TONIGHT! I went and saw Tipping Point Lucky Stars, the show everybody is just going to refer to as Celebrity Tipping Point. I spent all of it sitting next to Ben Shephard’s delightful Mum (it is great to know that celebrity parents are just as prone to accidentally shoutwhispering answers as well as anyone else in an audience). It was a ton of fun, even if it’s actually not the most audience friendly show in the world. Main format points first, then some interesting production things:

• The celebs have quite lengthy scripted bits to camera they’ve had to remember for their introductions.
• There are just THREE celeb contestants in each episode. The game is played exactly the same as regular Tipping Point, except nobody is eliminated after Round One.
• All counters are worth £100. The jackpot token is worth £20,000. Losers get to keep their money for charity. If the winner takes the end of show trade and loses, they still get £1,000.
• The mystery tokens are there and may confer comedy booby prizes, the chance at bonus counters by answering a question related to them or even charity cash!
• And of course there’s an audience, which means lots of oohing and ahhing in the right places. It doesn’t really need coaching, the reactions are pretty natural.

Otherwise it’s the same great show we know and love. I’m not expecting it to be an immediate hit on Sunday nights (starting June 9th, I’ve read), but I think it will grow into one as it will have the new audience of people who work standard weeks develop a love/hate for it.

OK, so now the interesting production bits:

• This was filmed at Wimbledon Studios where they used to film The Bill, the set of which is still up. It’s actually not an easy studio to find from the map given, although it turns out there’s a fairly simple route in when you know what it is.
• The studio was hot – really hot, it was the thing most of the people on set remarked about. Apparently they retooled the studio but didn’t put any air coniditioning in, so they had to open the big scene doors between parts to cool everyone down.
• The audience sit behind the contestants, slightly raised. Interesting thing apparent: it’s actually quite hard to judge the counters in the machine from the angle the contestants and the audience are positioned at. It’s quite deep, but it’s on an angle about 25-30 degrees from your eyeline. The big screen at the end of the studio cuts to an overhead once the counter has dropped (but not until, the director wants eyes forward most of the time). Interestingly I think this shot turns up on Ben’s monitor, because the one time it took ages to show up he was bending over to look at a constant overhead feed in a monitor inset to the immediate left of his podium stage. The audience was about 150 people.
• Speaking of his monitor, we got to see a shot of what it shows whilst they were doing audio pick ups. Player scores up the top, second row featuring clock and the stats for each drop zone, bottom half for the questions.
• After each go, a man called George silently runs in and counts the counters that have been pushed over for OFFICIAL confirmation in a style not dissimilar to Jason Bourne. In the first rounds there’s a short pause so he can count, Ben can reveal, then he can take them away. In the final round, he comes in to remove them whilst the contestant picks their next category.
• Timing. The rule is “three shoves of the shelf” – if anything mysteriously falls after that it will not count (unless it’s the final round, then everything counts).
• It was all done and dusted within two hours.

I’ve probably forgotten a lot of stuff, so if you have questions feel free to ask (although I’m quite busy Friday generally so don’t be offended if you don’t get a quick response).

Right I’ve just got back from watching Reflex filming at The Fountain at Wembley. It’s changed rather from the pilot (which Martyn wrote up here a while ago).

For pragmatic reason of keeping the 5 Minutes to a Fortune show discussion post more visible, I’m going to hide my thoughts under a cut.

(more…)

Friend of the Bar Martyn With A Y Not An I went and saw this yesterday and I think it sounds very encouraging, he wrote this:

