Unusual ordering

By | March 30, 2017

Filler bag time, and today it’s a 1987 episode of Runway with Chris Searle. Today’s question is: can you think of any other show that deliberately played its endgames at the beginning of the following episode, as a cliffhanger of sorts?

I’m not interested in shows that have games that are of variable length and what will be will be, this was deliberate. It’s also something they got rid of by the time Richard Madeley came along.

I’ve always loved the visuals of the original Runway endgame (although I prefer the later version’s clock music). I always found “would you like to stick with questions on the USA or I can give you questions on Bolivia?” choice non-choice a bit odd.

11 thoughts on “Unusual ordering

  1. Matt Clemson

    Not quite what you’re asking, but a somewhat related thought: How were the various stages of The $64,000 Question stripped across episodes? That effectively has *multiple* cliffhangers in any given contestant’s story, but I don’t recall if one episode would feature the full range of question levels.

    Reply
    1. David

      They spread them over 4 weeks- first week was 64/128/256/512/1K/2K/4K/8K (most of those were one part questions, and only the 8K used the isolation booth) then they went one question per week for 16K, then 32K, then 64K. What levels were played varied- In one of the surviving eps for example, one player played for 32K and won, one was interviewed for a couple of minutes before declaring they’d stop at 32K, and a third started to play and won 4K before time ran out.

      Reply
  2. Weaver

    Superstar was ITV’s entry into the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical casting show. In amongst the sob-story and casual blasphemy was an unusual structure.

    Live performance shows on Superstar were stripped across a week, from Monday to Friday. Each day’s show would have the performances, the criticism from the jury, the calls to vote.

    But the phone lines remained open until 7pm the next evening. The final sing-off and elimination was at the start of the next day’s show. That’s until the Friday, when they returned to a normal structure.

    The touring show, Britain’s Got a Brand New Jesus Christ Superstar, closed in 2014 due to public indifference. Reigning champion Ben Forster is now in Phantom of the Opera. Andrew Lloyd Webber is 69.

    Reply
  3. CeleTheRef

    To answer to the quesiton: in Italy there was Genius, a kids gameshow, where the bonus round was at the beginning of the following episode.

    Reply
  4. Steve

    I’m way late to the party, but I just thought of this. In the early 90s, there was a US game show called The Challengers hosted by Dick Clark. If a player won three straight games, they came back and started day 4 by answering three questions for a growing jackpot. The rest of the show resumed as normal (round one was shortened to make up for the lost time). Technically, it’s a bonus round at the front of the show, but it definitely didn’t happen every episode.

    Reply

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