So a new show from our good friends at Talpa debuted on RTL4 in The Netherlands yesterday evening, based on an Israeli format by production company A Capella. The Big Picture is essentially Picture Who Wants to be a Millionaire, hosted by the same guy who hosts Weekend Millionair usually in the slot, Robert ten Brink.
The show’s big USP is that sponsored by the Bankgiro Loterij you can play along at home on the app and win some money yourselves. The show is prerecorded so they put your face and name up using whizzy live post-production.
One person is selected from the audience (photos of everyone up on the walls which spin round until one stops on the big main screen) to play. They are 12 questions away from winning €1m. Each question is based on a picture displayed on the large screen, which might be as simple as just identifying who it is of but might also be a bit more general knowledge, using who or what is in the picture as a theme. Each question has four multiple choice answers. If they are wrong they will leave with nothing. If they don’t know they can use one of their three “escapes” to swap the question but it might force them to share a quarter of their winnings with a Bankgiro Loterij player (also each time this happens one of the live app players is selected to win €5,000). If they get it right they can opt to climb the ladder (€100, €500, €1, 2, 5,000, €10, 20, 50,000, €100, 200, 500,000, €1m) (they do not get to look at the next question before making this gamble, which I dislike as a thing because exciting television requires contestants to be encouraged to take risks and asking people to gamble blind encourages conservative play with the numbers involved, although when they get past €10,000 they can at least look at the picture before deciding to take the question) or get out.
When they choose to get out they see one more picture before deciding if they want to take a question. If they decide to walk away then the money is split with the Escape Loterij players, no harm, no foul. However if they opt to take the question and they get it correct then they get to keep their entire bank and the home players leave with nothing. If he gets it wrong, they split the entire bank between them.
It’s OK. If you stopped watching Millionaire before then there’s no real reason here you’ll go back to something like this, on the other hand if ITV wanted to fill a Millionaire shaped hole in the schedule there are worse things they could use. It debuted to decent viewers last night on RTL4, over a million which everyone seems happy with.
Don’t just take my word for it though, if you can get round the geoblocking you can watch it for yourself.
You can click on the picture for a larger version if you like, the question is “what are the name the dogs?” and SPOILER The answer is Kenneth and Carla. I’ve no idea whose dogs they are.
Dogs of Pim Fortuyn (a controversial politician in the Netherlands, shot in 2002 by an environment activist).
About The Big Picture:
OKish, but I’m not sure about the way contestants can win money as any error means instant death, and quitting contestants having shared money with at least one random lottery player are all too happy to cling on the money.
Compare to Millionaire where contestants can exit or risk without having to play a complex endgame, or Succes Verzekerd (also fronted by Robert ten Brink), 1 vs 100 or The Drop where contestants must complete his run to get paid.
a comedy variant of this: Paolo Bonolis used to host a talk show and one segment was having Luca Laurenti guess “the top 5 reasons for…” by showing him pictures.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2f8ow6_il-senso-della-vita-5-buoni-motivi-per-andare-a-votare_tv
This show is a very poor rip-off. It only scores 1,1 million viewers because of the high lead-in (1,9 million viewers!). Probably next weeks ratings will be lower.
Well I’m going by the reaction of my Dutch media chums. I think the show is *OK*. It’s *fine*. It’s also *not a show I’d be going out of my way to watch any time in the future*.
Still on 1.1m viewers, possibly helped by an extraordinary brave contestant.
How much did they go for?
One contestant bailed out with € 100,000 (with a quarter of the prize money going to some lucky lottery player).
Incidentally when Mel and Sue finishes in three weeks it’s getting replaced by 1000 Heartbeats.
I’m a bit surprised- I thought 1000 Heartbeats was a primetime show, not daytime…
If you want to spoil yourself for the format, it’s described at https://skyvision.sky.com/Brand/2042/1000-heartbeats# and it looks like you might even be able to see a couple of episodes early if you have an account. Unfortunately it looks like account applications are manually verified so my application with job title Nosey Beggar and a throwaway e-mail address was not accepted. Nevertheless some of you might legitimately have an account and so can beat the broadcast. Do let me know whether I need to bother watching or not.
I think that sounds alright actually, Vernon Kay’s Mental Agility Cube.
It looks… potentially quite tame, which suits me down to the ground. There could have been a more “phun”, The Whole 19 Yards way to do it in that every wrong answer doesn’t deduct 25 heartbeats but triggers a scary penalty to waste time and get your heart racing (man with a big tuba unexpectedly toots in your ear, big buzzsaw flies down and misses closely like in The Chair, etc.) but that probably wouldn’t go well with interesting mental agility games.
It would be cute to think that Big Vern has got a relatively upmarket, cerebral gig on the strength of his (entirely decent) work on Million Dollar Mind Game. Every cloud…
It was the football transfer window deadline day on Monday, and – as expected – there was no deadline day transfer activity for Middlesbrough FC this year. The local newspaper had a live blog nevertheless and the reporter (who’s very blue-collar, but can write brilliantly) talked about watching University Challenge and Only Connect to pass the time. Accordingly, there was a thematic Connecting Wall (and following comments, going onto the second page of comments to the blog post) to liven things up. Perhaps it wouldn’t completely meet established standards, but nevertheless it (probably) raised a smile.
One funny side note, Bankgiro Loterij seemed to have nicked question bed from Break the Safe (author Rage Music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7huwG-8lCJs
Sound design for the show was created by a certain omnipresent and versatile composer MS. Not Marc Sylvan, but Martijn Schimmer (the guy also scoring leaders for all The Voice franchises).
I was quite amused to note when they bought back The €100,000 Show in the Netherlands a while back they borrowed one of the beds from The Waiting Game with Ruby Wax for the bit where they put the code in.