Saturdays, 6:10pm,
BBC1
On this most Easter of weekends, how appropriate to see the spirit of Total Wipeout rise again on Saturday night with new physical obstacle course show Can’t Touch This, fronted by TV’s Zoe Ball and top Diversity dance-troupe member and Release the Hounds wimp Ashley Banjo. Don’t Scare the Hare‘s Sue Perkins provides commentary.
Can’t Touch This is a show with a simple premise – if you touch it you win it, but between the contestants and their prizes are a number of wacky rounds and obstacles. And we’ve been promised injuries so it’s properly serious. There’s also a car to be won in the endgame which is unusual for a BBC show, in fact I reckon it might be the first time it’s happened on the channel.
The BBC could do with a new Saturday evening entertainment hit as The Getaway Car hasn’t really taken off. Is this it? Do let us know what your think in the comments.
Edit: I’m informed a car was played for on Win Your Wish List, but not won. Aww.
I was mildly optimistic about this, hoping it was going to be closer to The Whole 19 Yards than Total Wipeout. Then I looked at the description they’ve given the show on the EPG,
“…and a man called `Mr Grumpy Pants’ tackle the course”.
I’m less optimistic now.
Actually a Car has been played for twice on Win your wish list in both Series 1 and 2.
So I had this nightmare that I just woke up from that I was watching Challenge and there was a promotion for The Link of BBC1 daytime fame coming soon.
I’m hoping this post is also part of said nightmare and doesn’t actually exist in the morning…
No, it is true apparently from 4th April. Prepare to shout at the screen all over again! At the adjudicating rather than the contestants.
It was actually one of the better performing early-afternoon quizzes so I’m surprised it didn’t get a third run, despite literally everything.
I saw the same advert, though that’s what I get for watching early-morning Countdown. I wonder if it’ll meet a similar fate and be put back to 4pm after three weeks?
Didn’t even last that – it survived two weeks before being banished.
Hopefully the show is better than the promo for one of the rounds they put up the other day. It felt very small and not very energetic.
Fingers crossed I’m wrong as TV sorely needs a new decent physical gameshow that isn’t as serious as Ninja Warrior
This is weak. Homoepathically weak.
Homeopoathically, even. But still. It’s kinda shit.
ffs Alex should probably stop drinking before he types long words
Maybe you should homeopathicly drink… it is much cheaper. all the fun none of the side effects.
Well I thought that was brilliant. Maybe round one goes on a little too long, and I’m sure with a bigger budget they’d have got a hyped-up studio audience in, but it’s Hall of Fame stuff for me.
What make of car did he win tonight
5 minutes of unique content stretched into a 50 minute show. If this lasts the full 10 episode run I’ll be gob smacked to say the least…
Would it have killed them to have composed some original music for the show? Round one was enough of a slog without having to endure the dregs of the pop library the whole way through. Round two was pretty solid and enjoyable, but five minutes of fun-ish content in a fifty minute show is a pretty poor showing.
Might have been a bit more fun if it had actually done something with the prize-touching idea and had a slightly bigger scale, more like Wipeout.
I have to be honest, I was struggling to see the attraction of this beyond “it’s indoor Wipeout”.
For some of the tasks, like the stacking one, surely you’d rather take the 30s hit than try to do it properly?
It picked up towards the end, though to win so few prizes after all the previous palaver almost made the rest of the show pointless.
Notwithstanding the result of the previous Special Forces series, I’m not 100% sure most women are going to have a fair chance at that elimination round.
I must admit I got extremely bored during Round 1 as it just dragged and dragged – the lack of atmosphere from an audience didn’t help either. Pace felt better in the following rounds but that final game felt very disappointing.
Plus, how many slow motion replays do you need of a bloke jumping through the air to touch a rather cheap looking car
I loved the slow-motion replays of the bloke jumping for the car! Well actually they weren’t replays because we hadn’t seen the outcome yet; it was a great way of stretching out the will-he/won’t-he suspense.
I really liked the way the whole show was edited. Similar, but much more effective (and in round one loads funnier) than Ninja Warrior UK.
(I then watched Ninja Warrior Japan on Challenge, and although I can’t be entirely sure due to the English re-edit, thought that the ITV version was a big improvement in most ways.)
Alright, I’m curious again. What is the complete format rundown please?
Here I am with your complete format run-down.
