Weekdays, 3pm,
BBC 1
A visually iconic quiz unlike any you have seen before.
That’s what the blurb suggests, if the pilot is anything to go by it’s lots of mini-quiz formats you have seen before done but on a yay-big sized floor screen, not seen since the “place the thing on a map” bit from I Love My Country.
Still, it does have one-man nuclear power station John Barrowman hosting (so that in itself should guarantee it a few viewers), if they haven’t changed much from the pilot the quiz itself is harmless enough (individuals face off in best of three games, losers are eliminated, in the final round the team captain can get help answering multiple-choice questions from surviving teammates, and if they get them all right straight off the bat they win a progressive jackpot – it’s the most 12 Yard 12 Yard format in aeons). Here are the two things I think will kill it if they’ve not modified them from the pilot (of course you never know how well these things come out in the edit):
- The insistence on playing everything as best of three but starting each game from the easy beginning bits each time, which made me want to claw my eyes out. The games are sort of Price is Right style – some take longer than others. the prospect of a third go round of some of the games makes me wake-up in a cold sweat. The more quickfire ones are less bad.
- Whilst there is a rolling jackpot element, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the standard prize of £2,000 split between five people feels a bit cheap.
Very interested to see how this translates to screen, so let us know what you think.
In that Hunt For Millions situation, they need to use the UK DoND rules- they have to verbally ask for the question, and then what they say is what counts- the button should be used only for show if that. Though if it had gone the other way, we’d have said he was lucky..
Mark Labbett is doing a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” interview at, I think, 3pm UK time today, give or take US summer time changes. Ask him some tricky questions!
Pressure Pad is the embodiment of iOS7.
It’s basically fine, isn’t it. Quite an imbalance in the questions in the final round, presumably designed to get teams to the last question and create some tension.
The money is not a lot, rollover or not.
I think Barrowman was a bit nervous to start off with, he certainly relaxes throughout the show. Hosting grated a little bit – but he’ll probably improve and relax a little bit.
Aside from that, it’s a perfectly competent little quiz. Some rounds are better than others, and the pressure pad is just a gimmick, but one that compliments the show. Some of the questions are Pointless style, which some will enjoy and some won’t.
I didn’t like the Radar round, because from an adjudication point of view it’s difficult to do and I also don’t like list quizzes. “Name all 50 states”, oh god… etc. The other rounds were fine though, I liked the first round particularly.
It won’t set the world on fire, but I like the pace of the questions [although maybe 15 seconds is needed in R2 rather than 10 seconds]. Main gripe is with the hosting which should get better over time.
I’m also not a fan of blue and pink, but that’s just me. The set design and so on was very pretty, although the lines in the middle of the pressure pad annoyed me somewhat.
Can’t help but feel 4pm is a better slot for it.
That is my 2p’s worth.
Well, Pressure Pad’s ended and it’s time to give my 2 cents on it.
I think the general consensus about this show is “I like it, BUT…” and that’s true with me. I really like the set, nice and futuristic with the blue and pink neon lights. John was a decent host, and I’m glad that he didn’t shout like he did in ‘The Kids Are All Right’. I liked the variety of games and I hope there’s new ones to be seen in upcoming episodes. The final head-to-head worked really well, even though it came down to which captain would end up standing on the correct answer to the 5-choice question first. The final rolling jackpot question at the end added a jeopardy element, but it allowed you to see the 6 answers before you committed to answering the question or not because if you played it and got it wrong, you would lose the £2,000 as well.
Here comes the BUT. I thought the bits with John flipping the coin a la SdR was a little unnecessary. Maybe it would be better for just the first game, then allowing the winning side to pick whether to go first or second for the subsequent game. Also, as Brig mentioned above, £2,000 split between 5 people IS really cheap. Even with the rolling jackpot, you’re looking at a maximum of £3,000 on this first episode which works out at £600 per player, so it’s not really worth winning. I thought having a daily prize of £5,000 (£1,000 per player) seemed fair, but with this being a 12Yard show, it seems cheapness is part and parcel with them, such as with Eggheads.