• I guess you would call it a crash between Minute To Win It (short snappy rounds) and the first round of The Krypton Factor (speed thinking puzzles) and, bar one minor irritation, isn’t a bad show. Given the amount of shows being recorded (including the envitable celeb specials) it does give the impressionthat Channel 4 are hoping for good things for this.
• Studio. Probably the last gameshow to be recorded in TC8 at the BBC Television Centre. Audience sit out of shot (just) at one end – the seating is split into two sections by a huge back projection lit screen. There is a nice multi-coloured star cloth wrapped around the set, and on the centre of the studio floor a eye shaped raised stage, leading to a small curved walkway, and a further small circular stage at the back of this with a icewhite podium/plinth with a large red button/dome on it. To the right of this, hanging down from the lighting grid is a very large screen, and futher to the right of this, is our rather large silver and perspex eggtimer, on a small raised stage with a HD screen at the base of it. The egg timer is filled with what we are led to believe are 50,000 plastic coins.
• Music and Graphics. Lots of reds yellows and whites in the graphics. Music – strings and pulsing tension drums, which don’t sound like it’s from the keyboard
  of Marc Sylvain (for once).
• Host – Davina McCall in usual form. Matey, chummy, tactile, shouty, consoling. And there is an unseen ‘voice of god’ question reader, who sounds like Gideon Coe off of BBC Six Music.
• A team of two play over 6 or 7 rounds. One chooses the rounds/subjects to play and how long to give his mate to answer the 5 questions, and then during those rounds, goes and stands behind the icewhite podium. The other, stands at the end of the stage, facing the audience (so has their back to the podium),  and the big centre screen answering the questions. Davina stalks menacingly behind the question answerer. To take home the £50,000, they have to complete 5 rounds within 5 minutes, and navigate the final round and answer that in lightning quick time.
• At the start of the game, they are presented with 7 vague question categories. These can be things like ‘bookworms’ ‘telly addicts’ ‘political animals’ etc. Podium mate (lets call him that) chooses the category for question mate. Then he must decide how much of the 5 minutes, to allocate to play on that round. It is a free choice how much or little you take out to play the round, but with the ever decreasing amount of time left as the game goes on, common sense says most will opt to take 1 min per round.
• So, let’s say the chosen category is ‘number cruncher’ and 1 minute is allocated to this round. Gideon reads out (and is demonstrated on screen) an example… Four numbers are displayed at the bottom of the screen – eg – 2, 5, 9 , 12. In each case, the question mate has to reorder the numbers in alphabetical order to how they are spelt, so the answer would be – Five, Nine, Twelve, Two. He has to do this 5 times within the minute. If yes, well done. However, with 10 seconds of the pre-set time limit remaining, the egg timer slowly turns over,  and when the round time limit is reached, the coins slowly start to drain out. When the 5 questions have been answered, the egg timer stops dropping the coins.
• The player is allowed to pass as many times as they wish, and a new question is given. Passed on questions are not returned to – but the answers are revealed once the round is completed. It’s worth pointing out, that no matter how quickly the questions are answered, time saved by being quick and correct is useless because the time remained on the clock when each round finished is not returned. So if you choose in the first round 90 seconds to complete it, and you use 45secs, the team would still get 3.30 left for round two, rather than 4.15. [Brig's note: this makes perfect gameplay sense, otherwise you'd just choose "all the time you have left" every round]
• At the end of each round, if the egg timer has released some of the coins, these are released and counted, and the amount lost is revealed, and then, that amount is deducted from the running total.
• Now, podium mate does have a part to play during the actual question answering phase of the game, because only once during any of the rounds, he can press the dome button on top of the plinth which acts as an ‘emergency stop’ button for the round if question mate is sinking, and getting into a spiral of passes. If the stop button is pressed, the game stops, but if it’s pressed before the egg timer flips around, then any of the cash is saved. The only other penalty is that podium mate doesn’t choose the next round, that is ‘chosen at random’ from the ones left.
• This is played in the same way until all five rounds (or 6 if the emergency stop button was pressed) have been played, and then one final round for the money. Here though, it’s roles reversed and it’s podium mate who will be playing and there is no choice of category, but belongs straight out of ‘Who Dares Wins’. To win, they have to provide 5 answers based on a list. There is no physical time limit – but there is a cash limit, because they are playing up against the remaining coins left in the egg timer. As soon as the question is revealed, the egg timer flips over and the coins start draining away, until all five answers have been provided, or, all the cash drains away. Fin. Clap, end credits.
• I was slightly concerned during recording that after each round Davina threw to a break, which would make it hard work to watch and follow on television, as most rounds only last between 2-4 mins. But it was just done that way to allow an edit point. Now, to please some around here – game rollovers from one day to the next will happen and some shows will feature more than one team of contestants. Which makes a nice change.
• With the format, my main deflated feeling (other than walking past empty deserted rooms on the way to the studio) was that it’s no good advertising the team can win £50,000 – when it’s plainly obvious that it’s almost impossible to. To win it, you would need to nail the five rounds in under the 5 mins, and then shout out 5 answers in the final in around 5 seconds before the eggtimer flips over and the cash starts to fall away. I guess the average win will end up being £1,000 – £5,000 and going home with zero are possible.
• Another issue I had was there was no sliding scale of difficulty with the questions. Some were fairly easy, and lightweight knockabout fun and some are quite tough for a 5pm quizzer.
• The political animal round was a series of made up e-bay style adverts selling something that would identify the politician/statesman, which the contestant had to name – i.e – “for sale a 2nd Jaguar car, previous owner doesn’t need it anymore after last general election”. Pretty easy to play at home.
• Give another couple of round examples – the pop music round consisted of the first line of song lyrics, with the spellings of each of the words, except either the first or last word jumbled up, and the contestant had to give the song title. Tricky. The film round was to name 5 movies based on credits – main male/female lead, writer and director scrolling up the screen. Throw in the reordering based on how it’s spelt or by saying the colour it is in, and you have a slightly jarring mix of shout out with minimum of thinking, to concentrating quite hard.
• And that’s it. 2 hours later, a few pick-ups, a couple of enivitable computer system breakdowns and we were let lose back into Wood Lane. It’ll be quite a nice little show once edited, but I am slightly worried up against the pincer movement of Pointless and The Chase, at 5pm this may get a little lost which would be a shame.

