A couple of badly timed and or badly located shows coming up, if you go and see any of these do let me know:
- Relatively Clever – New Sky family quiz hosted by Mel Giedroyc. Some puzzles done by Only Connect people so likely worth a watch – I was actually meant to be attending a session tomorrow but real life has got in the way, so we’re super interested to know what you think if you go. Films at Elstree. Tickets: Applause Store.
- Get Your Act Together – New variety competition where celebs team up with variety acts, and also may or may not be from the mind of Endemol Joe. Pre-recorded heats film at ITV Towers on the 10th and 11th. Tickets: Applause Store.
- Smart Ask – Pilot where contestants must try and stump experts with their questions for £500,000. Not to be confused with the Canadian quiz of the same name. There’s a lot I don’t like about this from the description, not least the name which fails to be a very good pun or make any sense, but if it is what I think it is (if) there are good The Chase alumni working on it so let’s not write it off just yet. Films 2nd November at ITV Towers. Tickets SRO.
- Pointless – sounds like a ton of celebrity specials are filming next month at Elstree. Tickets SRO.
- Cheat – Pilot where contestants can try and get away with cheating if they don’t know the answers. Films Salford on November 5th. Tickets: Lost in TV.
Oh, someone’s got some traction with the cheat dynamic – the second most common quiz idea I’ve heard these past eight years. Well done them.
I was going to do some ratings but all the quiz ratings are very boring, so I’ll save my fingers. Also I’ve just seen a commissioner refer to The Jump* as a “Big, channel defining reality event”, so I’m off to kill myself.
*The Jump: Average ratings were 19,000 above what The Big Bang Theory got on E4 last night. Every episode rated lower than an episode of Location, Location, Location that aired the same week, and ratings for the second half of the run were about 50-100,000 higher than they get for a typical 6pm repeat of The Simpsons.
To be fair to The Jump, it did end up being quite funny. I enjoyed it more than I was expecting anyway, despite everything.
I hope they’re well insured for series two.
Interested to see how they work the cheating dynamic, previous goes of it tend to work the same way (Enemy Within, Dirty Rotten Cheater, that Quebecoise one that’s on at the moment whose name I forget).
Quebecoise one – Paquet Voleur perhaps?
No no, five celebs that play through the week, each day one of them is being fed the answers. Really swish animated graphics.
It’s Le Tricheur : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0b-wH4pgIg
Boom! That’s the one, thanks.
Er, I don’t believe Smart Ask involves anyone from the Chase. More than that I cannot say.
Then it’s not what I think it is then, but certainly I was asked by production if I knew any experts (fairly) recently.
Unrelatedly, the Prime Minister weighs in, in the second paragraph, on a long-held Bother’s Bar contention.
Never in doubt.
Edit: Ha ha, they’ve changed it.
Ooh yes, good luck to anyone playing Gareth Briggs’ MOLE this weekend. I know at least three members of the Bar community are playing; while I don’t know whether they’re playing on Saturday or Sunday, I imagine this means that they can’t all win. (Unless the victory condition is different to something trad.) I won’t be playing on either day – but, then again, I would say that…
I know it’s not Strictly Bar Business, but just to say I had a great time at this today, big thanks everyone else who came, and it seems the bar people were mostly in the Sunday group.
(I didn’t win.)
I’ve just heard about Dan Peake getting chased by a dog.
Feel free to talk about it, it sounded fun.
Steve Jones hosting Who Gets Nothing, films Elstree on 3rd Nov. Tickets SRO.
Got tickets for Cheat, since as it happens I’m in Manchester not doing a great deal next Wednesday before flying to Orlando from Manchester Airport on Thursday.
Great stuff, do let us know your thoughts if you have time.
Cheat was a bit rubbish really and took a whopping 5 hours to film!
Write up later
Yes please John, if you mail it to me I’ll stick it on the front page.
To kick off it is the first time I’ve been to MediaCity, nice place. Appreciated how there was alcohol in the waiting area available for purchase (not free sadly!). But getting in to the studio was a bit unorganised, eventually slowly ushered in via sticker numbers.
Audience was mainly comprised of the older generation, so their plan to integrate an EXCITING SMART PHONE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ELEMENT fell a bit flat (more on that later)
Alan Carr…I mean Jonathan was the warm up, new to me although I’m sure based on that description some of you will know him. He was probably the best part of attending this recording.
Steve Jones is the host, remember this was just a not for broadcast pilot so it was probably a case of who was available near Manchester on the day. Not the worst host for this I guess but nothing special. Then again, I think the last time I saw him was the hugely successful 101WTLAG…
Anyway off we go and Steve introduces the 8(!) contestants who do a quick intro (When I say quick, one poor guy had to do a retake at least 10 times as he couldn’t get his words out properly!), the intros maybe according to Steve contain ‘a few bluffs’ but this idea never really goes much further to be honest.
