Saturdays, after Ant and Dec
(For episode one that’s 8:20pm),
ITV
We haven’t done a Show Discussion post for a series of The Cube for ages but tonight apparently sees a large refresh of the graphics and audio so I figured it would be worthwhile. I also expect this to be a last roll of the dice – save for a series where it was regularly getting six million leading into The X Factor, it’s been languishing at a point where it looks like it might be worth trying something else. And it’s up against The Voice.
Still, a new series means a new photo of Philip standing in front of The Cube, so here it is.
I think the biggest problem with The Cube these days is £10,000 for example is now a huge sum of money to people in recent times and they’re less inclined to gamble – Especially with no safety net! It has affected a lot of game shows in recent times.
Having said that I was losing interest over past series so I made a point of going to be in the audience for a recording of this series and enjoyed it 100 times more than watching it on TV as a lot of stuff obviously has to be cut out for the 45 minute TV show. And they provided a caramel wafer bar for each audience member which instantly put them in my good books.
I do think producers have to be cleverer with their use of jeopardy these days, gambles which nobody take make for very dull television and look like poor format planning.
Phillip Schofield’s YouTube page has a 3-minute “behind the scenes” look at the new set and series:
This is not Cube related but might still be interesting: Today there is a) Scream if you can/ Release the hounds in Germany. It seems there will be a team of five so your thoughts about the “new itv adventure game show” being Release the hounds might not be all that wrong.
b) Far more interesting to me: There is a revival of the paneuropean game show “Einer wird gewinnen”. It’s the 50th birthday of this show and there are 8 contestans from different european countries (the abbreviation is EWG which is also the abbreviation for the European Economic Community) who will compete in a simple quiz game combined with funny sketch-ish bits. This show used to be very classy and full of “upper class fun” (Well the sketches were all about operas and stuff like that.) so I’m interested how they will handle this aspect which defined the show nowadays…
Oh! Thanks for the reminder.
I’m going to do a seperate post for Scream If You Can! later I think.
Wow, really loving the new graphics.
Glad they kept the all white logo though, I doubt anything they could have replaced it with would’ve been better.
I thought the new effects would be whizzier. I feel awful.
Yeah, the new effects weren’t all that spectacular … and it seemed that the game-intro music wasn’t quite as bombastic as it used to be, especially at the higher levels.
Biggest graphics fail is that you could tell which Body demos had been recorded on the new set vs. the old set. That would seem to make those demos not quite as portable to the other international versions, unless Cube World HQ mandates that they all switch to the new motif.
Overall, though, it’s an interesting colour scheme. Intangibly, it seems to say “2010s” to me, where the old set said “2000s.”
As for gameplay, two compelling games (one VERY compelling game) to start the new series! Still has me yelling at the telly in ways most other shows do not.
Focus was incredibly tense to watch sat in the studio, as from the audience POV it was quite hard to see if she had put the cube in the right spot!
They edited out the part where the audience let out a collective ‘Noooooooooo!’ when she considering adjusting it slightly on the last go!
Just over 4m last night, so not bad.
In other news…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2571208/Chris-Tarrant-rushed-hospital-following-health-scare-flight-returning-Thailand.html
It only struck me after reading this article Chris Tarrant is older than Noel Edmonds!
I’d hope that somebody will upload an episode of the current new series onto YouTube, so that we Yanks can get an idea of the new graphics and special effects.
Frankly, an insufficient number of episodes have been uploaded. ITV’s signal is geo-blocked, so that folks outside the usual viewing area have to rely on uploads onto sites such as YouTube.
“The Cube” needs a user such as “unicyclist93”, who has done yeoman service in promoting “The Chase” on YT. I submit that were it not for the efforts of this user, there’d be less impetus to have a US version of “The Chase”–and GSN would not have the breakout success it has had with “The Chase”.
If you like the shiny browser of Google, I highly recommend an app named for the Spanish word for “Hello.” Free, fairly quick, and has gotten me past pretty much every geoblock I’ve found.
The video isn’t very high-quality, but here it is:
Part 1 (missing the opening titles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3z2HD27XPc
Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmKFru-I1M8
Another version of the first few minutes, this one with the titles:
Cube’s back; they’ve tweaked the look and left the game alone. pip’s still git his awesome array of facial expressions and the Cube has even more games. Plus they’ve had the decorators in and, has been noted, it’s an improvement.
I very much enjoy the new viewer game of ‘guess the game before the name is built’ which is great fun; except where the game doesn’t have props.
I just the the money tree is a bit out of whack with the economy as it stands. The jumps aren’t consistent and for the rarity of winning, the jackpot is a bit on the low side. Essentially at the moment £20.000 is too good a prize for game four, and there isn’t enough gain at game seven for anyone to gamble.
I would maybe suggest 1k, 2k, 5k, 10k, 25k, 75k, 250k. as a tree to even it out a bit.
All this aside it is still one of a very small numbers of game shows that have me shouting at the TV whether I’m alone or in company.
