race..). Those podiums were bad. And I wanted more graphics or anything, I couldn’t say, who had the most prizes at any point. And losers should have kept some prizes, maybe by saying the losers will leave on a tiny boat were they can chose up to 1/2/3 prizes they can take with them and the winners have a boat big enough to carry all their winnings.
Though the biggest problem I had was the finale. I thought it was a horrible idea to let them answer a single question for 50000 GBP and a car and let them get rid off 3 possible answers with bad games. The word game wasn’t fun to watch, the grid game should have been the real end game and the game in the middle wasn’t really memorable (actually I just can’t come up with the English words I’m looking for, but it wasn’t memorable anyway).
A huge plus: The show had one of the best games in a game show this year: The Swiss Family Plumbing. I have to admit there wasn’t enough water flowing, that’s for sure. But The entire game was somehow entertaining and it was easy to see, who was in the lead though they didn’t use graphics (I’d stil prefer graphics, but in this case it didn’t matter). However I can’t really come up with many new game show games this year.
It’s like 7,5/10 though I’d rather watch Crystal Maze episodes on Youtube than tuning in for this. For one time only it was worth a watch! (Though Emma Willis is always a reason to tune in for me, she’s lovely…)
Very little new or original here. (Which was the first UK game show with formal product placement and the big P? I don’t know the answer here; might it be this show?) Nevertheless, I enjoyed it rather more than I was expecting, but mostly as a period piece as to what big bouncy family game shows used to be like, ooh, twenty or thirty years ago. There are some modern sensibilities and the sort of budget that product placement might provide, but nothing too extreme. It’s delightful to see a game show with small prizes as an integral feature along the way to the bigger ones, which again is an artifact of decades past. The bonus games left me thinking “I wonder if they just haven’t decided what length of slot they’re going to get and these will be included or excluded in the edit accordingly?” The set and the theming did feel just a little summery and tropical, to the point where I reckon this might have gone down better in January or February, but very few shows ever take their theming to its logical conclusion, and it gets harder and harder to buy into the ones that do. Perhaps this goes to show that big friendly not-too-extreme physical games haven’t come back into fashion in the intervening years after all, which is a bit of a shame.
I don’t think the games themselves are necessarily interesting enough to watch week after week and fear that this might be another The Whole 19 Yards or, stretching back, Happy Families in terms of over-repeated game material. Hard to see this getting a second series. Nevertheless, this feels on the right side of the half-way line to me, without ever threatening to be particularly outstandingly good.
The male host – what was it, Armison? – seemed quite self-assured and confident for someone so unfamiliar to our screens. Perhaps he might get a few more jobs out of this, at least.
League of Their Own has had the P since I think Season Three (spring 2011). It was one of the first things to have it. Not sure if the first.
Well, my Sunday was spent with Lucy Spraggan and about 300 others at the Digbeth Institute. Last year’s other undefeated contestant knows how to work a crowd, and makes great songs to sing when a little tipsy. Might have been upstaged by her support act Andreas Moe.
All of which meant that I saw in two parts: half while calming down on Sunday, a quick recap on that and the second half in the cold light of Tuesday evening. Agree with Brig that the water game needed better shots, and that the finale is badly done.
The basic concept is a stretch, but if you can suspend disbelief long enough to accept a mine containing widescreen televisions, the show has a certain something. Certainly enough of a something that I was positively interested in how the game ended, and didn’t want to rush it in last night’s game show overload.
Brig, you know that revival you said we were due? I wonder if it might be under way…
I can’t help but think that the endgame section is far too underdone for the rest of the show.
I keep expecting it to have some kind of ‘Desert Forges with slightly different sand’ grand scale to it, and it’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t.
Bit bored with ep two, didn’t have the sunsets of episode one really and most of the games were repeats. Oh well.
Interesting that it was a 65 minute slot this week compared to the 55 minute one it got last week.
I have realised that Xander Armstrong appears to be wearing a toupee on the show. To stop his bald patch getting sunburnt? Who can tell. Odd, though.