Tuesdays, 8pm,
ITV
New reality sporting competition in a bid to lure people (hopefully advertiser friendly males, by intention) away from the Champions League which has now vacated ITV.
Richard Bacon hosts as eight sporting stars battle it out in various challenges testing all sorts of physical and mental prowess and their will to win. Each episode the two worst performers face a Night Challenge to stay in the competition, the loser goes home. It’s a bit like Superstars but with challenges rather than sports, basically.
It’s actually not a bad idea for a show and the original Belgian show we wrote about a while ago showed a certain promise but felt ultra cheap, although had some interesting ideas – I quite liked that (in the first series at least) the Night Challenge didn’t necessarily send someone home, for example.
As to the chances of this show’s success – it’s a big shame that few of the celebs competing are really relevant these days – Gail Emms is good value on Fighting Talk when she appears, and Matt Le Tissier is currently tearing up Countdown in the afternoons, we’re not backing Fatima Whitbread to win (although best of luck obv.). It all feels rather low key.
This being said though we’re of the belief that a reality competition is probably the best way for ITV to grow out of it’s Tuesday night flop zone – if it fails then it’s no surprise, but if it catches on then you’ve got what increasingly becomes a hit on what is usually a dead night. I’m not sure this is the show that will do it, but I suspect it will be solidly entertaining for anyone who does tune in.
Looking at the name and the suits – if this doesn’t have a power ballet theme (Like Gladiator) then it should fail.
Funny, the UK Gladiators logo is EXACTLY what I thought of when I saw the triangles on their suits. (The Australian version’s logo, meanwhile, is currently enjoying a breakout role as garnets on The Genius.)
Talking of ITV I was in a hotel over the weekend and happened to turn the TV on around 3am to find a repeat of ‘Show Me The Telly’ on and it reminded me of how much I actually quite enjoyed it!
Wish they would do a second series…
It’s heart is in the right place but it’s not exciting. Having a race where you have to watch competitors stand and rest is not TV that I find entertaining and got bored very quickly.
I’m sure they could have found someone more suitable than Richard Bacon too.
Core idea is fine, not sure if I prefer the format over the Superstars-based points system of the original. The first 40 minutes featured around five minutes of actual action of which three of them were people doing nothing getting their heartrates down. Would have been interested to know how long the bouts in the night duel actually took.
Think the games needed to look bigger, they look like a bit like a school sports day without the budget so far. Editing is overwrought, we’re watching some people stand on one leg the music does not match the importance. Richard Bacon phoning it in, although seemed to enjoy himself more chatting to Science Man.
Could be better, could be worse, will probably continue to watch but don’t feel too heavily invested.
Not bad…I think part of the pacing was that they had to do the intros for everyone. Now that it’s out of the way, it should flow better.
IIRC, on the ep for the original series they used a cumulative scoreboard to determine who goes to elimination- so it emphasized consistency. Maybe if each the three events are scored 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1, bottom two go to elimination each week.
If they don’t want to use points perhaps:
1st event is for immunity for winner
2nd event determines a person for elimination- they go to the duel unless they win event 3, but they’re given a handicap to make it difficult (say with this week, the person with the worst time in event 2 had 5 balls deducted from the total saved).
3rd event determines the other elimination candidate (or both of them if the marked person from event 2 overcomes the odds and wins)
They got lucky at the duel though, I thought the editing was very good with the rain and the lightning..
I’d give it a 7 out of 10..hopefully next weeks ep will flow a bit better.
Thing I noticed: The Jump has its logo in the font Frutiger Italic, and the main graphics in Gotham. Eternal Glory has its logo font in Gotham and its main graphics in Frutiger Italic.
The fact I noticed that instead of anything else probably says something about the show…
I went back and figured out what would have happened if they had used a points system for the first 3 events:
For events 1 and 3, I used 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 (giving Fatima an automatic 1 for event 3). For event 2 I used 10-6-4-2 in each heat.
Matt: 3-10-10= 23
Shane: 6-6-8= 20
Gail: 10-4-5= 19
Christian: 8-4-6= 18
James: 2-10-4= 16
Jade: 4-2-3= 9
Liz: 1-6-2= 9
Fatima: 5-2-1= 8
So it would have been the same two in the duel (I’d assume the tiebreak would be the one with the better performance in event 3 is safe). It also shows possible flaw in using a scoring system; if it was cumulative, it’d be difficult for Liz and Jade to stay out of the bottom 2 next week unless they got top 3 in all three events…
The assumption is they’d clear the scores after each week, otherwise yes you’d be continually kicking someone when down.
Actually from this video of one of the other versions it was a cumulative scoreboard (look at about 14:40):
(though the scoring was a bit larger- In the original article, the video was a 1st episode with 11 players and scoring of 15-12-10-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, with 0 for a DQ or DNF)
Good spot, don’t like that as a format point at all, if you want to keep everyone in the race (and indeed make sure everyone is in with a chance of getting eliminated each week) you have to reset the scores after an elimination.
1.68m exc +1 according to DS. Deserved slightly better.
Just over 2m all-in by the sounds of it.
Not a complete disaster, just a disaster, but I’m a big believer in trends so we shall see – it sounds like the reaction to it hasn’t been all negative like the usual. I’m just not sure how you’d sell it to friends though really, “watch this show, Gail Emms off of badminton stood on one leg for over three minutes! It was incredible.”