Right, the heat is on, the time is right, it’s time for you, for you to read an old feature I’ve tided up and put up:
- The one, the only, the original Knights and WARR-iors!
- And thanks to friend of the bar Cosser, some more information on Les Mondes Fantastiques.
Meanwhile, I’ve Daniel to thank for the rest of my evening’s entertainment, a full 90 minute episode of the Japanese show Run For Money, which you may remember was reversioned in the US as Cha$e with Live and Kicking‘s Trey Farley. Here’s Part 1, the rest are down the sides.
And Daniel has written up explanations for the missions here.
run for money is right up there as one of my favourite shows ever, up there with fort boyard. cha$e isn’t.
Cha$e is super-frustrating because it could have been brilliant, and one or two episodes of it were very good. The rest, not so.
the whole point of rfm is that the rate at which money goes up, and how hard the game is, depended on how good the contestants were and how much of a risk (exposure wise) they were willing to take. cha$e succeeded to a point, but it just seemed to lack something, didn’t push it’s own boundaries like rfm does. cha$e tried different things, but that’s not the same thing.
Tis much better than cha$e – Personally I thought 55 hunters chasing after 2 stragglers was hilarious – as was the elimanted contestants trying to get past them – No kill like overkill they say
Really what Cha$e required was a hilarious storyline to tie the missions into. And there’s a PSP game!
Anyway, that was brilliant.
Glad people enjoyed Run for Money, as I really did! A UK version would could brilliant, if it followed this example. It’d probably too expensive though with the hundreds (ish) of cameras and all the extras used in this. Could work on a smaller scale though, I guess… But then you wouldn’t get 55 Hunters chasing a couple of players!
*would could brilliant? “could be brilliant”, even.
I actually had no idea there were quite a few older (and shorter) episodes on Youtube, so I’ve been spenidng quite a lot of a day off today watching some of them.
I like the fact they play around with the format quite a lot, I notice one episode where one of the contestants is a Mole and earns extra money dobbing the other contestants in!
Ooh, I didn’t realise either.
Just has a quick flick through one, and seen some terrifying “Long Leg Hunters” (…they’re on stilts). I think it used to be a weekly series, but they seem to just do these longer specials now. At the end of the 90 minute ep it says the next episode is on the 18th May.
I’d love to see a Brit version of this, if they did it as a monthly thing, and allow winning contestants (by virtue of survival or escaping) the chance to come back next time (to sort of mimic the idea that it looks like the Jap show has quite a lot of repeat celebrity contestants), I could see it catching on.
If you thought 55 Hunters in the last ep was fun, there’s an episode on Youtube I’m halfway through watching now where at one point 100 Hunters get released! This ep works on a lsightly different basis again, featuring several mini-runs and the mission objectives being to find the keycards that let you through the gate and onto the next run.
We should do that with 88 Hunters. And give them all masks. Just because.
…OK, this is probably me being stupid, and even if I’m right here it wouldn’t have changed the result, but:
Isn’t 30/02/2003 a palindrome? And wasn’t the palindronic dates sequence ‘in chronological order,’ with 20/02/2002 being the third clue? And doesn’t 30/02/2003 come before 01/02/2010? Or am I completely losing the plot here?
(Or was it meant to be palindromic dates within palindromic dates, but me missing that? [So 20/02/2002 is 2002 2002, etc])
How many 30th Februarys do you know about?
Anyway, highly entertaining episode, well done.
Apropos of not very much, if a question is thrown over in round one, the other team see all four clues and can get one point. Shouldn’t it then follow then in round two, the bonus should be two points as that is what Team A would expect from seeing the maximum three clues?
The logic is that the second team may have learnt the correct logic from the first team and also the first team have eliminated one possible answer. Also, they’ll have had 10-15 seconds longer to think about it.
As I said – Probably just me being stupid.
The BBC4 ratings for the w/e 21st March make for interesting reading :))
http://www.barb.co.uk/report/weeklyTopProgrammes?_s=4
Congrats!
What happened w/e 14th March for a third of the audience to switch off?
Is it going to go over to BBC2 (at least repeated) David B?
Wasn’t that the week there was no University Challenge, because there was “Look, Some Lambs!” on BBC2 instead?
In any case BBC4’s select audience has a lot of natural variation in it, so they tend to be bothered more with the average over the series rather than any one week.
Personally, I’m mildly against the move to BBC2. Changing channels isn’t really that much of a strain – if you can’t find the remote, then you’re not going to enjoy the show anyhow. If we’re on Two there’d be pressure on us to retain at least 2 of the 3 million we’d inherit from UC, and I’m not sure the audience is out there for those kind of numbers. We’d probably have to tweak the format and/or the questions, and I’m quite happy with the little enclave we’ve built – we’ve got our own style and there’s no pressure to change. And then there’s the issue of more erratic scheduling if Kate Humble decides to roll up one week. All said and done, those people who really want to watch are already watching.
I guess thats true – you forget hiow much the norm switching away from the main 4 channels has become. Interesting to se the fluctuations week on week. Is it a big hit on the iplayer?
As of right now, I’ve no fixed view about an original transmission on BBC2 or BBC4. The argument to move centres on the view that the show is worthy of a bigger audience than it’s getting. Only Connect is already a big fish in the relatively small pond of BBC4, and there’s got to be a maximum regular audience for an unashamedly intelligent channel. I don’t know what that peak audience is, and wonder if it’s close to the half-million current audience – or if there’s a million people who could be interested in watching.
On the other hand, something highly popular will (by definition) attract an audience to the channel, and I’m sure it will gently encourage them to sample something else. The old Rethian principle of giving the audience something a bit better than it thinks it wants. It might fit the current BBC’s strategy to originate one or two very popular series on BBC4 (and BBC3, and CBBC) with an eye to encouraging this sort of audience crossover. And, to be blunt, giving an eyeful to the meeja moguls who think that ratings are the hallmark of a good show.
What I do see is that, if Only Connect becomes synonymous with one channel, it will be increasingly difficult to show new episodes away from BBC4. Not that this rules out repeats on BBC2 – after Newsnight Review feels like a fair place. I do think that the time to leap is not that far away – if a putative series five goes out on BBC4, that may be where the show will remain for good.
I think you should double the points to make it more exciting for the casual viewer, like on Beat the Teacher.
Hooray! I hope you are all celebrating and that the show gets the wider recognition that you all deserve.