Overall, I’d give it a 7/10
I reckon a grand a player is the lowest an afternoon show can go and not feel a bit cheap, but there is never any chance of them offering £5k a show, not when other shows in better slots on the BBC are happy with their £1-2k a show progressive jackpots.
It sounds like they’ve changed the jackpot mechanism from the pilot, I’m looking forward to watching it when I get in.
A show in that slot will have a budget of around £30-35k per episode, hence a £5k pay out would be difficult.
It’s not true that producers don’t want to give away money, in fact they like big wins (I remember when nobody won on the first couple of episodes of Magic Numbers the mood in the office was disconsolate). We just have to walk a tightrope between offering an exciting prize and not massively overspending our budget.
Remember that TV shows are very tightly budgeted. The prize fund (except in some special circumstances) will be one line in the budget. And budgets are agreed with, and signed off by, the networks, and are subject to stringent rules and contracts. It’s not like if a company can go a whole series without giving anything away they get to keep a big chunk of cash for themselves.
So I think you’re being a bit harsh on 12 Yard, especially when the prize fund is entirely commensurate with other daytime quiz shows on the BBC (although before anyone says anything, obviously I’m not entirely impartial).
Indeed – I reckon the £2k(+) per show is generous given Egghead’s £1k per show split between 5 people. Budgets in the early afternoon are tighter than Russell Brand’s trousers.
And when they win £1,000 on Eggheads (and hey! Pointless, let’s be fair) it looks cheap, but in mitigation the average win is quite a bit higher than that. When it’s won I mean.
I remember Magic Numbers, I remember reading about the endgame the afternoon before and feeling slightly incredulous that that’s how it worked.
Yeah. So was I.
It was during the production of Magic Numbers that I attempted to explain probability to some other members of the team and received the response “Well, it’s all subjective isn’t it?”
Many apologies if I seemed harsh on 12 Yard, that wasn’t my intention.
I just don’t like how a lot of production companies (not just 12 Yard) seem to be fine with giving away loads of money to celebrities’ charities on celebrity specials, yet are so tight-fisted when it comes to shows with the general public who are just trying to win some money to help them through these harsh economic times. I’m sorry that I feel this way as it makes me look extremely petty, but it IS a massive bugbear of mine, and I drive my mum mad whenever I go on about this particular subject.
Fair enough, when I appeared on Memory Bank in 2004, the top prize was £2,000 and I won £700 of it and I was extremely happy with that. With it being my first ever TV game show appearance, I didn’t even think I’d get to play for the money, so I was really just going there for the experience and if I won anything, it was a bonus.
When you have a show where there’s a team of 5, and you’re basically giving them a few hundred quid if they win, then it IS going to feel really cheap. At least with Pointless, when the jackpot is won, there’s only 2 people that will be sharing it, so that’s not as bad.
Well those celebrities will have a higher budget, presumably. Because they should get more viewers and act for a bit of a shop window to the format.
celebrity shows i should say
How did the Magic Numbers endgame work? I can’t find it on the internet…
There’s a run-down of how it all worked on this edition of Weaver’s Week: http://ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Weaver%27s_Week_2010-08-15#Magic_Numbers
Basically (I forget the exact numbers so happy to be corrected) a number of cases, most contain money, three contain crosses. Caller picks six, if they find a cross they lose everything they accumulated so far. On the first two episodes the caller picks a cross on their final pick, rendering the entire show completely moot and looking really bad considering the public had to call a premium rate number to play.
Edit: or read that more accurate Weaver’s Week review.
Magic Numbers
The winning caller gets 5 questions. Each right answer puts money in one of 5 empty cases. Another 5 cases are added – 2 with money and 3 with crosses. The caller picks one case for every correct answer they gave. Money is added to their total but a cross reduces their total to zero.
Pressure Pad.
£400/£600 for a win is just cheap. They should have returning champions so the contestants have the chance for some decent money.
