For various reasons (I’m off to see Stewart Lee this evening, Final Fantasy is out tomorrow YESIKNOWSHUTUP) this week will probably be a bit “quiet”.
So if you want to talk about Pointless or We Are the Champions which both start today and which I won’t be able to see until fairly late this evening, here is the ideal place for you to do exactly that. Or whatever else you want to bring up.
FINAL FANTASY XIII IS OUT TOMORROW!!!
Not sure if you knew?
Not liking a number of the visual tweaks to Pointless. The the lights don’t flicker nicely when it goes through the red line, the spotlights on the contestants flash nastily and why does the number at the top at the Pointometer suddenly shrink when it goes from 100 to 99? And yellow and green? Ugh.
New round on pointless. Round two is a pick from list instead of at random. I do not like the change one bit!
Head to head has changed as well, easier questions but ether than it’s pontyon don’t be first over 100 it’s the best of 5 single questions. It’s more obvious, but not as bad a change as the last one!
18 people haven’t heard of planet Earth?
This is all sounding a bit “difficult second album” so far.
The head-to-head is less of a head-scratcher but definitely a better game.
New second round is a bit rubbish, new head-to-head is good. I’m amazed no-one said Robert Southey for Poets Laureate. And John Masefield too! He’s dead famous an’ that!
It strikes me that there’s less opportunity for viewers to say “I would have got the pointless answer! Yay!” because picking one from a multiple choice just isn’t the same, is it? With very little knowledge you can pretty well eliminate the 1-99 pointers in the multiple choice round and be left with a coin-toss over which of the remaining choices is the pointless one. (Do I know anything about team sports? No. Did I work out the pointless answers anyway? Yes. Was this particularly satisfying? No. Certainly nowhere near as satisfying as dredging up “Baby It’s You”, “Real Love” and “Beatles Movie Medley” in the first round.)
Unrelatedly, except that it’s been on today, I’m rather enjoying Winning Lines on Challenge at the moment, though showing two episodes of it in a row is overkill. Editing a forty-minute(-plus?) show into a Challenge half-hour, with something like 24 minutes of content, is a pretty impressive feat of editing. Obviously anything related to the National Lottery goes and accordingly even the opening sequence has to be heavily pruned, but the remaining show has a very high ratio of killer to filler. The Wonderwall is the Best Three MInutes On Television once more! It’s a shame that some of the brilliant sound package doesn’t make the cut as a consequence, but to me it’s one of the highlights of the TV Production Music Museum. (Technically that’s the US version, but it still sounds good and there are clean versions of many of the wonderful little background music tunes you don’t otherwise hear in full. I wonder if there was ever a CD released, akin to the Millionaire music one? Surely not, but…)
Similarly, Challenge’s edit of Eggheads is much more to my taste than the original.
Winning Lines, eh? Brilliant!
Winning Lines was a great show with a superb opening game, and a really classy Wonderwall finale. Only the middle section let it down – I didn’t like the undue haste with which it was done, just 5 rapid fire questions to go from 5 people to one, all over much too quickly. The ‘you’re out if you DON’T buzz in when you should’ mechanic seemed unfair, and the original show added endless chat between host and six contestants to pad the time out. What would have been wrong with a ‘first to three correct answers’ type of round?
In this repeat, the need to wrap it all up in a Challenge half hour means all the chat was gone, with the result that the rubbish middle game was over very quickly – if you’ve got a weakness, best not to dwell on it!
Great quiz, best of all the Lottery ones in my view, with Who Dares Wins close behind.
Mmm… I think the middle round suffered from being dictated by the format. It’s fair, even if brutal, and the questions are sometimes fairly interesting. Perhaps if players got two lives then it might be more interesting.
Winning Lines suffers from questions that date quickly, but it’s such a technically impressive show that I can see it getting nearly as long a run in repeats as The Crystal Maze.
How did I not know about the TV Production Music Museum? That’s brilliant, thank you Chris!
Given that you’re a technical chap, Tom, is there a way to convince the site to serve the tunes in a way that can be downloaded rather than just streamed? I have used software in the past which changes the sound driver to something that will record the audio output rather than play it, but if there are any neater ways of doing it…
Depending on how it works, if you use firefox, either the flashgot extension or the UnPlug extensions might work… I think there are some others for the same/similar purposes.
Yep – and Live HTTP Headers will give you the MP3 links too,
I award you both White Hats of Helpfulness. Thank you!
This is not to say that I have cracked it. I have not been able to properly drive Live HTTP Headers to the point where I recognised anything as a URL ending .mp3, and when I tried flashgot then it seemed to baulk at the vast variety of things on the page. I did manage to get it to download everything, once, which included a Winning Lines theme tune, so there has at least been some degree of success, but in any case I wouldn’t say I knew how to drive it properly yet.
My ideal year of Lottery output on the BBC
Winning Lines
1 vs 100
Who Dares Wins
(In no particular order!)
Funny how all 3 shows have had a presenter change (Mayo to Pip, O’Leary to Shephard and to a lesser extent, Eamonn to Nick)
Reduction from 5 teams to 4 – Strangely seems to improve the pace despite it feeling too slow last year.
New second round – Bleh.
New head to head – Prefered the last one, personally, but not much in it.
Still not enough Alexander and Richard banter.
Another very exciting OC! I don’t think I’ve seen Ms. C. enjoy watching a team on the Connecting Wall so much before. 🙂
FWIW, my favourite quesiton was the apparent dates one – I would have fallen for the intended trap of “gap of four months and one day” and was delighted to see something smarter at work.
On that question I was going to suggest the unusual time signature of 4/16 as what came next. Would DB have allowed that? Given the first three dates could have been written 1/4, 2/8, 3/12.
Pft. Those are hardly unusual.
(…But I’m only saying that because I got my dad the Gulliver Suite for Christmas. Which contains such wonderful time signitures as 24/1, 3/32 and the ever popular 3 2/2 / 4 (I think that’s meant to read three and two halves over four)
(…And how come every single music question I hope it’s a property of the music, such as time signature, rather than the title of the piece?)
Don’t think I’d give 4/16 because that doesn’t follow the pattern but I’d be tempted to give April 4th because it undeniably works even though the logic is a bit ‘flat’.
Something I never got the chance to ask, David B – on the ‘backgrounds of notes’ question, if I’d have got my wallet out and looked at the back of a fiver, which didn’t occur to me until there were five seconds left, would that have been allowed?
Incidentally, I’ve just realised that – in the “pen names of duos” question, I confused Nicci French, best-selling crime writers, with Nicki French, Eurovision singer and coverer of Total Eclipse of the Heart. I reckon that’s what threw us off…
The getting-a-fiver-out-of-your-wallet/purse thing happened on Cash Cab once. And if it’s good enough for Cash Cab…
Weather allowed or not, it would have been rather entertaining.
I made the Nicci/Nicki confusion as well.
two minor queries:
i) Are there meant to be new walls up yet?
ii) If so, are they working for anyone else – i.e. is it just me who just has the original ten?
Still 10 for me. I reckon they’ll be up by tomorrow.