A couple of shows coming up:
- Great news for fans of mid three-figure prizes and rubbish jeopardy in the guise of strategy, the surprise second series of The Edge starts Monday now fronted by The Gabster herself Gabby Logan. Format tweaks are promised (thank goodness) and it looks like there are new arrows on the set background. A Show Discussion post will go up for it on Monday, you can read the thread for series one here if you want.
- The following Monday (that’s the 19th) Pick Me! begins on ITV at 3pm, upcoming talent Stephen Mulhern fronts a game of hard questions, comedy costumes and comedy bluffing. Will this be a bit too in your face for an audience used to Tipping Point? We shall see.
In other news Challenge have bought the rights to The Million Pound Drop series 1-3 – that’s probably going to require quite a bit of editing to get rid of all the ‘look how live we are stuff’ like the clock and references to people playing along with the app. Still, you can thrill at how slow the first series felt all over again, and at that bit where a couple get to the final question with over half a million.
There are two shows on SRO Audiences looking for contestants that have pretty much exactly the same blurb: For What It’s Worth with Fern Britton and Masterpiece with Alan Titchmarsh. One’s BBC, one’s ITV. It’s uncanny. If you like antiques and collectables (it sounds like the BBC one has a general knowledge element as well) why not try and get on both?
Finally an episode of Celebrity Squares from 1977 has turned up on Youtube look:
There we were last week banging about how Decimate was doing quite well with its 17% share, but now Judge Rinder’s doing pretty well again Decimate’s share is down to 13% flopzone territory despite its raw figure barely changing. Now I don’t know what to think it’s like share’s a completely stupid measure.
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showpost.php?p=79928259&postcount=7939
Does anyone know how Release the Hounds did?
Weren’t Series 1-3 a bit boring? I seem to remember the early series payout being precisely £0 for ages!
Just glad I got to go to a live audience one before they scrapped the live part, and that the contestants on my show managed to take £100k through to the final question meaning Davina could do the usual ‘AFTER THE BREAK!’. Really enjoyed that audience visit.
Interesting they just stopped play right in the middle for several minutes so they could do the home audience bit- and it shows Bob’s ad-lib skills in coming up with jokes for the questions he just heard..also interesting they had a safe or risky option for the endgame.
I never realised they had the public write in with questions and someo charitable cause got £10 for every one Bob got right. Amazing what you can learn from Youtube.
I miss Bob, though I miss Kenny Everett (announcing here) more.
Has anyone seen the viewing figures for series finale of Hive Minds? Curious where it ended up.
I have no idea – but it was nice to know someone else was watching it.
What a fantastically bad way to end the series and crown your champions.
OK, so I correctly assumed that the overall series winners wouldn’t be winning anything remotely like a cash prize, but they got a trophy – at least I think it was a trophy.
Because, unlike OC and the ‘out from the desks and front and centre presentation as the credits roll’, this was a botch job of epic proportions.
Fiona, wrapped up, threw to the viewers credit distraction puzzle, then as the mics were being faded out, remembered that under the desk was the winning team gong. But by that time, the jib camera had been raised to studio light height, and you could just make out a handover of some sort going on, stage right.
No studio floor angles, no close-ups of the victorious holding and grinning wildly with the trophy. Nothing. Just the answer to the question set 30 secs previously, and the production company logos.
Oh Bye, then Hive Minds. Maybe you’ll be back, maybe you won’t. Don’t really care if that’s the send off you leave your viewers with.
These are exactly my thoughts! Thanks for pointing out how terrible this last episode was. Additionally it was making me feel uncomfortable how difficult the questions were for the teams. Really no joy to watch!
Really do hope it gets a second series, I throughly enjoyed it despite its flaws, and I think if given the chance it could get past its growing pains and be a genuinely good quiz show, the format is there, it’s just missing some polish and to figure out how to make the play along work. I don’t think the comparisons to OC did it any favours, even if they were inevitable.
Over the moon Trivium won, my favourite day from day 1. Onwards and upwards for series 2!
I remember series 1 Million pound drop as a sort of rough diamond that I really think ‘felt’ like a different (and in my opinion, much better) show from all the following series.
For a start, it was on late, I think 10pm. The set was too dark, and too small. It was everyday for a week. And live. And someone could win £1M. It seemed like a sort of mad experiment. (It seemed like they were daring me to turn off, lest I miss the historic moment when someone won £1m on live TV.) Further, very importantly, the questions were much more of the WWTBAM ‘straight’ general knowledge variety – this meant couples were getting knocked out a lot, (hence a lot of £0s), but it also meant the programme worked much better (imo) as a test of nerve. When Davina said “you’ve got £200k left” there was a genuine sense that the if they did well, the team could win that money – it wasn’t just a countdown until they were down to their last 25 and playing sudden death.
I remember the episode with the £550k loss too. I would cite it as an example of how I personally think the slower style *really* *worked* for MPD – I’ve never been as emotionally ruined by any tv as I was by that final moment, because I really really bonded with the pair over the course of their show. Davina really is the master of emotive presenting like this.
It’s funny (and quite sad) to think even just 5 years on, I doubt C4 would do anything as experimental as S1 MPD was.
Agree with every word of that. It soo lost its appeal when it was just everyone getting to the end with £25-£50k.
It will be really interesting to see if reality matches your memory when it makes it to air!
One criticism I remember were too many questions of the ‘which came first?’ ilk.
Thought you might be interested in seeing this from the Netherlands- Homerun from 1997 (it’s a 100.000 Mark Show type)
https://youtu.be/Rw4VqA_HfVg
Those final games are quite good fun, surprised they haven’t been reused in a De Mol capacity since. The Bomb is presumably the equivilent to 100K Show’s Hot Wire. Nice touch of the Penny Antes in the final reveal.