OK, I thought the end result was basically pretty solid (although I won’t pretend it was exciting particularly), and I congratulate the team on at least addressing the main issue I had with the pilot (or at least looking like it on the basis of episode one) of not having games with 20-30 seconds deliberation between question and answer and not resetting to the easiest level after each mistake – all the rounds felt decently quickfire with little downtime, I only really felt Divider Went On A Bit.
Didn’t think I’d like the jackpot mechanic, thinking it not an especially interesting gamble until a sweet spot about three or four episodes in on the face of it, but actually giving a contestant a decent idea of what the question is worked fairly well. (In the pilot you won the jackpot if you got to the middle on your first attempt).
The judging felt a bit loose, I don’t think many shows would accept Winner Takes All for something as famous as The Winner Takes It All.
I’m amused the forced handshaking between rivals has been dropped.
A better show than I was expecting and certainly no worse than other shows in the slot.
Some decent variation of rounds. I agree that Divider went on for quite a long time – the questions in that round seemed to vary from reasonably interesting/thinking questions like the “visitors to attractions” one to downright easy like the “how many cards in a pack/balls on a Snooker table/pieces on a chess board.” They could have edited out a couple of pairs of these questions to shorten that round at least.
I quite liked the final round and in particular how they keep getting the same question till they get it right and it’s not just a new question or something as there’s good potential for catch-up/getting stuck/playing an elimination game rather than just taking punts at questions till you happen to get one right.
I’m not sure the gamble in the early shows is very tempting – even though I also knew my cyclists I’m not sure I’d have bothered today when you’re risking 100% of your prize to win just 50% on top.
The one thing Eggheads and Pointless have over this in terms of rollovers is that when they’re won they’re often quite substantial so it feels a decent prize even when most days everyone wins nothing whereas with on this show having a daily £2,000 baseline could feel a bit cheap 75% of the time.
A bit better than Perfection but then I’m not really a fan of Perfection!
I just watched Pressure Pad from yesterday.
It’s more like Eggheads: The Dance Mat Ballet.
Watching is also enhanced by putting it on double speed then thanking your lucky stars that it isn’t ANOTHER Nick Knowles vehicle.
At least it’s better than Beat the Pack or The Kids are all right.
Mmm, the bonus round is a bit of a damp squib ending if they don’t go for it.
Interestingly Borderline was played in the pilot, the differences are fairly major – thinking time was much longer (in pilot the strip lights around the perimeter acted as a clock, they had 6×5 i.e. 30 seconds to pick a spot each time), and the map wasn’t cut until both players had a go. It’s substantially better sped up.
Other thing I notice is audience sitting right up close and personal around the pad, it was just normal audience facing seating in rows originally.
Barrowman is alright
The format seems ok…
The set is not bad…
But for me it just never really takes off…
I’m glad I waited until after seeing show 2 before commenting on this because my impressions have gone up from a 6/10 to a 7/10, and it could have easily been an 8/10 were it not for a few minor things.
It works best in the rounds where the pad is used properly rather than just a timer or scorekeeper, although I suppose some variety with a sub-optimal round is better than five superb rounds repeated endlessly.
The pad itself is pretty darn neat. I guess it’s one of those LCD strips that some shows use as backgrounds, and someone’s realised that you could put it on the floor instead. The graphics do a decent job of making it look like it has 3D depth. I do have to say I hate the bright green they’ve used for right answers, which is eye-searingly bright on a large telly. Something more Racing Green would’ve been better.
The pacing comes across as a bit lumpy given that some rounds seem to drag on rather and others are much quicker, but I guess it’s just a case of us getting used to it. We all said Pointless was rather slow when it came out.
The main disappointment is the final two rounds, really. The benefit of having the extra brains in the final – something that we’ve spent 35 minutes fighting over – don’t really come to the fore over the course of just four questions, and (so far) it seems the first few questions on the wall game are rather straightforward. And the gamble at the end, though I understand the reason for it, just doesn’t come across as exciting because the money’s not high enough.
