Weekdays, 5pm,
ITV
The lovely Gethin Jones challenges 11 people to enter quiz duels with each other, but the only person who gets the chance to win money is the person to answer… the 21st question (duh-duh-DUH).
This is on for a two week run, and by the sounds of it most viewers are going to need the full two weeks to work out what’s going on. Or at least that’s my interpretation from the rules sheet I’ve seen, it might have edited quite well. Contestants have told me it was fun to play, but is it fun to watch? Let’s find out.
Well the graphics people should be sacked….”Veto” Corleone????
Yeah… that’s a bad one. I only verified the 21st Question on this particular show (I can dig out the final 10 if anyone’s that bothered).
At the very least, that set’s one of the best I’ve seen in daytime in quite a while.
Thought the format was a bit slow, it is almost like a poor mans Chaser. The whole 21st question thing was a huge let down. I think they missed a bit of a trick not doing 1 question with lots of answers and having the 2 battle it out until 1 does not give a correct answer to the question set. A bit more quickfire is what is needed IMO.
I was not happy they did not give all the answers out on the 21st question. I wanted to know if the 2 i was thinking of were there.
Doubt i will bother with this again
Also i know it is unlikely but what happens if every single challenger goes out on the first question? We will not reach 21 questions then.
Don’t know whether Chocolate Media will refer to that as a bug or a feature.
Some more observations:
– Question 1 is basically an accelerated rehash of Number One, but here, contestants can elect the positions they like. This is however cunning and Catch-22esque (in a positive way).
– Not sure about the Double Up, all it does is doubling up the stakes.
– The final question is a neat nip-and-tuck from La Cible. A countdown clock (60 or more seconds) would spice things up.
7/10. Despite less questions than on Take On The Twisters, we see more actions, albeit in a more shuffle tempo.
Given the obtuseness of some of the rules, I find it amusing the logo looks so similar to Quizzlestick’s
Despite having relatively few questions for its slot, it felt like it had a pretty good pace throughout. Format was a lot simpler and less reminiscent of Quizzlestick than I’d expected. If the audience eventually worked out Breakaway, then they shouldn’t have too much trouble with this. I imagine it’ll be at its best later in the week, once the contestants have had some time to suss out each other’s weaknesses.
Presentation-wise, the set was a thing of beauty, and moving parts always worth big points in my book. The graphics were okay, though kinda plain and occasionally a little jerky. I quite enjoyed the music, kinda sounded like Paul Farrer’s work from back when he actually tried.
Mr. Jones was okay, but he didn’t seem quite as competent technically as on Holding Out For A Hero.
You might not expect it, but the music design was the work of Marc Sylvan, albeit a improved variant of Beat The Pack.
Well, here’s my 2 cents on The 21st Question.
Pros:
– Gethin was decent as a host.
– I loved the set, very futuristic-looking (which I like) and the rotating Q as it revolves to the next challenger in the line was a nice touch. It reminded me of Kirsty Young’s rotating desk from the first incarnation of The People Versus.
– The questions were of a decent difficulty. Some nicely answerable ones with some curveballs thrown in (e.g. I fell in the trap of thinking Stonehenge was in Somerset instead of Wiltshire, but thinking on, I think I confused Stonehenge with Glastonbury…)
– The show progressed at a decent pace. On paper, you’re thinking “21 questions in a hour? That sounds really slow, especially when The Chase gets through a LOT more questions in that time”, but with Q1 being a ‘pick 5 from 10’ and having the players pick their positions, and Q21 being more of a final game than just a single question was a decent touch.
Cons:
– The question font was a little hard to read, but that’s a minor niggle.
