Tom Scott’s Game Garage

By | February 28, 2019

The first of three game show pilots by Nerdy Internet Celebrities Tom Scott and David Bodycombe where other Nerdy Internet Celebrities play a game and we find out if it’s any good or not and Nerdy Internet Commenters point out how brilliant it all is in the comments.

I was fortunate enough to see these in testing, so I have to say that of the three Weight For It (episode 1 here) is actually the one I’m least excited about – sure it’s visual, but for me it’s a segment rather than a show. At least that was the case at the time, I can’t wait to see how it all edits as a twenty minute show in its own right.

Of the other shows, which I shan’t spoil as this is a weekly Thursday thing, one has potential as a weekend show and one a pretty damn good daytime quiz providing they’ve got the scripting right.

31 thoughts on “Tom Scott’s Game Garage

  1. Brandon

    A few months time we see on the ITV press site: in the Chase replacement slot for 2019, Weigh For It, probably hosted by Mark Durden-Smith or George Lamb.

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    1. Brandon

      The use of most/fastest/longest sort of questions instantly brings to mind Secret Fortune, which isn’t a bad thing.

      Reply
  2. Chris M. Dickson

    I too was at the testing for this. The finished product was rather better than the testing, hurrah. The testing had pairs or teams compete against each other, which is probably the right decision for the final show, but the decision to have single players against each other was absolutely the right decision for a garage of that size. The third question here was much better than the routine used in testing, and I don’t think it’s too big a secret to reveal that the routine involved a question about picking from a selection of large felines that might or might not have weighed less than David B., inspiring a Bowen-esque catchphrase “You’ve picked a cat that’s far too fat”. The questions here were very good; there was one in the testing that I raised a pedantic quibble with but these felt watertight to me.

    One thing that this show didn’t make clear, that the run-through did, was whether the order of picking was always going to be snake-draft 1st-and-4th vs. 2nd-and-3rd or whether it happened to turn out 1st-and-4th vs. 2nd-and-3rd because the 1st place picker happened to choose better than the 2nd place picker in the first round. It probably ought to be the former, but I didn’t get that from this show.

    I recall a David tweet that he only got one hour of sleep between the two days’ filming of the series of shows and would be intrigued by a producers’ commentary on how filming went. Did this one need dozens of retakes or was it easy to film? Good stuff all round – and, like Brig says, the other two are even more worth waiting for still.

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  3. Brig Bother Post author

    This was roughly where I thought it would end up – it’s OK but not much more. It’s a pity they weren’t Scales of Justice style scales really, to avoid the levelling out faff.

    If nothing else it needs a more convincing way to build up the tension, I wasn’t really getting Pointless Tower vibes when they were emptying the sand. How attached are you to the boxes? Something like a petrol pump style affair which pumps the sand out without giving a hint as to when it’s going to stop might be a solution.

    Also amazed that for effectively a pilot you didn’t make them go for the £50!

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    1. Brig Bother Post author

      Boxes would work better if they arrived via some sort of conveyor or something, so there’s less dead giveaway in someone picking them up. Basically: set this show im some sort of factory.

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      1. David B

        We spent our £47,000 budget on a conveyor belt but it didn’t fit through the garage doors. Which is why the show looks so ropey. Sorry.

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      2. Chris M. Dickson

        See, if that’s a problem – and I don’t think it is, but can understand how someone might – then there’s a simple two-part solution:

        1) Give all the containers identical narrow spouts so the rate of pour is near enough identical.
        2) Give all the containers weights attached to the bottom of the inside, but secured so that they cannot fall and block the passage of sand, to make the total weight of the container constant irrespective of the quantity of sand therein.

        I’ll await a Pot Of Cash in the post.

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  4. Nico W.