Some of the question material is better than others – the fresh rounds like Divider are quite good, but some of the other Q&A rounds have a rather high chestnut quotient. And yes, it’s really a ‘sum of parts’ show all said but some of the parts are quite good.
Overall, it does more right than wrong and I actually prefer it to Perfection.
Pressure Pad might be 2013’s (second) best new quiz show, outnumbering other contenders and leaving few points ready to be nitpicked.
7.5/10 methinks. Let’s hope the ratings are solid enough and the show doesn’t grow stale.
Ok. 3 days late, and most above have nailed it, but here’s my random jottings
1 – If you had to come up with a gentle parody/spoof 12 Yard format, then it would’nt be too far away from this. Teams of 4, knockout, head to head, dark backdrop, varilight and LED all over the place, loosers vanishing from the studio ect.
2 – That said, it is a neat idea to make sure the question setters from Who Dares Wins don’t feel like there hard work on IMDB and Encylopedia Britanica didn’t go to waste after the last series was recorded. Becuase this is where most of the questions appear to have come from.
3 – Hate the gamble element for the winners – would have tried to somehow incorporate it into the main final game.
4 – Isn’t there a portable circular LED screen big enough in the country for use in this show? I really didn’t like the strip black lines running virtically down the pressure pad, splitting it up. Was expecting to see perfect circular screen.
Oh and would have been nice to see a proper standing area for both contestants facing each other for all games, rather than standing on the edge for some, and on the pad for others.
5 – After ‘The Kids Are All Deaf’ it’s good to see Barrowman has found the volume switch for his voice. Pity some of the pre-game ‘small talk’ with contestants couldn’t have been hacked down to the minimum. Me no like forced humour.
All in all given the budget constrictions on what 12 Yard could do with the show – reasonable, suppose – 7ish/10.
Three episodes in, I fear mini-game fatigue setting in. I did like Deadline as an idea though.
You say that, and yet there’s been 10 Mario Party games.
I get fatigued with that as well (although I do initially love them), the problem with minigame compilations I find is if you don’t have a constant stream of new ideas then you tend to get bored as you yearn for something a bit meatier – PP is just variations on general knowledge questions really.
I think one killer idea to make a show out of beats lots of little if quite good ones that repeat themselves, certainly in terms of longevity.
And they even had the nerve to call one game after that scuzzy little boy-band on today’s episode >_< You'd think they'd have come up with a better name for a game where you put 4 answers into some sort of order and they form a path on the Pressure Pad, wouldn't you?
A worse offender than Five Minutes To A Fortune then.
I watched 5MTAF for about two weeks straight, in its favour were very strong music beds, a massive hourglass and Davina. And 27 games, many of which were quite puzzly which is more appealling to me.
I didn’t lambast 5MTAF, I was just comparing the ephemeral nature of 5MTAF and Pressure Pad. Cryptically.
In fact, I’ve not yet decided whichever format will top my 2013 picking list.
Yes I get that, I thought the comparison was interesting.
Just a thing, this got 837k yesterday apparently. I’m not sure how to interpret that – it’s roughly what Beat the Pack was getting in the slot in March but it’s beating the last figures I saw for Perfection, and that keeps getting recommissioned, so.
Edit because I got the number slightly wrong.
It got 780k yesterday… I am not sure it deserves a second run.
They simply don’t have enough games and the ones they have feel drawn out and slow.
And why Perfection keeps coming back is beyond me…
I guess it’s a combination of people getting bored of seeing the same games multiple times and that a lot of teams don’t seem to be going for the bonus jackpot at the end. I certainly have stopped watching it recently so that I can focus on practising for Countdown now that I have passed their audition.
It seems to be hovering around 800k. Like I say, I’m not certain of the BBC’s criteria for a pick-up.
The interesting thing to note is that Dickenson’s Real Deal on ITV1 at the same time is doing about 1.2m.
I think you’ll find, that a lot of people would argue the land
area of the rep of ireland is not a “british isle” as your
graphic seems to suggest on pressure pad.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/British_Isles_Euler_Diagram_13.svg/532px-British_Isles_Euler_Diagram_13.svg.png