We are having some difficulties…

By | May 19, 2020

…bringing you the latest episode of The People’s Ben Justice’s Top 100 UK Gameshows of All Time. It was hoped to go up today but may be a bit late. Edit: Rescheduled to Thursday.

In the meantime, here is some music.

Do-do-do-DO-do-do! Woah!

17 thoughts on “We are having some difficulties…

    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I just can’t help thinking “Nooo! You’ve got the music the wrong way round!” towards the end there, although Hummel Gets The Rockets from The Rock is a nice addition – always liked it as the theme to Expedition Robinson.

      Looks like they’ve upped the top box as well (or at least it was €100k last time I looked). Box 25 remains rubbish.

      Reply
    2. David Howell

      I heard about this from someone watching it from France. He was not impressed, but that was mostly because the offers were obnoxiously overt about the Banker seeing what was in the box.

      Which can only possibly work if there’s a guaranteed swap IMO – if that’s the case then any overt dishonesty around seeing a low amount gets insta-called and punished if a big red is left. In fact two Italians doing the DoND-as-economics-experiment research thing with Affari Tuoi – which of course was the first version with a knowing Banker – literally published some arcane mathematical proof in the appendix that the best strategy for a knowing Banker is to act like an unknowing one, iff there’s a swap guarantee.

      Reply
    3. Tantusar

      Dear lord, these boxes look cheap. So much effort into the set and into that LED name strap and the boxes are utter tat. The least they could’ve done was to make the letters a little smaller and actually affix them straight.

      Reply
        1. Brig Bother Post author

          They’re the same boxes (or at least in the same style) as when D8 bought the show in 2013/4 I think.

          The original version avec Arthur remains my favourite version of the format, very silly, but able to turn on the tension. Even if they have to split the prize with a home viewer.

          Reply
          1. Setsunael

            Well, considering that the ad market is quite catastrophic lately (there was a single 90-second ad break during today’s show) and the live production costs, the phone-in competition is quite needed there to fund the prize budget (even if I was never fond of that for every TF1 big-money gameshow too)

            It’s indeed the same boxes and set that were used in the previous reboot, adding a 250K€ box this time. Unfortunately, as many of you noticed, the Banker was quite obvious on its game – hopefully that’ll be corrected soon if ratings stay afloat.

  1. Brandon

    They’re actually in the studio, rather than doing it remotely, I’m surprised! I’m not really sure how you would do this variant of DoND where future contestants open the boxes over Zoom or something, other than posting them the boxes every day and just trusting that they won’t open it before the show.

    Reply
  2. David

    Fox in the US has their Ultimate Tag show starting this week- here’s the 18 (!) house taggers…

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1262103804612431873

    and the 5 courses:

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1255889386769702915

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1258063818686595072

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1259528392191479811

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1260253162562297859

    https://twitter.com/UltimateTagFOX/status/1262427784623935488

    (the Dome course looks like the one that would have fit in on Gladiators)

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      This might be quite fun – definitely feel the Gladiators vibe – but will the fact that it’s basically five games of Pursuit hold up over an hour? We’ll see.

      Reply
  3. Chris M. Dickson

    I’ve devised a UK-specific sequence puzzle and don’t know where else to publish it. What does this sequence represent, what comes next in it to replace the ?, and how certain can we about the answer?

    19, 23 1/7, 27 1/7, 26 1/7, 30 1/7, 26 1/7, 28, 21 2/7, 23, 24, 24, 25, 24, 24, 25, 24, 24, 26, 24, 25, 24, 24, 25, 31, 292, 25, 33, 33, 30, 27, 27, 27, 24, 25, 24, 24, 25, 24, 24, 25, 31, 31, 30, 31, 31, 31, 32, 188, 32, 32, 32, 32, 31, 31, 32, 32, 32, 30, 30, 30, 31, 30, 30, 30, 30, 31, 31, 30, 30, 30,30 , 30, 30, 30, 30, 31, 31, 31, 30, 30, 31, 31, 31, 31, 30, 30, 31, 31, 31, 30, 30, 30, 31, 31, 31, 30, 30, ?

    Reply
  4. David B

    Speaking of technical difficulties… the Schlag den Star channel has been making old Schlag den Raabs available (it’s up to ep. 20 so far). There is a hard to find but interesting feature on YouTube – if you go to the settings cog, then choose “Subtitles/CC – autogenerated (German)” and then go to the same setting AGAIN and this time choose “Auto-translate —> English” you effectively get the equivalent of a Babelfish. It does a fairly decent job of translating most things sufficiently, enough that you can follow much better what’s going on.

    For instance, the (in)famous event on episode 2 when the Notary had to come down and cancel Game 7 is now understandable. You can watch it here from 1:42.30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQKDBfhYIug

    Reply
    1. Chris M. Dickson

      Well, that’s very cool, and I particularly liked the emergency cue card for the replacement game seven popping into shot and being whipped away at 1:44:54. I presume there are autocues lined up and used for most of the games, but in an emergency situation like this, I imagine it wouldn’t be possible to bring them up to date quickly enough. The substitute game also proves surprisingly interesting. (Also: a shirt with elbow patches, Stefan? Maybe it’s a German thing, though I kind of like it…)

      Thank you for sharing!

      Reply
  5. Chris M. Dickson

    Very exciting to hear who the special guests are. I was assuming they’d be Luna and Lobo, and very much hope that Luna and Lobo do make further appearances later.

    Reply

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