    I really really liked this! And the Game Garage idea is somehow pretty close to an idea I have in mind for some time now and I am really looking forward to the other episodes!
    I agree with Chris’s remark about the choosing order. I didn’t really understand it as well. And I was wondering whether the sand was relative to the actual answers (e.g. so that 1500 airplanes weigh 1500g while 200 airplanes weigh 200g) or to the placement in this selection of answers (e.g. best answer 1000g, second best 900, etc.). I probably could have figured it out had I paid more attention. Also some sort of graphic showing the sequence of the answers and the relevant numbers (airplanes/ box office/ years/ players) would have been nice so I could compare them more easily to my answers.
    But those are the small things one critiques when you don’t have any real issue with the episode.

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  5. Christopher McBride

    More importantly, will we ever get a 2nd series of Lateral, and can I be on it?

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  6. Brig Bother Post author

    I’ve made this a Show Discussion post so you can find it in the sidebar easily for a few weeks.

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    1. David B

      If you can excuse the humblebrag, today’s game genuinely contains some of the funniest video clips I’d seen in ages.

      Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      This is one I think has a decent chance of working on telly, team of three civilians against seven celebs, pre-recorded or otherwise.

      I really like the idea of the endgame, although I didn’t love the letterbox layout (or indeed the angle set up of the table) but that is by the by.

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    2. Chris M. Dickson

      This is so good, and so commercial. I think you would get celebs rolling up to be pre-taped for this as they can be pretty sure that they can be edited to look good, or at least for only their funniest or best few seconds to be used. I am confident that you can come up with plenty of good games to keep the show interesting and different. Unlike Brig, I really liked the split-screen that you used for the endgame as being the best way to track progress, but I’m not sure if the split-screen would work if the team had done poorly and wound up facing many more than three opponents. (Or, as you only care about whether the team beats the three fastest opponents, do you only show the three fastest opponents, whoever they turned out to be?)

      There’s one big question that I’ve got. Obviously you edited this for the web, and it ended up being as long as it needed to be. If this were a TV show, how long a show would it be? Would you trim it down to a very lean, very quick-paced 20-21 minutes for a commercial half-hour with an ad break after game two? Granted, if you were to sell this to a streaming service like Netflix, they wouldn’t mind if episodes happened to be 31 minutes, 34 and half minutes and so on – jagged numbers, different from one episode to the next.

      As much as I’d like to see this being a very slick half-hour, I have a feeling that the commissioning editors of this world would prefer to see it as an hour-long show with more from the celebs involved. As an hour-long show, I think it might work to have four games and then the endgame, even if this breaks the neat arithmetic. (At a guess, you could have a team of four players, score the games 1-1-2-2, and theoretically put the breaks after game one, game three and game four.)

      People on YouTube are asking how the other celebrities did on the endgame and that’s a fair question; that said, I guess that in this day and age you could simply say “To see how the other celebrities performed on the endgame, visit our web site” and just put slightly less edited versions of the celebrities’ performances online.

      Really good stuff, though!

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      1. David B

        We did actually have a graphic in the first cut which showed how fast all seven did the domino run, but even *I* didn’t understand it so it got taken out. Tom does say that the player maximised the money he could have won for the team given the speed he went at.

        I think if there were more that three opponents left, we might just pick the fastest three of the X you’ve got left.

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        1. Matt Clemson

          If there were two or even one opponent in the final, was the prize breakdown going to be all-or-nothing, or “We’ll already assume you had beaten the missing opponents, so that’s safe?”. I quite like the notion that doing well enough in the baseline game does mean you secure *some* prize.

          Space in the garage probably got in the way, but I think the format could perhaps lend itself to having a team round in there where we get to see everyone on the team play the same task together; possibly something like “1 point for everyone who beats the average”. Could even reuse the same sort of shot from the final. Trouble is, I guess adding more rounds for more points would require more Panellists to balance the final, and seven’s already quite a lot!

          One thing I wasn’t sure about is that the graphics necessarily had to reveal who was best among the Panel right at the start of the final, although that did become very apparent very quickly – however, had there been an incident of a Panellist making a quick start but then failing to topple correctly and have to restart, their positioning in the graphics may have given it away before the key moment.

          I assume the “Player maximising their money” thing meant that five were faster than his eventual performance?