I’m actually going to be watching an episode so find out how much I agree… soon! Thanks Martyn.

Edit: I went and saw this earlier today, here’s some stuff I observed.

So I went and saw Pointless being filmed today, the first of series seven (I think) (Apparently not, thanks Dan H) at the new digs at Elstree.

• Basically nothing’s changed, so the apparently very exciting new endgame is being saved for another series. Still if you’re going to waste my time and money, at least the show is still entertaining to go and see.
• Basically look out for lots of jokes and references to moving to Elstree in the first episode (specifically things that you’re nearer to now they’ve moved), and they’re not shy about pointing out to viewers that although nothing looks like its changed actually it has and it’s been months since the previous episode had been recorded. OR it will probably all get edited out.
• The big issue is that there appeared to be a massive static problem, and Xander was frequently audibly yelping when leaning on his monitor. I don’t think there’s been a format where a host tries to host whilst getting regular electric shocks, so that’s something for the future.
• Mark Olver did the warm up. I know he’s been around a lot and regularly does Deal or No Deal, but this is the first time our paths crossed. He was good! He’s Bristolian and shouts at people.
• This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Elstree, but the last time was for The Exit List which had a weird set-up. The Elstree audience holding area is a bit swanky isn’t it? Much better than the Television Centre’s, in that there are a proper amount of seats and tables. And the bar sold a Snickers and a can of Coke for £1.60, which is less than it costs in my work canteen.
• It seemed to take an age to get everybody into the studio, although I can’t tell whether that’s a feature of the studio or because there was a coach load of old people come to watch and I was towards the back.
• I award Elstree 8/10.

New daytime quiz beginning apparently March 4th. TV’s Paul Brassey suggests the inspiration for it comes from not being able to convert early poker tournament leads into actual victories which is very interesting and you can see in the format, although apparently he hasn’t been involved with it for a long time.

• This was filmed in TVC4, TV geeks. Incedentally TVC6 is currently set up for Millionaire? – it had been closed but they’ve reopened it up for that and the gallery is currently sitting in large OB vans outside the studio. Ray Turner was on warm-up duty, about 100 people in the audience I reckon.
• Set is futuristic without being overly dark – looks like lots of neon lighted steps in the background in between large vertical dot matrix style screens. Studio is wide – large walkway in foreground, Jake Humphrey and Control player stand on the left, a large screen on the right and “the pack” behind a large light up desk on a higher level in the background.
• So the game. Eight people begin, usually one is selected randomly before the show (but see later) to be the Control player, the other contestants are The Pack. One person can walk away with up to £12,000.
• The object is for the Control to bank as much money as possible AND stay ahead of The Pack through a game of six categories, shown at the start of the game. Control also gets one Double Answer (i.e. they can choose two answers instead of one) to be deployed after any question. If the Control player changes at any point, they too will get a Double Answer to use once.
• Control picks a category. They are shown a question with four possible answers worth £2,000. The Pack also all answer in secret.
• Control must decide to answer the question or pass it.
• To remain in the game, Control MUST get a question right before The Pack does or he is eliminated. However if he gets a question wrong he’s also imediately eliminated.
• If he passes, it’s revealed who in The Pack got it right via a 12 second (I counted) dancing light tension thing. Whoever got it right can go to “The Safe Area” – a bench back left of set, and cannot be eliminated this round. Another (easier, importantly) question is then played but the value is halved (i.e. £1k, £500, £250 etc.). This keeps going until he decides to answer a question or the Pack beats him.
• If Control gets a question right, the value is added to the bank. Control also gets to eliminate a member of the Pack who hadn’t made it to safety. It’s in The Pack’s best interests to answer correctly, but there is a risk if Control Beats the Pack you look like too much of a threat and get eliminated anyway.
• Either way the game continues either with the current Control (the safe members of The Pack is bought back into the fold) or if he was eliminated (important note: the money they won is lost from the game), the best performing Pack member gets to become the new Control. Astute readers will notice that that means after every category The Pack gets smaller which makes the decisions to play or pass more interesting as the game progresses. This also has baring on your category selection – it’s usually wiser to get rid of your weak categories earlier as the more people in The Pack, the less likely they will strike you out.
• After six categories we are down to Control and one remaining Pack member for the final, playing for the money built up in Control’s bank (which might be up to £12k, or if Control gets in late in the game, not much at all. And if Control gets knocked out on the very last question, they’re playing for the right to come on again in a later episode beginning as Control).
• Control must stay in control for 75 seconds of quickfire questions. These are mainly pretty easy questions and they muct be answered in three seconds. If they get it wrong or take too long, the last of The Pack can answer. If they can push the Chaser back three times then they win all the money instead of Control, otherwise Control wins.