There are 16 contestants, each one tackles the same obstacle course a la Wipeout. At various stages of the course are circular targets with a yellow handprint on them. If you touch it, you get the prize associated with it (a robotic vacuum cleaner, a trip to Barcelona, a sat-nav, a smoothie maker, a luxury pan set and so on). If you fail to touch a prize target, you get 30 seconds added onto your final time for each target you missed. The top 6 fastest competitors go through to Round 2
In Round 2, each of the 6 competitors are spun on circular turntables (think Dizzy Dummies from Total Wipeout) and make their way along a mesh of bungee cords. At the other side are 5 buttons and 5 chairs. After 5 competitors have taken those seats, they move on to the next obstacle where there are 4 buttons and seats, and this is repeated once more with 3 buttons and seats at the end. Each button adds another prize to your stash.
Round 3 has the 3 surviving competitors on a large revolving turntable with numbered discs dotted around it. They must each collect 3 numbered discs in the colour of their helmets before they can scale a conical tower with climbing wall handholds on the sides, but some of them are attached to bungee cords so that they come away when you grab them. The first to touch the prize target at the top is the winner and gets to have a shot at winning some of the prizes they have banked across the entire show.
Suspended above the winner are large cubes emblazoned with icons depicting the prizes they banked over the course of all the rounds. They have 60 seconds to touch as many as they can as the bob up and down above them and they navigate a wide Travelator a la Gladiators. After the time is up, they then move on to the final where they have to jump off a platform and attempt to touch a car suspended above a large pit of foam blocks. If they are able to touch the car, they win it.
If you wish to know the course from Round 1, here it is:
1 – Launched from a human catapult into a pit of foam blocks
2 – A moving travelator with a water pit at the end. The targets are above the start of it and a distance back for the second
3 – A pit with 4 circular cushion-things. You make a tower out of them to reach the target and to scale a high wall to get to the next obstacle
4 – A narrow balance beam on an incline with 5 swinging bags to knock you off. The target is located underneath the bar
5 – A slide with 2 targets swinging from side to side and a water pit at the end, and the final target on the other side
I forgot one. Between obstacles 3 and 4 is a padded pole vault across a water pit
My 5-word-and-a-number review of Can’t Touch This:
Bring back The Whole 19 Yards.
Oh god no-one deserves that.
The Whole 19 Yards was pretty good, though.
It wasn’t my cup of tea!
My longer review – I want to like this show but I just can’t.
The tone of the show – whilst better than that of 1001 Ways To Leave A Game Show – is still too serious.
PET PEEVE – the set was too dark. Well, it actually wasn’t here, but what I mean is it should still have been more colourful still than it was. They all wore black from R2 onwards, for example!
The show needed an audience to help with the atmosphere. Zoe is a great host, Ashley less so. Glenn Hugill’s commentary was superb in The Whole 19 Yards – Sue Perkins’s fell short here.
Round 1 did go on far too long. Round Two (6->3 people) was lovely. I wanted more of this. I liked 3->1 people as well and the finale was alright – but there was too much filler between rounds.
Here’s another thing – and I’m not criticizing THIS show for this one. Prizes are naff – now I know why game shows only give out money these days. They left me unimpressed – which I thought was a shame.
Anyway, I wanted to like it – I still love the idea of the show – it just wasn’t imaginative enough for me. I was hoping for some more innovative obstacles or challenges. I’m pleased it’s been tried, but bring back The Whole 19 Yards is my overall view – it did similar things much better.
“So I’ve got this idea for a show where we have lots of prizes hanging in awkward fashions and whatever the contestants touch they keep.”
“I like that, that’s simple, obvious and could be quite spectacular, and there hasn’t been a really prize-y show for a while. Trebles all round.”
…
“You know this thing about having the prizes ready to touch? Yeah, we can’t really do that, that won’t work. How about we have boxes representing the prizes instead? Will that be close enough?”
“Well, it’ll have to be, won’t it? Tell you what, why don’t we do Total Wipeout instead? Everyone likes Total Wipeout, it got renewed for several series and sold around the world.”
“Won’t that be a bit, you know, expensive? There’s a reason why they built one course and had everyone use it from around the world.”
“You know, we’ll just have to do our best.”
…
“Crikey, that is expensive. How can we cut costs? Make the show longer for higher fees, and cut right down on the prize budget by only having one contestant win prizes, and not many of them.”