One is ‘randomly picked’ to join Steve at the podium with a large red buzzer in the middle and they have tablet keypad devices set up. These went into standby mode a lot which ended up causing a lot of retakes.
First round is 3 questions with a multiple choice of 3 answers for each, an easy question a medium question and a hard question seemed to be what they were going for. If the contestant gets any one of these 3 questions wrong they’re out of the game for good BUT WAIT! If they don’t know the answer they also have a cheat button on their tablet which will automatically select the correct answer!
After each question Steve will open the field up to the other waiting contestants and they can start questioning the active contestant to try and work out if they actually know the answer or are bluffing and have cheated their way through the question. For example if the contestant is asked ‘Which pub soap features The Queen Vic’ and the answers are Emmerdale/Coronation Street/Eastenders they might decide to ask the contestant about the characters from the various soaps.
During this rather awkward conversation period of any of the waiting contestants feel the active contestant has been a bit naughty and cheated then they can awkwardly walk towards the big red button and hit it to accuse them of cheating. If the accusation turns out to be correct then the active contestant gets booted off for good and the accuser gets straight through to round 2.
Should the accusation turn out to be incorrect however then the active contestant carries on as normal and Steve sends the accuser back to the waiting area with a yellow card. You read that right. A YELLOW CARD. (Not as in an actual card of the yellow colour, a football style ‘one more false accusation and you’re off the show’). This was stupid, in my eyes they make one wrong accusation and they should be eliminated there and then.
Anyway rinse and repeat until 4 contestants are through. Very boring.
I’m sure Steve at one point mentioned any of the waiting contestants that didn’t get through would maybe get to appear in the next show but this was never mentioned again…however…
…by the end of the recording they seemed to have decided Round 1 was a massive complex waste of time so did some pick ups so basically the entire show starts at Round 2.
Round 2 and down to 4 contestants. Steve invites 2 of them to go head to head. The head to head involves both contestants getting 3 lifes and 3 cheats. Steve alternates between the contestants, asking them questions the same as in Round 1 multiple choice questions with 3 answers. After each answer is given the opponent has a bit of a debate before deciding if they want to hit the button. If they hit the button and the other contestant has turned out to cheat then the cheater loses a life however should a false accusation be made then the accuser loses a life. If the contestant cheats and the opponent doesn’t catch them out then nothing really happens. Again, why isn’t the opponent punished for managing to miss a cheat?!
Once the contestants have used all their cheats they are on their own, I think a wrong answer at this point meant just a life lost but it may have meant instant elimination, I can’t fully remember.
Again rinse and repeat until one of the contestants loses all their lifes. This dragged lots and was a bit boring.
At this point we were a good 3.5 – 4 hours into recording and half the audience decided to leave and it was time for a quick 10 minute break.
When we got back? They had the do the exact same again with the other 2 contestants! At this point I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t bail with the others before!
Anyway this round is where they tried the EXCITING SMART PHONE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ELEMENT! Basically the audience members with smartphones had a website (cheatquiz.com if interested) to visit and the opponent could ask the audience just once during the round if they thought the other contestant was cheating or not. Didn’t really work, eventually they settled on just getting the audience to form an opinion via crowd noise which got on with the job. Cheers for the free WiFi to stop me getting too bored throughout the recording though!
Anyway after all this is done and dusted we have 2 contestants to face each other in Round 3. Which is just head to head again!!! (SERIOUSLY?!) the only twist this time is before the question is asked the opponent gets to pick from 2 categories so they want to pick the worse category for the challenger based on what they have learnt about them throughout the show. This drags as much as Round 2 and in the end it was getting quite late in the evening and the remaining audience were getting a bit bored so they rigged it a bit just so we could get on to the final round.
The final round and money is up for grabs! Up to £10,000! The contestant is posed 7 questions, again multiple choice 3 answers and has 5 seconds to answer each one (although initially Steve decided to give them all the time in the world resulting in yet more retakes!). After all 7 have been answered, the answers are reviewed by Steve and the contestant. Here is the catch – they must get all 7 right to be in with a chance of winning any money! However they can CHEAT up to 3 of their answers if unsure, which will half the prize fund each time so 1 CHEAT = £5000 2 CHEATS = £2500 3 CHEATS = £1250. If the contestant wins then Steve will go through the answers they CHEATed on to see what money they could potentially have missed out on.
And that is it! I understand this was a pilot but to arrive at 2:30pm and only be back at the MediaCity tram station for 8:30pm for such a simple show seemed a bit stupid really. And the overall impression I felt was ‘boring’ so I would be amazed if it got a commission, particulary in the teatime slot it seems to be aiming at (although a Pressure Pad type slot may be another option).
Sorry I didn’t know how to email you and since I’m off on a 9 hour flight soon I thought I would just stick it in here – feel free to copy and paste etc as required!
Thanks John, will do.