          Reply
    1. Chris M. Dickson

      I know that Matthew! He was in the RPG society at university at the same time as me. Lovely chap, as advertised, and far far far less Rees-Mogg than he appears. (He was absolutely on his best behaviour on-screen and I choose to believe that he bought a bottle of absinthe with his winnings and invited the crew to do shots with him.) I wonder how he was cast – does he know Tom via other means, or was it via QLL, or some other way? Anyway the scripting of this one is well and truly sorted out and this is good to go. I did enjoy David as the anti-Vanna, though the extent to which he handed it up more in the same role during testing was a great deal of fun… and I’m still convinced that the catchphrase for rejecting a scroll and setting fire to it should be “Let’s ignite that shite”.

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    2. Brandon

      The title makes it sound like a Take It or Leave it parody, but this is actually brilliant. I think I would watch this most of the time if made into a proper TV thing.

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      1. Brandon

        It’s just hit me: although it does mean you would have to drop the catchphrase, I think the scrolls should be in the carousel thing from Avanti un Altro!

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        1. David B

          Wickes was right out of carousels that day, sadly.

          Overall, the series has gone down very well and we may do more later in the year.

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  7. Will Stephen

    Definitely agree that Take it or Dump It was the best format of the three.

    I’m thinking the prize money should depend on how many answers are left at the end of x questions. I think once you narrow the answers down, in it’s current state if you know you win with just having one left, you’ll always safeguard one, but if the most money is given on the majority of answers then the strategy changes. e.g. first 4 questions, each answer remains = £1, next 2 questions £2: Final = £5. Then even possibily do one last question for the jackpot, with a difficulty threshold depending on how many answers on the board e.g. 5/9/13/ to give % back…. Just by typing that I’ve developed my own show with a fancy tag line. “Majority Rules” :-p

    Reply
    1. Will Stephen

      Now look what I’ve done, I read about the Parody of Take it or Leave it and decided to incorporate it into the title :-p Obviously meant Keep it or Dump It woops!

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      1. Brig Bother Post author

        “Take A Dump”

        The issue with that is that you’re pretty much at the mercy of the scrolls as to whether you win a big prize or not, this way at least you have a fighting chance of the top prize with knowledge and a bit of strategy. Possibly he was lucky to get some fairly easy money questions but he had at least earnt the right to be in that position.

        I think the playtest with two people playing as a team worked quite well, not sure why this was just one against the game. Also burning the scroll was a bit less visually exciting then I think I was anticipating although I suppose you don’t want to burn the garage down.

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        1. David S

          Yeah, it would have been nice if the scrolls were touchpaper, or paper that burns up completely in seconds.

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  8. Matt Clemson

    I was about to ask a question but I think I’ve just figured out the answer as I typed it!

    The question was going to be: “When the category changes, what dictates which of the fifteen new answers from the new category come into play?”. And I think I’ve just twigged that the answer is “They’re in alphabetical order”

    I’m wondering if it’s possible to fashion this in a way that has the [i]same[/i] answers persist from round to round. Maybe a list of animals would have a Nature question along the lines of “Animals that lay eggs”, a Sport question along the lines of “Animals that appears in the name of a NBA, NFL or MLB team”, a Literature question along the lines of “Animals that are principal subjects of the Just So stories”… something like that? Would be way too complicated to be a regular question, but now I’m wondering if it’s possible to implement that fully! Interesting question-setting exercise, at least.

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    1. David B

      Each answer was assigned a ‘box’ number from 1 to 15. So if you lost box 1 on a question, the corresponding answers for later rounds also went – not that you’d know what they were going to be. But for our purposes, we could prove to the contestant afterwards that it was all above board. I suppose it would have been better to put them on different sides of cubes if we’d thought about it more.

      I think what you say about the answers could possibly work for a few shows – a series or two – but it would be stretch for a returning series.

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  9. David B

    Two contestants were intended but we had availability issues. And we were going to use flash paper but you need public liability insurance and council approval if you’re doing it in any kind of commercial capacity.

    Reply

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