– I think the player on the Power Spot has a bit TOO much power. It was especially egregious on Q20. It didn’t matter that the challenger was correct since the Power Spot player was as well. What I would have done to probably make the game better was have a timer system. Whoever buzzes in correctly first wins the challenge (a sort of ‘be fast but be correct’ gimmick). That way, the challenger has a chance to get the Power Spot player out other than having to hope that they got it wrong when the challenger got it right. I heard talk of the knocked-out players coming on tomorrow, so I suppose that DOES soften the blow somewhat, but if you only got one shot at the game, then it would feel like A Bit Of A Wasted Journey to get to face Q20 just to be turfed out just because both of you happened to be correct, and to be fair, it WAS a rather easy question anyway…
– I thought the Double Up felt rather tacked on. On paper, you’d think that having the challenger use it is rather silly, so why would they even do it? Yeah, I know that since the question is harder, the Power Spot player is more likely to get it wrong meaning that you can take their place, but on the flipside, if the Power Spot player IS wrong, then no money will be added for that question, reverting the value of the next question back to £100 so it’s kind of a waste. And I think the Power Spot player would only use it when they’ve knocked out a few opponents and there’s some categories left that they’re good at so they can get some extra cash into play.
– I, too, was annoyed that they didn’t reveal the other answers in the Top 10 list for the 21st Question. I was saying Inception as an answer all the way through, along with The Aviator and my mum was saying The Beach as an answer, so it would have been better if we could see if those answers were also correct.
All in all, it felt like another of those shows that’s made up of parts of other shows. As another punter mentioned, the first question felt like Number One, I thought the rest of the questions played like Duel but without the chips and the Accelerators, and the titular 21st Question was like a watered down version of Who Dares Wins’ Money Lists. If I’ve somehow not understood the rules properly with my points, then feel free to correct me on them. Like a lot of shows lately, it’s technically OK, but with some gameplay tweaks, it could be even better, I think.
I give it a 7/10.
I actually thought it was an OK basically quite entertaining game-y game (funnily enough I didn’t think it dragged particularly when it really could have), but they’ve shrouded it in so much bollocks there is no way the average 5pm punter is likely to stick with it after the initial bit of rules explanation.
Rules and procedure are important to game shows, but unfortunately they (especially the latter) are the two things you have to hide as much as you can in something aiming to be mainstream. This basically fails miserably. It’s not actually that complicated a concept but it does feel like they’re throwing rules and terminology in just for the sake of it – it needs to set out its stall much more cleanly and get rid of the distractions – the double ups are Just Something Thrown In, changing the screens from red to green doesn’t require a fanfare, it’ll be blatantly obvious if and when they get round to play.
Gethin is just lovely, isn’t he?
Someone was paid good money to come up with “you will NOT be facing the 21st question.” Well done everybody.
The set is quite neat, but whilst I’m always warmer towards a show with some good music or a soundtrack, this has nothing except a tedious drone in the background throughout.
I would actually watch this again which comes as a bit of a surprise but I can’t see it lasting beyond the initial two weeks. Would be intrigued to see what something like TF1 would make of it.
Daniel Nettleton’s name jumped out at me from the credits as one of the brains behind it, you might remember him as the very funny Tree of Temptation from Big Brother a number of years back.
Just reading the DS thread and actually this DID bug me – Dan got his question wrong but seemed to get a second chance when nobody else seemed to. Did I miss a rule? The Power Spot always seemed to otherwise win where they both got it wrong.
Can’t remember this exactly but if I’m thinking of the right question (Bronte) then both Dan and Claire got it wrong, so Dan got a stay of execution. A challenger is only knocked out if they get a question wrong and the power player gets it right.
Thanks Nathan, that would certainly make sense, although probably not a good sign that we needed an explanation.
Quite. I find it very odd that they’ve managed to make it difficult to understand. Gethin took part in the auditions and early run-throughs so he was well-versed in the game. It’s fairly obvious that the writers gave him very little to work with, I suppose.
It’s quirky but it’s not THAT complicated.
They basically cut out all extraneous chatter. After the first few challenges Gethin came over to me and asked why I put myself in a position where I wasn’t guaranteed to play, and I explained that it was a calculated risk. There was quite a bit of such chatter in the record and I think keeping some of it in might have been useful to the audience, considering the players definitely knew how to play the game.
