Episode 04: The Gameshow Losers Special

Life is full of winners and losers. But we don’t like to think of them as losers, just people who didn’t win. The losers. Speaking of which, it’s time for the gameshow losers The Line Up special!

Once again we thank our good friends at QuizQuizQuiz.com for supplying the questions today. Check out their app.

Here is the link to download the episode directly, it’s 23:30 long this week and about 32mb.

And here follows some show notes. They are also SPOILER heavy, so you are well advised to actually listen to the show first.

• I decided to go with the Ask Me Another opening for no other reason than it had been playing in my head for months. AMA is NPR’s puzzletainment quiz show usually starring Glee’s Jonathan Coulton, it’s quite good fun and worth a listen (show page, subscribe on iTunes) but it carries a certain… tone. I think I really nailed it (*sarcastic straightface*). Anyway there is always a bit at the end in the credits where they do anagrams of all the crew’s names which is basically hugely excruciating (I note they’ve cut that bit down for their second series) so the ending of this show features a joke that’s a callback reference to a show not many of you will have listened to. I’m not going to pander to you, KEEP UP.
• Today’s brilliant contestants are Andrew Sullivan (@Keshihead) and Shanine Salmon (@braintree_). Andrew is a regular on the Fifty 50 Show Podcast was also a contestant on 21 Questions Wrong. Shanine I’ve known on messageboards for  years that I knew had been on many actual real TV shows and I basically had been dying to ask someone “is Eamonn Holmes different in real life?”
• The contestant sound effects came as a genuine surprise. I added one for Shanine though.
• This was a bit of an odd game I think really because it seemed to me that more of the difficult questions were used earlier on and the final round is full of sitters (3/20, then 7/10). This is actually fine because it means an exciting final round but it just goes to show. Don’t forget when our contestants are supplied with the questions they’re going to attack each other with, they are not given the accompanying answers. I hope at least that we managed to make three correct answers out of the first twenty sound like entertaining radio.
• As ever, questions were supplied by our good friends at QuizQuizQuiz.com. Here is a link to the spreadsheet with all the questions on and their PROFESSIONALLY graded difficulties – see how much you agree with them.
• Quick maths – how did question placement make the game? Well by my rudimentary reckoning Andrew could have been restricted to 8 points and could have scored a maximum of 19, whilst Shanine’s range is 3-12, so the results could have been very different if the questions were put in a different place. Which is what it’s all about.
• I decided to see out the show with So You Wanna Be A Boxer? from Bugsy Malone. Boxing seemed to be the category that defined the game, I think. The inspiration for this was actually the use of You Give A Little Love as the ending to last Summer’s last Big Brother’s Bit On The Side, I had basically forgotten what an awesome soundtrack Bugsy Malone had. Also using something from a 1976 film is precisely the sort of thing NPR would do. We might tackle This American Life next time.