There are a few things on today which may be of interest, but probably not interesting enough for full blown show discussion posts so…:
Guess This House – 12:30, ITV. Well someone was determined to pun the title (they were asking for contestants under the name Game of Homes), it’s a 12 Yard Production so I predict it’ll be completely workmanlike and basically fine and their self-aggrandizing Twitter feed will suggest it was 10 years in development or something. Two couples go round houses and try to value them and everything in it, the better they do the more time they get in the final property where one could walk away with £2,000. Saira Khan hosts. Edit: Respect for the holding-a-question-card promo shot!- Hello Campers – 4pm, ITV. ITV muscle in on C4 territory with a show that’s a bit Coach Trip and a bit Come Dine With Me (two shows that do well for C4). Each week sees five couples set up camp and perform tasks and challenges based on local customs and keeping the camp running to earn points, the winning couple win £1,000 at the end of the week. It’s a 12 Yard Production so I predict it’ll be completely workmanlike and basically fine and their self-aggrandizing Twitter feed will suggest it was 10 years in development or something. Actually this might be decent fun. Fingers crossed for a sarcastic voiceover!
- You Can’t Beat A Bit Of Bully – 9pm on Challenge tonight, but repeated on Sky One AND SKY ONE HD tomorrow at 8pm – A documentary celebrating Britain’s love of Bullseye.
- Pointless starts in The Netherlands tonight! Best of luck to all involved. Hopefully you might be able to watch it on catch-up here.
I wonder how many “WEEERRRRRR, this isn’t TIPPING POINT” comments there will be on DS and Twitter.
Incidentally the host of Freeze Out starting in the The Chase slot next week is none other than Mark Durden-Smith.
it’s the last of Italian Countdown!
Well Dutch Pointless is *weird*, unexpectedly so. I think it’s rather lost something in translation.
Three couples. Round one is a single open-ended question played in the standard UK style (both players answer going back and forth down the line). The total score determines the turn order for round two, a sudden death pick-from-seven round played as a pair – couple picking the highest (or wrong) answer is out. Surviving two play best of three open ended questions for the head to head, and winners play the final (played in the old style but with a choice of two categories), but seemingly not against a clock and with no putting the answers to least to most likely order.
Prizes are €500 + €100 into the jackpot for each Pointless answer.
There’s not much chat and it doesn’t feel like there’s much content really. I’ve got no idea what the Dutch are going to make of it.
The strange thing about feeling DP lacks content is that structurally, the difference is five answer reveals and a board of questions/answers, which given the show’s a third shorter probably isn’t that awful really.
Very brisk.
It seemed obvious that the contestants (and probably the whole country) were familiar with the BBC version – surely it took several series before British contestants played that well.
Some odd differences I noticed – the presenter almost never repeated back the contestants’ answers; the head-to-head didn’t have a back-to-back totem.
The questions were localised versions of very, very basic ones. Many of them were expressed in 4 words. Maybe this is why the content felt less – there was not much to puzzle out. I remember that ‘we are the world’ was a picture question on the BBC, which was a far more interesting way of presenting it.
The graphics seemed to be cleverly sped-up and slowed-down to add tension? or perhaps just jerky?
Very possibly, I think certainly BBC1 has been freely viewable in The Netherlands for sometime for whatever reason. I did laugh rather at the Central African Republic answer.
BBC1 and BBC2 are part of most basic tv packages in the Netherlands. They used to get the analog signal over there.
873,000 seems a big number. I’m going to wildly speculate that this number will drop sharply if the comparison is made with the UK version.
Dutch Twitter comment: “for the Lingo audience, not for people who know the BBC version” https://twitter.com/MA_Vredegoor/status/625972142778249216
Curious to know what SquaredEyes thinks.
As for the BBC1 comparison, I reckon the absolute number is marginal, especially since the actual audience is not watching BBC.
In numbers, Pointless did similar to what Lingo used (!) to do, but that went down with each new series. 20% share is fair enough, but it rates old (50+ was over 25%, 20-49 was below 10%). It currently is summer time, lots of people on holiday and weather was bad, plus a huge press coverage.
We will need to see if it continues, but my gut says there will only be a summer season, perhaps one more next year, but nothing serious.
It looks like it’s a variable speed column to “increase tension”.
873.000 (19% share) for Pointless, which is reasonably okay. De Slimste still up over 1,2 mln at primetime.
Both Guess This House and Campers came second in their slots:
Guess This House 739,000 / 9% share
Hello Campers 940,000 viewers / 10% share
Thanks Simon. That’s quite a drop from Tipping Point for Hello Campers, but Guess This House isn’t too far off what ITV gets at lunchtimes IIRC.
Would you know roughly how the nation’s favourite quiz 15-1 has been doing?
450k yesterday 6% share and Friday , seems to be hovering between 300-400k, but dipping down to 250k last Tuesday.
Not too bad, probably slightly up on last series ta.
Guess This House lost 83k yesterday.
Hello Campers lost almost 180k viewers.
Ta.
I have to agree about that OC question last night..One of those “It’s 5pm on Friday and we want to go home for the weekend but we need one more question for the episode” things…
An hour of Bullseye after the watershed and not even the “‘e’s pissin’ deaf!” clip! What a waste!
It was fun, but really I’m not sure what the Bullseye doc bought to the table other than a realisation that it a remake is ultimately pointless.
What I got from You can’t beat a bit of bully?
1) Challenge knows how to make a decent clip programme. Decent, adequate, workmanlike.
2) Target: people who enjoy Paddy McGuinness, don’t know Challenge shows old Bullseye, and can get nostalgic about it.
3) … so not me.
4) This could be a cheap way to test the water for a revival “by public demand”. Can said demand be stoked by clip shows smeared with combustible nostalgia? If it can’t, a revival won’t fly.
Twist ending: This leads to a full series of Bullseye documentaries.
19,9% for Pointless, well done – stabilized and slightly increased.
A massive 27% for De Slimste in prime-time.