Am I being daft here?
If you win the first question surely plump for 7th place as then you’re guaranteed to play and you won’t have to field all that many questions when you make it to the middle. You’re going to have to beat the person in the middle to get to the middle anyway and you don’t know who that’ll be in advance. I guess that’s why the cash ramp is there to try to tempt people into sticking around in the middle for longer.
Having said that I quite enjoyed it (and we must remember we had Light Up The Twisters this time last year…)
7/10
(And yes I spotted Dan getting an unexplained second chance too – it was on a Double Money question – do you get a reprieve in that instance?!).
There are advantages to going eighth – you may not be guaranteed to play, but you only need three questions to go “unused” for that to work. You’re gambling on some contestants being eliminated early, but if you really want to sneak in at the last minute, there’s some advantage to making that gamble.
If you go seventh, you could end up playing as early as Q8(Q1 + six wrong answers), and while there would only be three opponents left to defeat, you’d still be better off being further down.
I’m not sure how much strategy there is in this in practice – probably seventh is the best place, and then you work outwards from that. And at some point, it’s better to take the power spot initially.
If you are confident that you can blitz through and build up a big pot, then there’s an incentive to consider the “middle places”, but I’m not sure why else you would. (Or, at least, that’s not a strategy which occurred to me…)
Yes – 8th probably a good shout too as you only need 3 “skipped” questions to get at least one yourself.
Agree with most everything said here.
[FULL DISCLOSURE: I was at a couple of the run-throughs, after answering an ad on this site. I’ll base my comments on the televised version, though I will note that Gethin is lovely in person too.]
It worked better than I was expecting, but it certainly needs a better over-riding rules spiel at the very start. (You can’t throw around terms like “Power Player” before you even explain the game.)
I think the killer is the rising jackpot – if you played for a fixed amount of money, things would look much more simple. Thankfully I think how the money rose was mostly put aside. Agree that the Double Up is a bit stuck on. (I assume a lot of this was trying to find the right balance between the power player and the queue – wanting to give the power player something of an advantage, but not so much that they were impossible to beat.)
With regards to who will and won’t play, I think a quick summary before each question along the lines of “This is question X, this means you need to survive 20-X more questions. Contestant Y, this means you’re now guaranteed to play/off home.” would make it a bit clearer. Introducing a random noise over-complicates things. (And it means Gethin looks a bit out of control!)
There’s more than enough game there if you take away the doubles and the rising jackpot, and it would be much easier to follow.
Other notes:
– Graphics pleasant, set lovely.
– Contestants need to be told not to say thanks to Gethin after being eliminated, because they’re interrupting a sting.
– Despite not liking the doubles, do like the nice silver colour it goes when the contestant does double up.
– Re: Andrew’s comment on the 20th question – I think that’s the point. If you choose/are forced to stand too far down in the queue, that’s the risk you take – you either don’t play at all or you perhaps get fewer chances to win.
– And yeah, they need a better catchphrase. (By comparison, I’m actually quite fond of the simplicity of “Lights out”.)
May well end up watching tomorrow, if I’m around, which means it’s reasonably promising.
No, that wasn’t my point. My point was that even though the challenger was correct on Q20, because the Power Player was correct as well, the challenger was eliminated which didn’t seem fair to me. Hope that clears it up.
No Luke is right here, positioning at the beginning is everything, the point is you don’t want to play in the final spot because there’s little chance of getting to play and if you do you won’t probably get three questions anyway.
It’s not really any different to sudden death when time runs out in the main quiz of Avanti.
Interested to see the numbers, yesterday will be all about people exprcting The Chase, I expect it to trend downwards across the week.