“That’ll have to do.”
That’ll have to do. 4/10.
That might be a bit cruel. It’s not horrible, and I think I’d prefer to watch it to Total Wipeout, narrowly. I can’t imagine this getting on my hypothetical Hall of Shame ballot; if it does then it means that 2016 has been a year without high-profile stinkers. It’s just… probably too expensive and too impractical to live up to its pretty decent idea in practice. Pity!
I do think a show which launched satnavs, coffee machines, ipads at contestants to catch would be quite a funny idea, albeit likely a health and safety nightmare.
I’d have thought the art department would be able to fashion some fairly-convincing-at-a-distance foam replicas of prizes.
How about instead of the catapult being more than just for show, as you’re launched a handful of foam gadgets get launched up in the air as well, grab one and put it in a container when you’ve got out of the pit.
Ah, I don’t think foam is going to cut it, you want something that’s going to smash into bits. Admittedly fake would probably be fine from a viewer’s standpoint.
A bit like Chris Jericho’s Downfall.
The irony of Downfall was that the cost of building ‘prop’ copies of the prizes that were safe enough to fall from a great height were often more expensive than the prizes themselves!
Interesting! I remember them constantly banging on about how the prizes were replicas rather than the real thing.
Quick question: this or Prize Island from 2013? I think PI but it’s close, and that’s not a good sign.
OK well the premise is basically a lie isn’t it? I suspect the entire format stems from a belief the leap for the car is the killer format point (it’s not really really, but having done Go Ape I’d totally understand any nervousness a contestant might go through at that point and as such quite enjoyed it), otherwise you don’t actually touch prizes, you touch touch points which represent prizes which you don’t actually win unless you then touch boxes (not prizes) which represent prizes in the end game. Come on.
Otherwise the format and styling is basically Total Wipeout with a few key differences which don’t really improve on the Total Wipeout formula, the obstacles in round one are certainly obstacles but they’re not wacky or impressive enough really, the pole vault won’t be as iconic as the Big Balls, the pole vault is basically impossible. Whatsmore Total Wipeout allowed us to be impressed when someone got through an obstacle unscathed (something it increasingly forgot about towards the end), I can’t imagine feeling the same when someone manages the beam. It does feel like the first round goes on for ages.
I quite enjoyed round two which may as well be Dizzy Dummies without the scale.
Round three felt ever so slight though, like the end game from Oh Sit! without any of the spectacle.
The final is not especially exciting, they’ve gone through all that then are barely able to win most of the prizes they’ve won anyway.
It all felt a bit early milennium Sky One. I get why there isn’t an audience, because it would take literally all day to film an episode, but the giant studio lacks atmosphere without it (even Wipeout made reasonable use of its losing contestants as noisemakers). I quite like Zoe, I don’t mind Ashley, Sue is basically reading Richard Hammond’s script.
So it’s a bit disappointing, The Getaway Car is probably the more successful show at aping Total Wipeout but seeing as they have all the staff from TW it’s probably no surprise. The people involved in this are capable of good stuff so it’s a shame but meh, on to the next one.
I do think it’s worth pointing out that TW had the sort of creative obstacles people hadn’t seen before, where people would bounce off things at entertaining angles. Ninja Warrior’s obstacles are tighter but have significant dexterity element. Can’t Touch This has got a travellator.
2.86m for the first episode apparently, about what The Getaway Car was getting before it was “rested”.
Much like others have said, this didn’t really have anything that we haven’t already seen before except we’ve seen it done better on other shows.
Round 1 was Total Wipeout’s Qualifier with time penalties and less interesting obstacles. Can somebody please devise a format which doesn’t require round one to take up half the runtime? Total Wipeout did it, The Getaway Car have done it as well. Also, I don’t care about seeing a retrospective of who has been eliminated after round one.
Round 2 was TW’s Dizzy Dummies except a lot more stop-start and with less interesting obstacles.
Round 3 was Chair Mountain from Oh Sit! except about a quarter of the size and difficulty.
The final rounds were fairly new, just not that interesting. Feels very unfair after working that hard you’ll never realistically win many of the prizes.
I fear we aren’t going to see very much variety in the obstacles either, I anticipate practically the same show next week, just with different contestants.
