Hey! Purveyor of unusual comedy gameshows Gary Monaghan has been in touch:
Hi Nick – just to let you know we’ve got a new game show coming out on Sky One on March 15th called Wild Things. It’s hopefully quite a funny physical game show that unusually for me is for a family audience, and it’s hosted by Jason Byrne and Kate Humble. It’s going out at 7pm on Sunday nights, the idea being that it’s like your last weekend treat before bedtime and school the following day . I think it’s quite good, although I would say that wouldn’t I
This is the link to the Sky website:
http://www.sky.com/tv/show/wild-things/video/owl-fall
Hope you like it
Best
Gary
The clip is quite funny, it is of a man in an owl costume who can’t see anything running through the woods. It’s the slapstick version of that bit from the film Intacto. Something that might be worth looking forward to at any rate.
Edit: here’s the press release. Short version: couples complete, one dressed in a woodland creature costume. That person can’t see. They must get through obstacle courses in the woods, with comedy consequences. The end result is GOLD.
Unrelated to this, but I found a pitch film for a US game show called ‘Catch’ and it looks rather good! What do the other Bar patrons think?
That’s Israeli rather than US.
I think they’ve rather stretched the “catch” metaphor there, and I think an hour of solving trivially easy wordsearches for an hour would be quite a difficult watch, nice set or no nice set. And that end game looks a bit silly. Still, I’d need to see full episode to make sure.
Meanwhile here’s Nippon TV’s Mansion Madness – basically it’s 24 Hour Quiz in a haunted house. Would love to see some sort of translation. (requires C21 account):
http://www.c21media.net/screenings/bestcompetitionreality/mansion-madness
Ah, yes, I see the Hebrew letters on the grid on that screenshot there…
Ah well, it looked interesting to me anyway because of the great-looking set
Excellent The Chase parody in the first part of tonight’s Saturday Night Takeaway
Was very happy to see Anne actually appear, wasn’t sure if she would or not. Was all very funny!
That Puppet Game Show… gone international?
Oh wow!
Oh that’s quite interesting, no mention of That Puppet Game Show in the credits, and it’s an Endemol Production. It’s more of a chat show.
Interesting comment in this week’s Quiz the Nation newsletter:
“We’ve also changed the format of the show slightly: from tonight there will be no break at the start and answers will only be revealed at the end of each round. Removes the risk of anyone being able to cheat.”
Why would they say that? Has someone found a way around the system?
This confirms my suspicions. On two different weeks, I was the leading player but then beaten by someone at the last moment who had submitted their answers late. How could this happen? What could it mean if someone is on a later timeline than mine?
The answer, I suspect, lies in something we noticed in week 1 without fully appreciating the significance. The lag between the live feed and the internet feed is over 10 seconds. So, if you synced your app with the live feed but were able to watch the Sky feed, you would see the answer first on Sky and then your phone would ask for the answer later! This works because there is not enough delay between the answer being revealed on one stream and the timer starting on another.
Even if you didn’t have both feeds, I suppose you could mimic the same effect by pausing your Sky feed for around 11-12 seconds, syncing your app, then fast forwarding to live television again.
You might ask why does the app allow for any kind of time difference. Well, unfortunately different viewing methods have quite different time delays depending on whether you are watching in Sky, Sky HD, Freesat, Freeview or Internet streaming. Although not all of these apply in the case of Showcase TV, nevertheless there are some time differences to account for.
I can’t conclusively prove any of the above, but I know in theory it would work. It explains a number of suspicious results to boot. I’m glad it’s now been sorted so that we’re back to fair fight. Bring it on.
Sorry, that should say:
“if you synced your app with the INTERNET feed but were able to watch the Sky feed”
Good luck everyone! I can’t win money and can’t be bothered and the novelty has worn off, but I’m very interested to see how it works out as a business. Hopefully more than 160 players tonight.
Especially if 8,000 are watching according to Weaver’s Week.
Its the same for me, Brig. I’m slipping further and further down the table (I only JUST squeezed into the Top 50 this week, BUT won a spot prize as well, so it wasn’t a wasted evening), but if I’ve got the tokens to play, then I might as well use them. Since they’re still giving us free tokens, I’ve got around 30 plus I won 10 more tonight.
But I digress. Something weird happened while I was playing tonight. I was on my iPod, and for the last 2 rounds of the game, the answers severely lagged behind the questions. Say I was answering Q1 of General Knowledge, the answers didn’t appear until Gordon was starting reading Q2. Nothing happened to my TV or anything like that, but it was weird. Kinda glad they didn’t reveal the answers after each question or it would have looked bad on me. I most likely wouldn’t have cashed as I only scored 5/10 on the Odd One Out round, so I had a LOT of ground to make up.
And well done to Team BBar for winning tonight i.e. David B.
175 scorers out of 225 registered. I wonder what will happen when the tokens aren’t free – I can’t see the, going up.
It’s something I experienced very early on – the answers still being on my app whilst the answer was shown on screen (partly because I was watching on the internet steam on my rather old PC which was obviously lagging after it had synced up). I did email them to let them know (and again the other week when it happened again) so obviously they have finally closed the loophole.
Had my worst week, only scoring 33 (although there was clearly a problem with the final score shown on the app as it said I had 36 – looking on Twitter, a few people had the same problem, although my correct score is on the website)