Pointless 2.64m (23.5%)
The 21st Question 1.96m (18.4%)
Tipping Point 1.61m (25.8%)
Big Brother 1.24m (7.0%)
Couples Come Dine With Me 0.85m (7.9%)
Perfection 0.77m (13.3%)
BBBOTS 0.56m (5.8%)
Deal or No Deal 0.39m (5.7%)
Countdown 0.34m (5.6%)
Win It Cook It 0.32m (4.0%)
All including HD and +1 where appropriate
Thanks Paul,
A decent start considering, but it’s all about the trend.
I’m trying to figure out the theoretical maximum if the first player in the power spot got all 21 questions right….from what I can figure it’s £37,200…
You knock out players 1-5 in one question each (Q2-Q6)
100+200+300+400+500=1500
You knock out player 6 in two questions (Q7-Q8)
600+600=1200
You take players 7 and 8 to the maximum 3 questions at normal value (Q9-Q14)
700+700+700=2100
800+800+800=2400
You take players 9 and 10 to the limit with the Double Up option (Q15-Q20)
900+900+900=2700*2=5400
1000+1000+1000=3000*2=6000
Total so far is 1500+1200+2100+2400+5400+6000=18600
You do all 6 answers for Q21 to double
18600*2=37200
I think I’m clear on the Double Up rules, but I’m not sure- The power spot player gets it at Q7, the ones in the row get it at Q14, the Double up lasts for the entire duel, and they can call for it at any time…
Absolute total speculation, but at the top of the show Gethin says ‘We always ask 21 questions’. Perhaps then if all 10 opponents are eliminated with questions to spare the remaining player can play those extra questions for cash?
This then gives:
Qualifier
(1 Question)
Beat the first 8 in one question
100+200+300…+800 = 3600
(8 Questions)
Double and take 3 questions for opponents 9 and 10.
2*(900+900+900) = 5400
(3 Questions)
2*(1000+1000+1000) = 6000
(3 Questions)
Then 5 spare questions at (I’m guessing) £1000
5*1000=5000
(5 Questions)
Gives a pleasantly round £20k going into the final.
That would make sense- they were mentioning 40K as the top prize…
I make it £42,000 – using the same methodology as above, but assuming that more than one challenger can use the Double Up. Not sure if this is true. (Think it was on Monday?)
So players 9 and 10 both elect to double up, but the champion doubles up on player 8. This adds £2400 to the prize fund, which is doubled to add £4800 in the final round. Add to your £37200 to make £42000.
(I shan’t speculate as to unused question rules – we may see it at some point, but given that there’s 19 questions between 10 challengers and it seems like the first of a set is designed to be pretty easy, it may be something that comes up quite rarely…)
Side note to quiz historians (to the extent that there is such a thing): have we ever had a quiz with eleven contestants before? Are there any others with weird numbers of players?
In some of the publicity, Gethin says The 21st Question is really easy to follow, even if you join halfway through. To test this, and having missed yesterday’s episode, I joined today’s halfway through.
Yes, the show is easy enough to follow: people are standing around, they’ll get into the middle if they hit a question and the person in the middle misses it. There’s cash when the person in the middle gets things right, increasing for each opponent.
Questions are left open (who are these people, how did they get here) but that’s the peril of joining at the middle break.
Professionally, I need to see a full episode. As a viewer, maybe I don’t… and that’s what killed The Fuse five summers ago.
They should let the winners stay on for the rest of week. 5x40k makes for a nice sounding £200k top line prize, then.
First of all, I think this is a really Good Game, up there with Breakaway in being Prepared And Able To Talk About Tactics.
It’s biggest weakness is being close to or in the ‘confusing too many viewers’ dangerzone. There are a few things that could be done about this:
1-Put MUCH more on screen, such as:
1a- A /21 in addition to the question number to remind us that it’s important there are exactly 21 questions.
1b-3 dots or something to remind us that a duel is max 3 questions and show how many we’ve had so far.
1c-When the players choose their positions at the start, have a graphic for that, with the places changing colour when they are chosen.
1d-Names or something better than the very random colours blue and yellow to represent the champion and challenger in the overlay.
