Saturday Night Fever

By | March 20, 2010

The Board of Excitement will be going up at a slightly later time than usual tomorrow, so with exciting things happening on Saturday (Push the Button, Who Dares Wins), here’s a space for you to talk about it.

The highlight for me is tonight’s Solitary v4.0 final, which if it is half as entertaining as the rest of the series should be very entertaining indeed. Last week featured an extreme memory test (being required to memorise a 30-part sequence of colours, acting them out by dunking your face into four containers of differently coloured goo) followed by an awesome treatment involving holding a set of stocks and traversing an obstacle course whilst balancing a ball on the indented stock edge, with the people finishing last having to pay a penalty of squatting in a stress position for increasingly lengthy periods of time. It ended on a cliffhanger – who will crack first? And who will win? I can’t wait to find out!

14 thoughts on “Saturday Night Fever

  1. Mart with a Y not an I

    Except the Rugger is on, so Knowles and his wild mid-2009 hairstyle will have to wait for another week – so as long as England stuff the French in their own backyard – I won’t be complaining.

    Cant see why the Lottery Draws have to be on at 10pm though. They could have done it in the 8ish minutes of Half Time.

    Reply
    1. Travis P

      I decided to show my folks how the American’s played Who Dares Wins tonight (The Money List) since it had a week off. Both were well pleased, given it’s the same production crew as the show was all done here. My mum took a fancy for Fred Roggin though.

      Just caught the end of Push the Button. Are they making the rules as they go along? Namely the £25,000 lower end cap and the jackpot gamble.

      Reply
  2. Alex

    Two new things about Poosh The Button:

    1) If, during the 4th game, a team gets to 25k, they time out, and stop playing. If the other team still playing times out at 25k, they both play a tie-breaker. No idea what said tie-breaker is.

    2) The final was this time a 7-colour sequence for all-or-nothing, played by only one person walking across DAVE and hitting the buttons. Somehow making the endgame even more anti-climactic. Nice one.

    Reply
  3. Brekkie

    They cut the intro section down dramatically too, which helped.

    The time out thing seems a bit pointless – surely better to let the one team go to zero and therefore the cash countdown stop wherever it remains for the team in the lead – though I guess they need five figures for the final.

    And just to add the one person, 7 notes thing was because they failed in the main game on the final sequence. As am endgame it was actually much tougher than the regular DAVE, but giving them a second chance on the easiest endgame in TV makes it look like ITV have loads of cash to give away.

    Reply
    1. Gizensha

      Third chance, at a gamble.

      (First chance – the screened ‘one mistake allowed’; Second chance, the unscreened lifeline; Third chance, an all or nothing gamble)

      Reply
  4. Simon

    The guy doing the endgame seemed to either be very hesitant or was adding a bit of play acting by feigning to press the wrong button a few times.

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I’ve just seen the recording, I think to be fair it would be much more difficult doing it from “inside”, whereas on your average Simon you can see all the buttons and lights at once.

      Reply
    2. David B

      I think, to an extent, he was using vibes from the audience as to which one was right.

      Have to agree, it’s not much jeopardy if you (a) have three chances to win, and (b) your pot odds are 9-1.

      Reply
    3. Simon

      I think the way to do it would be on your own would be to ignore the colours and label them 1 to 5 so he may have been counting.

      Reply
      1. Brig Bother Post author

        I certainly know that when I play similar games of memory, for me it’s as much about visual pattern recognition as anything else – I could certainly build up to a decent sequence given gradual repetition, but to learn a seven point sequence cold, and then have to replicate that from a completely different viewpoint… I think it’s a much more difficult task than a lot of people here are suggesting.

        I was madly impressed when Number 6 managed to build up to the 30-part sequence on Solitary the other week, especially given the disorientating circumstances the test was performed under.

        Reply
      2. Brig Bother Post author

        Although I certainly think you might be onto something with the numbers. Again, I’d be useless at it, I stopped learning telephone numbers a long time ago (in fact, and how sad is this, it took me a good six months for me to learn my landline number, just because it’s so rarely used with my mobile).

        Reply
    4. Brekkie

      Scary really how few phone numbers people do know now with the phone memory making remembering them a thing of the past. I guess for one person, seven notes, the best way I could remember it is as seven numbers, assigning each colour a number one to five.

      Considering though the whole thing was much tougher on their own, perhaps the game could be tweaked so the family compete individually – the first doing say 5 notes, the second 6, the fifth 9.

      Reply
  5. sphil

    Just saw an ad for the door during casino royale. Rather excitingly, it looks rather estate of panic-y/ fort boyard. At no point was I excited, but now I am!

    Reply
  6. Andrew Warren

    Decent ending to Solitary 4.0 – not quite as climactic as some of the past seasons, but all three remaining were deserving winners I felt, so I had no qualms in that regard. I’m just slightly annoyed that a teaser clip told me the winner because I was able to very easily identify it as a reaction shot of them being told they had won. And this is why I usually try not to watch teaser clips, because I’m too observant for my own good..

    Reply

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