For no discernable reason last night I found myself watching various clips of late night viewer participation show Quizmania, from back in the day when these channels were all the rage. Incredibly this is a decade old now, and I was surprised to discover QM actually only lasted 16 months.
I can’t condone the business model but my love of live television and low-rent puzzles meant I could watch things like this for hours at a time – crikey, the amount of hours I put into watching Quiz TV with Russ from Scooch, Caryl Varley et al. Quizmania was probably the only one to my knowledge that had a Big Breakfast-esque sense of freewheeling fun to the proceedings.
Anyway from Greggle’s Youtube Channel here’s a retrospective which also features some very rude words if you like that sort of thing.
Actually just doing some Wikipedia-ing it’s actually a bit longer than 16 months as it existed before joining ITV.
I watched QM mainly for Debbie – but then I *was* 17/18 at the time.
I too can’t quite believe it was a decade ago now. Nor can I quite believe the rather large number of clips on YT – although it *is* fun watching them.
Believe it or not I won in the region of £10,000 – £15,000 from memory on these quiz show things back in the day (I still have all the winner letters somewhere as they used to pay by cheque!)
However the vast majority of wins were from when ITV Play was on air, I didn’t ever bother with the channels with the pretty impossible puzzles, and it took a lot of time and effort watching to keep up with the answers given and the like but that wasn’t too hard back in those days as I was a skint 18 year old college student!
I was 90% web entry so no worries regarding the premium rate phone number, but I did use a mobile phone to enter the Rover Return Pub Quiz as I was getting through and winning crazily often (It was like a multiple choice pub quiz so the highest scorers had a much better chance of winning, I may or may not have had a laptop with Google at the ready sat by the TV ;)). Great TV that was with the likes of Paul Hendy! I even got invited to the studios once to be in the ‘pub’ on screen (As they featured a few people each night) sadly I couldn’t make it there in the time before the show started
It was literally impossible to get through once they hit ITV1 in the early hours of the morning though, but I managed to once on Make Your Play at the start of the show for a very simple anagram puzzle (About as complex as a Countdown conundrum!)…congratulations the £2,000 cheque is on the way! On the Freeview channel it would have been worth more like £50 – £200, but those small wins quickly started to add up!
That’s brilliant! How many hours of form filling do you think you did?
These days you’re charged to enter contests online, although postcard entries are still the price of a stamp.
I seem to remember Google AutoFill worked back in the day, just as they were starting to wind down I think they started to put a limit on the amount of entries you could do via the web per show though!
Somehow I also ended up with and still have a Quizmania frisbee, an ITV play T-Shirt and slinky plus the all important signed presenter cards from This Morning Puzzle Book
Incredible.
Here in the states, GSN ran a 2 hour block of this sort of programming up to 6 nights a week from midnight to 2AM for about a year and a half. Originally, it was just called Playmania, but then it became the Playmania block with 2 different shows depending on the night of the week: Quiznation and 100 Winners. All of them were based on UK shows (100 Winners apparently was a show called Cash Vault).
I will agree with you: it was actually fun to just switch there and watch it all happen. I tried to get on a couple of times but never got through. GSN was probably too small a network to sustain this thing long term, and with how much more fractured TV is today, I doubt you could bring it back now with any more success.
it’s interesting because the impression I got was that these channels were raking it in despite low audiences, right up until the big investigation into them.
That may very well be true, but if that is the case, then I wonder what did the GSN shows in. We never had the scandals involving the shows on this side of the ocean (granted, these two were the only ones that I can recall airing on American TV), and both of them ran for a few months after the plugs got pulled on everything in Britain. Heck, whenever I watch British television and see those phone-in giveaways on shows like Saturday Night Takeaway or Red or Black, it always strikes me how those contests NEVER happen over here, and I kind of wish at times they did.
PlayMania also had a British host in Mel Peachey:
This is quite interesting.
1) Evidently the callers are vetted before coming through, which isn’t much fun.
2) In the UK the hosts were *usually* keen to point out that you should set yourself a limit and regularly point out the cost of entry, here it’s all “Look at all the different ways you can give us money!”
As I understood the system, the way it worked was you entered and then had to be randomly selected to go on air, at which point the show would call you back to get you into the game. They would keep playing from the same pool of entrants until a quiz was won, at which point they would start a new game and you would have to enter again to take part.
Also, according to the Playmania FAQs (which the Web Archive has saved and the Wikipedia article of the show has a link to), you were hard limited to 10 entries per episode, regardless of entry method (so 10 in any combination of web, mobile and phone entries).
That’s interesting, Mel seems to be suggesting there that you got ten calls per number, and that the more methods you use the more entries you can have.
In the UK most worked on a double-drawing sort of system as I understand it – you phoned up and were either immediately told you were a loser, or if you were lucky you’d get put on hold and when the buzzer or whatever went off one person on hold would be put through.
Word of advice: never annoy the Mel Peachey mailing list. Just don’t.
In other news, it’s BLINDAH DATE!
http://www.itv.com/news/2017-02-07/blind-date-set-to-return-after-13-years-off-air/
Vicky Pattison hosting, according to The Sun.
In France, we also got our lot of call-tv stuff (including weirdly a Quizmania local adaptation which lasted only one week : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFXW2hvLEn8 ) and a lot of scandals going from impossible games (hello Telemedia) to not-so random selected callers. Everything busted pretty much at the same time as many european countries due to regulations. And stories of people going into massive debt playing (no call limitations were in place !)
TF1 had also a Challenge-like channel (well at least they were initially selling it as a family channel with entertainment and reruns of gameshows, “quality” interactive premium competitions) that quickly turned to full-time low-quality call-in-and-lose all day long – with some reruns of Viking (yay) and EPT’s first season. It closed after a year, apparently losing money… and i’m quite sad not having a channel to rerun old WWTBAM episodes here.
The original I believe was 9 Live Quiz TV in Germany, and evidently it was successful enough that it was doing its own full scale gameshows at one point, including Glucksrad with Frederick Meisner who had hosted it on its former channels as well. It did look cheap though.
Here’s an episode of 9live’s Glücksrad. I quite liked it, it is definitely better than the RTLplus version aring now.
https://youtu.be/TrCKL8NBv0U
I like how through Youtube-Fu this led me to find out finally what the 500 Gamble wedge on the final UK version’s wheel was.
I watched an episode a while ago and it annoyed me that the wheel didn’t change between rounds and that there was only one flipper.
I was quite impressed they opted for a manual puzzle board though.
I think (or at least this is what 9live wanted me to think) the board and wheel are mainly made of the last original version of German wheel.
When 9live stopped airing some years ago, they auctioned the wheel and emphasized that it had a specific certificate from the format owners. The owners allegedly give this to all the wheels around the world, if they approve the wheel (it spins well, looks good, is well made, etc.) and if you didn’t have the certificate, you couldn’t make your own version, they just wouldn’t allow it. And 9live claimed that it would be a cheap way to get a certified wheel which stays certified forever (according to the 9live host). That was the reason, they could pay for this version: The old decorations were in the studio lot 9live used and they were allowed to use them (I think ProsiebenSat1 also had shares in 9live at this point and they were the owners of the old versions).