Saturdays, 6:50pm,
BBC1
Dermot O’Leary returns to Saturday nights with a new show that purports to be about driving, right, but is actually about relationships, unlike any show involving two or more people who know each other already. Crazy.
Various driving challenges ensue and the best couple will race against Top Gear‘s The Stig to try and win £10,000.
I’m keeping an open mind because I like Dermot but my gut is not doing backflips thus far – it sounds a bit like a format created by committee doesn’t it? But you never know. Let us know what you think in the comments.
It looks like they might have dropped the “The” from “The” Getaway Car “The” Weakest Link style, so be aware.
Good news everyone, in all official BBC documentation it’s now THE Getaway Car again. Phew!
I have little to no idea why it wasn’t last week.
The idea of this confuses me greatly. Car loving people will hate the heart warming interaction stuff and non-car people just won’t tune in.
For example, love Top Gear but have no interest in this because I have no desire to see a mother and daughter argue and then make up. My other half loves Gogglebox, First Dates, Come Dine With Me etc, but flatly refuses to watch anything to do with cars.
Doesn’t seem as bad as some of the BBC Saturday night shows recently – interestingly Illy on the yellow team was on Pointless yesterday – and will be again on Monday I think.
Was this slated before the Clarkson incident, it feels like a way of asserting Stig rights and resurrecting Total Wipeout’s feel in an area where they’re less likely to cause offence.
The press release came out in August so make of that what you will. I can’t believe Clarkson/Wilman would allow The Stig to be involved in something like this.
My understanding of things is that The Stig is parcelled in with the Top Gear format which the BBC own, not Clarkson/Wilman so there’s nothing they can do even if they wanted to.
Yes I get that, but they’d kick up a big fuss if they were still making Top Gear, and they’d have some clout.
‘The Stig’ and his image is owned outright by BBC Worldwide.
They got that when they brought Bedder 6 – which was Clarkson & Wilmans ‘shell’ company to channel through their cut of the profits from sales using the Top Gear brand.
JC/AW don’t have a say in how or what The Stig appears in.
If they use a Stig-esque character for the Amazon Prime show later this year, they’ll have to come up with a new name, and, a different look for it as BBC Worldwide will head over to the legal department, and ask them to deal with it.
I get that but why do you think it’s only now they’re using him in other shows?
I get what you’re saying now, it certainly is interesting when you look at it like that. The Stig doesn’t really bring anything to the format, it could be any racing driver (faceless or otherwise), although it looks better from a promotion point of view.
I think it’s just a bit of brand association – pure and simple.
Use The Stig, make his contribution known, hope to reel in the Top Gear fanbase channel surfing on a Saturday evening.
If you (BBC Worldwide) own the character and his identity, then why not try and use it in something else other than BBC Two Sunday night 8pm for 10 odd weeks per year.
Let’s face it, there’s not that much else a mute, crash helmeted racing driver can do, other than drive cars – and with driving cars the main ‘driver’ (pun absolutely intended) of the format, why not?
I’ve just watched the first 10 mins via I-player whilst having me lunch, and like a stick of rock, if you sliced it open, you would still see ‘To Be Presented By Richard Hammond’ written all the way through it.
I didn’t think this was completely awful actually although there’s something putting me off about the production and can’t put my finger on it.
It’s biggest problem is that it’s neither as funny (for all the pre-show banging on about it being about relationships I think I wanted and expected more arguing) and what’s on show not as impressive as anything on Ninja Warrior on the other side. There’s only so much you can do with driving, similar to the idea all you did on Ice Warriors is skate. I liked Beat the Boys on Saturday Night Takeaway but Hazard Highway stretches a seven minute segment to the best part of twenty minutes and it doesn’t really need it. The off-road bit was like a less interesting version of round one.
I thought The Chase at the end would be more exciting, perhaps the music needed more of a foreboding ‘he’s coming’ element.
I don’t hate it though but it’s the sort of thing that should be on the periphery of an evening than one of the main courses.
It’s an interesting one to analyse, isn’t it? Personally, I find these “let’s do a long task and edit down to the funny bits” hard to make exciting because often the tasks are so long that the results are rarely very close. So you have to hide the reveals but that makes you care less, I feel.
The reason why there’s not many arguments is that they didn’t really give the co-driver much to do other than “Yeah, doing well, over there, over there…” and the brief bit with the blindfold.
I liked the penultimate round, but felt that they should’ve kept the choices unannounced so that they had to make a split-second decision at the last moment. And it felt a bit of a brutal way to get from 3 couples down to 1.
The cash values seem a bit strange – it’s hard to be disappointed about not winning if you can get 80% of the top prize.
The Beeb need this to be a hit – they’ve spent an awful lot of money on this, and effectively they have to get the site used by international versions for the gamble to be worthwhile. This explains the scheduling.
If there’s some variation in rounds each time, or the courses change a bit, then it’ll be OK but if not I can see it outstaying its welcome somewhat.
4.14m for ep one which is OK, especially for a new show, but it lost to Ninja Warrior (with +1) and dropped a million from Pointless. As an example of hammocking between Pointless and The Voice it seems to be one of the more successful attempts, but The Voice seems to be in a slump so really interested to see how this is still going in 12 week’s time.
Incidentally, I pitched a racing format to the Beeb about 10 years ago which culminated in one of those Mobius loop tracks with a bridge in the middle, like the one they now use on Race of Champions. Felt that could have been a better way of deciding 2 down to 1.
“The Beeb need this to be a hit – they’ve spent an awful lot of money on this, and effectively they have to get the site used by international versions for the gamble to be worthwhile. This explains the scheduling.”
Ah, they’re trying to Total Wipeout it. That explains why they’re in South Africa, I guess?
And it’s the same course weekly. Pity.
Basically it feels overproduced and not that funny, they’ve tried to make the production style from Total Wipeout and applied it straight(it has a lot of the same people working on it), but what was happening in Total Wipeout is so ridiculous it just about works, here we have some people going round a roundabout – it actually might have worked better played relatively straight.
It’s lost a lot of points from me now it looks like it will be exactly the same structure every week. I still think it’s a waste of a feature to have the obvious ‘blindfolded driver’ mechanic in the opening round, rather than give it a whole round of its own. Makes the co-driver a bit more important than in most of the rounds where they’re pretty redundant.
3.7m for ep two I’m reading. Still not (yet) a flop, but probably not the success they were hoping for either, especially given that Pointless costs peanuts and gets loads more.
The Sun reckon it has been axed, but the BBC are insistent it hasn’t and still has a ‘second series’ to air! (Yeah, those episodes that were filmed but have yet to air…)
Still, could be a replacement for the BBC2 Sunday 8pm slot with similar ratings I suppose!
That’s quite fun, I had pondered where it might go/have got to a few weeks ago:
https://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?p=9329