This is quite an interesting story and although it’s been reported by the Mirror it doesn’t seem to have picked up much traction. Basically Tim Wonnacott’s been suspended from Bargain Hunt after an apparent argument with a producer on Friday – details unknown, an investigation is taking place.
Bargain Hunt is an absolute daytime monster and has been for about twenty years, usually the biggest show in daytime outside the big 5pm quizzes and regularly getting 30%+ shares (which makes it basically the biggest show on television outside of soaps and Strictly/X Factor. If only schedulers would put it on at 9pm, it would *literally* get 8m viewers nightly). This would not be the first time the show’s iconic host has parted ways, the series shot to fame under the stewardship of David “cheap as chips” Dickinson and became even more popular under Wonnacott. Both very much personality hosts.
Guest hosts (the regular antiques experts, presumably) will be covering the rest of the recording of this series, much like when Wonnacott was training for Strictly Come Dancing. Who’d be the next permanant host? I reckon with a bit of sharpening up Anita Manning is just eccentric enough and seems to have a large enough persona to carry it off full time. We’ll see though.
We don’t know the reasons for the suspension, but we will look forward to Wonnacott’s Win A Cot on Amazon Prime in due course. The other question is what will happen to the other shows on the BBC where he acts in an expert or voiceover capacity?
In the meantime we wait for ratings for Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, but the reviews are mixed at best. On the one hand shows are made for viewers not critics, on the other this sort of thing just doesn’t seem to go down well in the US (see Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, My Kinda Town etc.)
Before you all write in I’m being facetious re: share, thanks.
Thanks for the heads-up, I’d missed this story! I’m a huge BH fan, and will be gutted if Tim is gone. The producers basically auditioned each of the existing experts as potential new hosts whilst Wonnacott was busy filming Strictly last year; each recorded a couple of episodes as main presenter. Perhaps Tim was made to remember he wasn’t expendable?
Yes, Anita was quite good – she is always entertaining and engaging, but she does need training up as host, and it would be a shame to lose her as expert/auctioneer (she seems to be able to sell ice to the Eskimos at a 200% mark-up). Potentially a better bet would be the slicker skills of David Harper or Kate Bliss.
The only problem with Anita becoming the new host is that it would mean she couldn’t be running the auctions on it any more. And no-one gets better profits than selling at Anita’s.
This is all great stuff – I don’t get to watch it very often although if I flick across it then I’m watching it – I saw Anita guest host it a while back and although I thought her not *quite* comfortable, I thought she was also the sort of knowledgeable but slightly quirky personality who is likeable and fits the bill well.
Very interested to hear who people would have as a replacement.
Tough to find non-geoblocked videos of Best Time Ever, but here is one that appears to be complete except for the opening titles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyUrfqKkxE4
Radio Times have a writeup as well:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-09-16/best-time-ever-with-neil-patrick-harris-is-almost-an-exact-replica-of-ant-and-decs-saturday-night-takeaway
The numbers: 6.8m viewers (compared to 11.3m for lead-in America’s Got Talent), 1.9 rating; “solid,” says Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-ratings-nbcs-best-time-823780
Yes, doesn’t sound too bad. Will be interesting to see where it goes in future weeks, especially as 8pm lead-in to The Voice.
The numbers are a little deceptive:
US networks have a little trick to bump up ratings for some shows- they schedule a popular show to end 1 or 2 minutes after the half-hour ends to prop up the numbers of the following show, as Nielsen only works on the strict half hour. America’s Got Talent ended at 10:01 last night, so the first half-hour of BTE was inflated a little:
10-10:30: 7.77 million viewers, 2.0 in the 18-49 key demo
10:30-11: 5.76 million viewers, 1.7 in the 18-49 key demo
For a 10pm show, it’s not too bad (it won both time slots), but starting next week they’ll be up against new programming instead of reruns.
And following a couple of suggested links from the Challenging Times tweet, I stumbled upon an ep of the Irish version of TalkAbout :
https://youtu.be/7yM8AcJev68
Americans! Almost as bad as the Italians!
The ultra-snarkers at previously.tv absolutely hated it.
Segments are mostly familiar – the guest announcer, host pranking members of the public and celebrities. Ant Versus Dec turns into NPH Versus Someone, “cross-country karaoke” sounds like something NTV did about twenty years ago.
Little NPH is present, but he’s also the climax to the show. They give away a car, but doesn’t look like they try to do Win The Ads.
In other news Release the Hounds back Wednesday 30th September, 10pm ITV2. That’s two weeks tonight!
Don’t know if you’ve been following USBB at all, but Vanessa Rousso will make it to finale night (she won the final Veto comp, so she’ll decide which of two players who aren’t safe will go out in 4th place). She’s guaranteed herself at least 3rd place, and has a decent chance to win (depending on how comps play out- and then a jury vote at the final two if she gets there)
Not much difference between 9pm and 10pm on ITV2 granted but that feels somewhat like a demotion from it’s Monday 9pm slot. Looking forward to it’s return though.