1e-What is the time constraint for the questions? Is it a Chase-style countdown triggered by first answer, or just a flat time limit. Either way, add a timer bar or clock.
1f-Have more than just the total money appear between questions. Also, don’t have it appear and then slowly move, that’s annoying. Maybe have something like: £1500+£200 = £1700 or maybe even a summary bar with eg:
£1700 — 2nd duel — £200 per question — Double up available
1g-For the 21st Question: I’d really like to see a who dares wins style tree graphic. Failing that, at least have the total prize and progress (eg: £4000, 3/5) on screen throughout.
2-Get into a regular order for the question reveal. I would probably suggest: Challenger answer, Correct answer, Champion answer, although with the current set up that has the awkwardness of going right to left. You could also go Champ, Correct, Challenger, that more fits the ‘The Chase’ model the audience are used to (ie: get excited when the first person got it wrong).
Given that there are only 4 outcomes: Challenger right, Champion right, Both right, or Both wrong, these reveals seem such a faff. Having Gethin sometimes start with ‘You’ve disagreed’, whilst clever, is too much.
Other things:
I wish the first question got a bit more time, I’d like to know how (fastest finger style) how many each got and how fast.
The suggestion of having a simpler prize system I second, I think maybe have something per duel rather than per question so that we can mention the money at the natural stopping points when we change opponent.
The double up… hmmm. It seems tacked-on, but I do like the idea of having 2 tiers of question difficulty, it makes it slightly easier for the challengers… maybe give the fastest player on each question choice of easy or hard question for the next, starting each duel on easy.
The endgame seems About Right, The effect of the numbers going green/red is very good, but I think maybe the already green numbers should just flash white or something when we go past them (rather than Gethin having to say ‘And of course we already know that number one is x’) to help sustain the tension better.
Despite all that moaning, I really think this is a fun watch, and it’s nice to a new format that’s a really good but actually quite simple. Gethin is great, the music is meh, the set is lovely, the questions are ok, and they talk about tactics. I hope (probably too optimistically) that we’ll see it again.
Just had a thought. The shows going out this week were the second batch to be recorded. Five shows were filmed before we’d even got going. I wonder if they made the rules a lot clearer in the first show that was recorded. I guess we’ll all have to watch it next Monday, right?
Obviously it seems ridiculous that they wouldn’t have done the same on Monday’s show, if they were thinking of switching the order, but considering how many other glitches there are I wouldn’t be completely surprised.
No time for proper ratings today, but 21Q got 1.59m (13.9%), 3.04m (25.5%) for Pointless, 1.65m (19.7%) for Tipping Point.
Thanks Paul. IT BEGINS.
Hiya I was no 20 on the first show when I got knocked out because we both got the right answer – would have been nice to have another opportunity to beat the hot spot lady but then it would have been too many questions – if it had come to me when there were more questions left to be asked perhaps it would have been a different outcome
There was so much banter that was cut out do maybe the show was slightly too long for its slot
And I did think it lost a little in translation
The set may look good but it was extremely hard in the feet to stand all that time
Semi-off topic so I apologize. The Chase USA started a brand new element yesterday, exclusive to the US version for now, that was pretty awesome. The Super Offer.
If the contestant takes the higher offer (in yesterday’s case he had a choice between $20K/$40K/$90K, took the $90K), Mark will offer the Super Offer (which has some really cool lighting and graphic effects on the set, by the way). The contestant can take one more step back, entirely closing the gap from the start and requiring 7 answers without getting caught, to double the offer. So he could have taken his $90K with a one step head start or $180K with no head start.
Very cool element. Worked awfully well and hope to see it more. Extremely unexpected and shocking. They didn’t really tease it.
Format devised by… everyone who was in the office!
And a few who weren’t.
Reasonably entertaining, but not a must see (or even close)
The answer reveals were a bit eggy.
The 21st question feels a bit long.
Directing is good though.
Set is lovely.
