The £100k Drop

By | July 14, 2017

Broadcast reporting that The Million Pound Drop is set for a sensational reduced-stakes daytime comeback where players will try to keep hold of £100,000. I hope the money is still in £25k bundles.

Davina’s back but no word on timing (60×60 eps sometime in 2018) or whether it will still use the Million Pound Drapp. Still though.

No reason this couldn’t work, there have been several fairly successful daily versions in Europe.

31 thoughts on “The £100k Drop

  1. Alex

    Are we keeping the “double or nothing Q8 that nobody takes” format?

    Reply
      1. Setsunael

        Spanish version had a rule that you could double/treble your money on Q8 if you wanted to go with three or four options for that final question (played weirdly, the two additional stacks of money were put in play , question was presented then the team could knock up to two wrong answers for each of the extra money bundles)

        Quite surprised that they left the “100K” in the title, not going back just as “Money Drop” like many other international versions. It feels quite out of place.

        Reply
  2. Callum J

    I really liked this show, I’m very happy to see it back in a similar form.

    Reply
  3. John R

    Bit of a a random but welcome decision for me, I went to see it as part of the audience when it was LIVE and had a really good time. Glad Davina is returning otherwise it probably wouldn’t work.

    Biggest (theoretical!) daytime prize fund since Deal Or No Deal?

    Reply
    1. Thomas Sales

      Nope. Tenable offered £125,000. Speaking of which, when’s that coming back? When its second series was announced, did they say that would be this year?

      Reply
        1. Callum J

          Meanwhile, series 1 of Tenable is being repeated from July 24 at 3pm.

          Reply
      1. Alex McMillan

        I finished recording quite recently, so I suspect it will fill the next available Chase-free slot.

        That being said, Cash Trapped has a new series also ready to air.

        Reply
  4. Little Timmy

    I would have kept the money the same – for branding; for playing up that it’s the largest ever prize offered on daytime TV – but added 4 more questions to bring the average payout well down.

    I had always felt I would prefer them to subdivide the last bundle into smaller £1000 bundles once they got down to one in the original version. I fully understand why they did not, but now I think they should, and in fact once they’re down to the last £1000 bundle they should subdivide it again into bundles of £25. Primary reason: guaranteeing the whole run of questions gets used and making the episodes self-contained. You can still mandate all-or-nothing on the last question, but at least there is the guarantee of a climactic finish every episode, even with peanuts (which we let DoND get away with for years).

    I know this changes the direction of the show quite drastically, but I don’t care: I feel entitled to comment as I (thought I had anyway) invented this exact format in 2003 with a billion quid on the line and an infinite sequence of multiple choice questions only stopping when the contestant had correctly nailed down a 5 digit safe combination with higher/lower. But hey I can’t be bitter as (a) I’m fairly sure it was already a borrowed mechanic from a preexisting European format and (b) I’ve never had the gonads to send these ideas to anyone anyway.

    Reply
    1. George F

      Splitting the money even further once they got to £1000 would just lessen the tension as it just gives them more chance the spread their answers, making the jeopardy even less.

      Besides, there’s no guarantee of a self contained episode, as they could put all their money on one drop and lose it all – as we’ve seen in the show countless times.

      It makes complete sense to make the prize fund smaller due to daytime constraints, but I would have changed the title to something like ‘The Drop’

      Reply
      1. Little Timmy

        It’s all too common for them to get down to one bundle… then you’re watching a straight knockout quiz, which I’ve always thought is a disappointing abandonment of the actual concept of the show: weighting answers by confidence.

        Yes, stopping at £25K forces low-stakes strugglers to leave the show a bit sooner, but my argument is that you don’t need (or necessarily even want) a constant revolving door so much in daytime. It’s cheaper contestant coordination if nothing else.

        The jeopardy already drains out as their money does anyway – that’s always been a given. It’s about “the journey” though, innit?