Interesting prize tree analysis, although I suspect if you did that everyone would go “oh, they’ve made it cheap.”
If you wanted to make it daily, though… (it’d probably still be a bit high for a prize budget. Still, you have to start somewhere.)
Quite the first contestant on Sunday night’s version from Dubai:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPTNJ5tcMs0
(An important graphic missing from the Dubai edition is the on-screen “Trial Run” indicator. But the absence of a lives counter means that the Trial Run is being taken.)
3.66m without +1 last night (will be about 3.9m with +1. Just slightly down on last week’s 3.75m (4.01m with +1). Also just slightly down on episode 2 last year (which aired on the same night, again after Takeaway) which got 4.02m (4.29m inc +1) but it wasn’t against The Voice last year. Episodes against The Voice were rating around 3.3m (3.5m inc +1) last year (with a BGT lead-in) so it’s a bit better than that.
Was the pattern of squares the same each time on the ‘Equal’ game?
I would watch again apart from I’m on a rather poor Premier Inn wireless Internet signal at the moment and my phone doesn’t block the annoying ITV Player advert breaks
No, the pattern changed each time. A very tough first game I thought.
Selection seemed a very tough £2,000 game – Even after the Simplify!
Would have been more suitable in the £20,0000 – £50,000 bracket, msybe without the handicap of knowing it would be the same colour pick each time.
There have been a couple of unreasonably difficult games at £2000 this series, wasn’t Equal played at that level? I wonder if there is now always a stinker of a game in the first three or four rather than the steady increase in difficulty?
Also, given what must be at least 100 games by now. Why are we seeing so many duplicates? Tilt, i’m looking at you as the new Barrier.
If you look at the Wiki page there’s at least 100 games that they play in China (allegedly, because…y’know, Wiki), and a fair few of them look like they would work a treat here.
Curiously I checked the TV listings for the next 2 weeks and one of the contestants I went to see being filmed doesn’t appear at all! Have they split the series up?
I’m not sure. I know they filmed more episodes than they’re airing but I don’t know if they did that many more. Also, I notice that even though the series apparently ends on 5th April, they’re airing a celebrity special in the random slot of Friday 11th April at 9pm.
Was the episode you went to see some kind of special or just a regular episode?
Well since the ‘Joe Public’ run seems to have ended now I can reveal (and apologies if this later airs and becomes a spoiler!) that the contestant I went to see was filmed the same afternoon before Sophie (Episode 1). He was a maths student/teacher from Leeds.
In the end he was defeated by the game where you have to launch a ball at a ramp so it flicks off and ends up in a square container (The name escapes me!). Can’t remember if it was for £10k or £20k.
From the sounds of it, Vault?
That defeated someone else a looong while back.
Has anyone noticed that Tilt has been in every game of this series? Hope we get more new games tonight rather than Tilt again! Last week, Plummet and Selection were really coo, games!
You know what they say, better tilt than barrier and construction again.
I’d like to see more of the balance beam games, one of which I think is posture, blind shot and what i think was called shatter? The one breaking the red glass.
The single-foot balance beam is Poise and the one with the cool red glass is Destruction.
Also I rather like Construction. In my book it captures the ‘looks easy but oh God it isn’t’ thing they’re going for brilliantly.
Circuit and stabilise were what I was thinking of on beams. I’d forgotten about destruction completely, shatter just has the one pane of glass. Looking at the list on the Wiki, Elevation appears to have been retired, it used to be the game everyone and their mother trial ran and then declined.
The first run of it absolutely destroyed that guy who did it, and everyone since has just ran, even though I recall his problem was The Cube not quite giving him enough space to work with (which was rectified by putting the game in the corner instead of the wall).
Still, though, they seem to be reviving it for a Judgement game in Fort Boyard 2014 which is nice.
Reset looks like it’d be a rather fun game to play.
I love new games and all, but why don’t they actually keep some of them?
We’ve never seen Curvature, Accellerate, Arc, Blind Shot, Symmetry, Scan, Circuit, Barrage, Configuration, Cycle, Dimension, Exact and many others ever again! In fact the only new games that have been played a lot from the last few series are Locate, Collision, Quadrant, Vertical Drop and Axis!
Blind Shot has appeared before this series, so maybe…
Also with Configuration and Arc mullering over the people who played them, maybe they’ve been held back for being too hard (although Perimeter is hard as nails for a 1k game and they still keep bringing it out every so often).
Oh, wait, we’re confusing Blind Shot with Blind Catch here.
well series 8 is over
So, Series 9.
Two new games, but really it’s the same as it ever was, for (mostly) better or (lesser) worse.
Still my favorite of everything on the air today, but still frustrated at how rarely games straddle between episodes … makes it way too easy to see what’s coming from a mile away.
The second contestant from this evening was actually filmed wayyy back in January 2014 as part of Series 8 as I’m in the audience! (The idiot with glasses just above the second person along the F&F row!)
I did wonder when he would turn up!