Also don’t think he’s posted it here but Dancc has spotted a surprise in the C4 schedules – Celebrity Benchmark on the 26th September. C4 still doing themselves no favours though – it’s up against Pointless.
Bothers Bar really should do a round up at some point of one series wonders. A few half decent shows which have slipped away too history, some of which I guess do have an influence beyond their life. Endemol milked the Shafted format in every other show for a decade!
As we now enter (what we hope isn’t permanent) Genius off-season, I’d like to share a Main Match & Death Match idea I’ve been working on, it’s still rough, but thought it might pass the time.
Main Match- Colour Pyramid (Probably 9 players):
In this match, players have to work to score points based on the final layout of a 36 triangle pyramid. At random before the match, they receive a set of three secondary colours, for which they will score 3, 2 and 1 points each time those colours appear in the final pyramid of the round (So e.g. Orange/Green/Purple, 3 points Orange, 2 points green, 1 point purple). The same colour may appear two or three times in the set they recieve, so Purple/Purple/Purple is possible, and would earn a contestant 6 points for any purple in the final layout.
In turns (and moving one along each round), players change the colours of 3/2/1 triangles (depending on the round) to either Red, Blue or Yellow. The pyramid will begin as entirely white, and after a person has changed the colours, the colours of the surrounding triangles will change accordingly:
– If every triangle surrounding a triangle is the same primary colour, that triangle also becomes that colour
– If there are two different primary colours around a triangle, that triangle becomes their mixed secondary colour
– If three different primary colours surround a triangle, it becomes permanently black and cannot be changed anymore.
Once the changes are made, the next player changes some colours, and so on, until every player has gone. The final pyramid is then revealed, and points are distributed accordingly. The pyramid retains it’s colours as it is used in the following round (9 rounds so every player gets a chance to go first and last, etc.)
Player with the most points is the winner, lowest scorer becomes the death match candidate.
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This brings us on to the death match!
Death Match: Entangled Tic-Tac-Toe
Based on Ultimate Tic Tac Toe http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/ (Which itself would be a fantastic death match), players will take it in turns to place a pair of X’s or O’s which are “entangled”, that is to say, the main-square of the first is the sub-square of the second, and vice versa (so for example, placing an X in the top-left part of the middle square would put an X in the middle part of the top-left square).
9 positions on the grid are “entangled” with themselves (middle middle, top-right top-right, etc.), capturing these means you will only place a single X or O that turn.
Players take it in turns attempting to get three in a row in any square, winning that square. The winner of the death match is the first person to line up three big squares they’ve won. Alternatively, if this condition is not met, the person who won the most squares will win. If they tie, the person who won the last square wins.
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Possibly a bit complicated, gonna try to draw some pictures to explain if anyone’s interested. Woo hypothetical matches!
(3+2+1)triangles*9 players=54>>36, so either overwriting or in-cell mixing is presumably allowed? I must be missing something, because the only outcome I can see is lots of black, and the winning player being the single color bettor that can sway those playing last best. Maybe the basic idea can work with Takenoko-style land pattern goals instead of numerical targets?
Ultimate TTT is indeed probably suitable, perhaps with a timer. Entagled TTT replaces restricting location of opponent’s play with opening multiple fronts. I’d like a play example of how focusing on more than one grid at a time works to one’s advantage, which is required to avoid ties. Talking of which, are entanglements broken if a grid is won? Are there tie avoiding rules either on the high or low scale?
Heh, that’s a fun exercise. Let me present an example main match which isn’t very particular about the number of players, which I’ll be honest and call Co-operative Phase 10.
Players are handed a number of random cards, and a wild card. An ordered list of card combinations (things like runs and straights) is presented, starting with tricky combinations needing lots of cards and continuing with easier stuff. For no combination does the number of required cards exactly divide with the number of players in the game 🙂 .
During the game, any number of players may go together to the dealer, put any number of cards face down in front of them and ask her to score their combined hand. The dealer laser scans the back of the cards 🙂 and either:
a) declares that a winning combination was contained within (but not which) and removes all submitted cards, whether used in the combo or not. Every card-contributing player scores the first combination on the list their hand satisfied.
b) declares no winning combination and returns the cards.
Submitted wilds can stand in for any card required to complete the earliest possible combo. However, every useless wild shifts the combo scored to the next (easier!) one. If no such combo exists, the hand is rejected instead.
The game lasts 90 minutes. However, every player that truthfully informs the dealer he is out of cards halves the time remaining.
At game’s end, players score a point for every kind of combination they scored, and lose a point for every card in their hand. Winners pick two combinations from the list, without access to detailed scoring. All players are awarded a garnet for each of the two they scored.
I can get my head around that a little easier than Colour Pyramid, certainly.
Brief clips and interviews with the composers of Blockbusters and WWTBAM themes on yesterday’s The Sound of ITV: The Nation’s Favourite Theme Tunes for their 60th Birthday.
Also if anyone was keeping note, it was the Fifteen To One Final today with a new series starting tomorrow.