GFX are quite nice.
Not sure about Gethin… needs more charisma.
1.5m, and 115k on +1 yesterday for this according to Richard Osman, which doesn’t represent much of a drop from Tuesday.
I’m pleasant surprised. It’s a watchable little show that needs a little tweaking.
The main game is fine, and simple, but it’s conveyed in an unnecessarily clunky fashion. It needs a few tweaks to the explanations and graphics to make it clearer.
The difficulty of the questions seems to be all over the place. It’s too common for ether both contestents to get the question right or the question to be a double-stumper.
The final round is excellent. It’s compelling to watch and the structure is deceptively fiendish in how it encourages the contestent to gamble. They should make the board flash for already answered questions and they really need to show the answers.
I verified about 80 multi-choice and (seemingly) all the 21st Questions for this show. I would disagree that the question difficulty is random – on the template I was given, there were 5 questions per category – E, M, H, HH (Harder Hard?) and DH (Double Hard?).
So the idea is that the first question in a duel is easy, the next one medium and the last one hard. This is the way they do it on Eggheads. It has several advantages, but it mainly means that there’s a reasonable spread of questions for the viewers to answer, and that the contestants don’t get knocked out too early.
I haven’t checked, but I presume that if a Double is used, the trio of H-HH-DH is used instead.
Aha, that makes sense – a subtle gameplay element I hadn’t considered. Thanks!
Does anybody know what the budget of The 21st Question is?
I’ve been watching all four shows so far, and apart from Monday (Claire winning £ 8,400), all Power Players have flunked the final question.
It’ll be somewhere between £40k and £50k per episode.
By way of comparison, I looked at daytime quiz prize giveaways in February last year. At that point The Chase had given away, on average, £5,220.48 per episode (83 wins in 337 shows – 1 win every 4 shows). Tipping Point had given away, on average, £4,145.37 per episode (13 £10,00 wins, 6 people win £0 in 54 shows).
For a point of comparison, DoND’s long-term average is near enough £15k.
Thoughts from the end of the first week.
By keeping players on, The 21st Question allows regular viewers to get to know these people a little bit better (will Jo win money for her honeymoon? Can Sophia ever get a sport question right?). There’s an attempt at a narrative across the week.
T21Q needs a bit more oomph. More sparkle. Something as simple as A Loud Voiceover shouting “Question One!” would help. Or a different timeslot: this feels like a Sunday teatime show, in the Bullseye / Scrapheap Challenge / Prize Island slot.
ITV has come up with two successful daytime quiz shows in five years, and we tend to forget the litany of failures. BBC Daytime has Pointless and Perfection, and another list of failures as long as one’s arm. In the past five years, Channel 4 has made their list of failures, and might have thrown enough mud at the wall for something to stick.
Successful channels will innovate, refresh, change. Some things will work, many will not. Right now, my gut feeling is that T21Q might have legs, enough to commission another month’s worth.
I forgot to mention this all the week, but it’s unacceptable not to display the 10 answers on the ultimate question. Unless you happen to be a 24/7 social media addict, you spend minutes/hours Googling the answers.
This is a Cardinal Sin. I was eager to express that word in small caps.
Not sure if this is confirmation bias kicking in, but there seems to be a lot more explanation going on today – this being the first episode they recorded. It’s moving along quite nicely.
Not sure if there’s really any more or less, although there seems to be more Gethbanter, but I largely suspect they made this one the second week because the prize pot for the Monday episode is comparatively small which is not what you want to lead with in a new show really.
The data for the final is almost two years old!
We were told we would probably be first week on because Claire won quite a lot of money – it was much more exciting on set with lots and lots of banter which was cut but inevitable I guess – perhaps if we’d been introduced (like Tipping Point) and the rules explained ought have been a little better – it’s a good show tho and deserves another chance – unlike that weird twister thing and I simply could not work that one out
Once again no Northern audition venues I believe. Where were the auditions held for this?