        I would be surprised if offering £1m in daytime was out of the question with a long enough run to average out any aberrations. Or my personal favourite: custom insurance policy *wink wink*

        Reply
  5. Brekkie

    Prize money really has collapsed hasn’t it – even the £250k drop with 25 bundles of £10k (so fewer options to split) would at least be on a par with the Deal or No Deal jackpot.

    Reply
    1. Jon

      The 250k Drop doesn’t have the same ring to it though. I think it’s an easier sell to with a rounder figure too.

      Reply
        1. Jon

          It’s called ‘The 100k Drop’, I think it’s a simipler proposition, than any other amount between that and a million. Obvoiusly the amount theyre prepared to give away is a factor.

          I guess anything in the 10k region is probably going to be a decent win on this.

          Reply
      1. Brekkie

        I’d say £250k is rounded than £100k but each to their own. Personally I think The 163 Thousand 276 Pound and 78 Pence Drop has a nice ring to it.

        Reply
        1. Matt Clemson

          The best title, of course, would unfortunately not quite have the stakes required.

          “The Penny Drops”

          Reply
          1. David B

            £100,000 was known as ‘a plum’ in old slang.

            “Drop Your Plums”, anyone?

    2. David

      The French version (which just ended in February after five and a half years and over 800 eps according to French Wikipedia) had 250k possible in 5k bundles- later in the run, they also were given a gold bar with the money and had to play it for the first four questions. If it survived, it meant if they could get to the 8th and final question whatever money they had left would be doubled- so 500k was possible (though the most ever won was 260k).

      Reply
      1. Brig Bother Post author

        I know the French show also had a thing where if you bet all the money on one answer and you were right you skipped the next question.

        Reply
      2. Brekkie

        Of course no reason why the money has to be bundled in the same amount. Would add another layer of strategy to have some smaller amount bundles to try and take through to the final stages so towards the end rather than say one bundle of £5k you might have 5 bundles of £1k if you’d gambled correctly.

        Reply
  6. John R

    Anyone off to see Davina on Monday 18th at 11am? I’m off to do so and then…THE BOARDROOM.

    Or rather the Countdown studios with Margaret from the Apprentice in DC.

    Reply
    1. John R

      Just finished recording, saw quite a lot of contestants the pacing is bang bang bang!

      Original set too apparently, but lower down…and the audience get seats which is a treat!

      Warmup was surprisingly Mark Olver from Deal so a safe pair of hands there.

      One thing that did stand out is that for a show airing Early 2018 (January?) all the graphics are of bundles of ‘old’ £10 notes! I know they probably couldn’t get their hands on £100k in new tenners (yes the money is still real!) but do wonder if they’ll be digitally altering that for broadcast somehow.

      Quite diverse pairs of contestants, couples, relatives, mum and son (this was a good game to watch!), from the way it was filmed it looks as if they’ll be pick and mixing the games, Davina didn’t change her clothing between the 2 episodes anyway.

      Once they hit Question 4 (of 7) as usual one answer is dropped but in a slight twist the time is also reduced at that point from 60 seconds to 45 seconds. Question 7 is the usual 50/50 gamble and thankfully no twists after that.

      Talking of questions, crikey did the majority feel difficult! It seems as if they don’t want to be risking the daytime purse strings too much! Lots of ‘look at this picture’ questions.

      Will it work in daytime? Hard to say really, it’s just Million Pound Drop with a 0 removed basically – which is fine until you get a team trying to shuffle around less than £10k for several questions which I can see getting a bit boring.

      Nice to see the bloke carrying the heavy camera to zoom around the screens and podium every question is back in employment at least!

      Reply
  7. John R

    I wonder when Channel 4 are actually planning on sticking these in the schedule, announced in July 2017, filmed in September/October 2017 so been gathering dust on the shelf a good few months now

    I was predicting mid February at the latest but the schedule for Monday 12th suggests a lot of Place In The Sun!

    Would have thought they would maybe have had a crack at the 3pm slot vs Tenable

    Reply

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