And that’s that. It does some quite neat things – namely the race to Beat the Pack but there are issues. The initial questions in each category is very hard to the point of being boring pub quiz machine trivia in a lot of places and these are the questions you are going to see most. The main game features about 10 questions in the space of 40 minutes, I think it’s going to have a pacing issue (each episode took 2-2.5hrs, but although the game was fairly enjoyable (it is actually the sort of thing you could rig up with pen and paper) they felt like loooong sessions). This afternoon, without spoiling too much, in the two episodes we were playing for the high tension final prizes of £250 and the chance to return the next episode. The central idea is quite neat, but clearing the bank after every change of Control just feels immensely cheap – imagine it happening near the end on Breakaway, then multiply it by quite a lot because that sort of thing is inbuilt as a feature of the game.

Jake Humphrey is a very assured host – and also good fun and pleasant off camera. If there was one criticism he does tend to push the devil’s advocate line a bit too much, asking and reasking if that’s what they want to do, yet persuading the contestant to change their mind precisely zero times.

This felt like a long day, they started recording at 1:30 and finished the second episode at about 7:30, with a 45 minute break in the middle (we were sent back to the foyer, but the cafe wasn’t open so cheers then). In fairness it might have been a bit quicker had one of the contestants in the second recording not fainted (apparently in the heat of the studio lights) which was of concern. Happily it looks as though he was OK and will return in a future recording, as we were only one question into the show it was decided to start again with a stand-by (who were apparently just two minutes away from getting home).

Anyway I sort of like it, I reckon it’s slightly below Breakaway series one in quality, fans of gamey games will enjoy it, fans of fun questions probably won’t quite. It’ll be interesting to see how it edits and is received.

You may remember we saw the pilot to this back in August. Has anything changed?

• The titles are a neat mash up of the two original Walker title sequences, beams of light going round a maze but this time clearly in SPACE. The theme is a pretty good remix of the original 80s Walker theme.
• The set has changed, it’s quite minimalist – three podia linked together and to the screen, raised stage in the shape of a speech bubble, some orbit-esque lights, that’s about it. However the backdrop is now a large panoramic projection screen, usually dark blue but featuring neat solar flare-esque effects. I rather liked it.
• No changsd have been made to the game or the controversial graphics which I think will put people off somewhat. Actually there is one change, the contestants now fill in thirds of a pie chart in the qualifier.
• Stephen Mulhern’s an OK host. If nothing else he can do a smart line in cheeky innuendo whilst pulling an innocent face. They do seem to have written him one-liner cheeky non-contestant-denominator putdowns which feel really unnatural, especially as many were recorded after the show for dropping in. He’s grows in confidence and assuredness when one of the contestants is eliminated.
• Also I think we pointed out the scene-setting element of the modern Catchphrases last time, now Mulhern has to point out when the actual clues are on the screen. Not his fault I suspect but very irritating.
• Also when a Bonus Catchphrase is revealed, not immediately removing all the squares and instead doing this as a seperate thing after the celebration of the correct answer is odd.
• The endgame hasn’t changed, although the Box 11 prize is now a holiday rather than a car. Because of the guaranteed big money involved, we are meant to cheer when the clock hits zero regardless of outcome. Unfortunately this is largely incongrouous with having a challenge with a clear win condition with a countdown clock and excitement bed. At the same time it’s difficult to feel bad for someone when losing still means having thousands of pounds thrown at them, so I don’t know the best solution to make good television in this situation to be honest.
• As I’ve said in the pilot, the spirit of the show is alive and well. And you’ll be able to see how it comes across on telly in March on Sundays, it was suggested.