Fun fact; this was directed by Chris Power who also directs Saturday Night Takeaway, meaning this week he directed two different shows, on two different channels which were broadcast almost simultaneously.
Great fact!
It’s Indoor Wipeout version 0.5- nothing totally terrible, but nothing totally great.
(And I would suspect they have it in the rules that they set the car based on the contestant’s age and gender- because if it’s a standard distance just from eyeballing it I don’t think a woman would be able to leap across that distance 9 times out of 10)
very unfair , height of targets should be set according to the height of the individual contestants . taller competitors have a big advantage
I’ve just watched the first episode and I still love the idea. But there are a lot of things you could improve.
I think the first round is way too long and I don’t see why don’t touch actual prizes. And I think they should own all the prizes they touch, no silly games in the end.
I love the second round. And and I think it would be easy to incorporate actual prizes there. Make them win a luxury chair, let them ride a bike over a tiny bridge, etc. But all in all I love this round and think it’s much better than any other round from Wipeout.
The third round is okay, it’s good that it’s this short. Maybe you could have another round here, without some boring “get the numbers together”-stuff, it feels like they were just looking for a cheap way to drag this round.
This round to get the prizes you have already won is boring and shouldn’t be necessary. And the final jump obviously is a great looking thing. But I wasn’t very excited about it, somehow they didn’t get much tension in it.
If my dark magic will work again tomorrow, I will take a look at the second episode, hoping there are some changes to the courses, otherwise this show will be boring pretty soon.
The second episode seems to have the same course as the first, but with different prizes.
*shrug*
I do think that the theme is decent though, an electro-stomper in the mould of Breakaway, even if they probably should have gone with the obvious.
Round 1 lasts 35 minutes.
Thirty. Five. Minutes.
:O
Zoe Ball retweeted a good question on Twitter – the pole vault as is is clearly impossible, but are you allowed/meant to drag up one of the stacking blocks so you can get higher on it?
David B – I think you mean 15 minutes of content dragged out over 35 long and dull minutes
2.43m last night, down about half a mill. Still, it just beat You’ve Been Framed!
2.43m… wow. That’s actually worse than Prized Apart’s figures.
The games aren’t good enough, the foam pits are dull (where is the water??) and it’s 20 minutes to long.
A woman won! But she didn’t win the car.
Interesting to see that episode 4 goes out at 5:25, immediately before Pointless Celebrities at 6:15.
Just over 2.6m last night. An improvement! But it’s still moving to 5:25 next week.
It would be easy to lump Getaway Car and Can’t Touch This as Don’t Scare The Hare-esque failures but the truth is they haven’t done *quite* that badly.
I’d rather watch Getaway Car than CTT
Tried watching Saturday’s episode but I couldn’t make it through. It’s just the same boring assault course for 3/4 of the show and the boring games that follow it.
Is the pole vault the worst obstacle in game show history?
I don’t understand why productions think we must watch these sorts of shows for the ‘characters’ alone and not really care about the game itself. This kind of show, when it’s in development, should have written in big letters at the top of the whiteboard ‘nobody wants to watch exactly the same games week after week’.
I think that would be very expensive. But there ought to have been a way where the big bits of kit are used in slightly different ways between weeks.
US Wipeout was often very good at using variants on a theme with the same apparatus (the sweeper changed every week for example, whilst still being the same obstacle) to change things up.
That’s the kind of thing I was thinking, you never saw exactly the same course week after week, there was usually something different.
I do find myself kind of missing The Getaway Car. When you have two quite similar genre shows in quick succession the lesser one makes the slightly better one feel slightly better. It certainly felt like a bit more of an event.
Like I say there are people I know involved in this so it doesn’t give me any great pleasure or anything.
This has probably already been said, but I feel like it’s trying very hard to be Total Wipeout… But much as I love Sue, she’s no Richard Hammond… And it just feels very slow.
This actually held up quite well with it’s 5:25 start (where shows usually go do die), 2.3m, not much of a drop from its better slot previously.
Are any of the ‘button’ heights adjusted to make it fair for shorter people?
It doesn’t look like it.
I’ve stumbled upon the game literally no-one is playing – a surprising Can’t Touch This online tie-in
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/17gPFZJWyVbXXKzyyygvZyJ/cant-touch-this-game
Has there been any confirmation of a second series? Or is this another game show scrapped after its first series?
I would be very surprised if it returned for a second series with the numbers it was getting.