Trial trials

By | November 22, 2014

So we’re almost a week into I’m a Celebrity Get Me out Of Here and it’s usually around here I decide an hour a night is too much to give up on a nightly basis, record it and just fast forward through to the various tasks – as I’ve been saying for years, the I’m a Celeb task designers must be the hardest working people in television having to find yet another way to dress up enduring being covered in things/putting your hand in boxes of things/eating things tasks. And I think the set ups are largely great (see The Catacombs of Doom tonight), except that the viewers have latched onto one particular contestant who does badly and they just keep refusing to do the tasks. I don’t blame the celebrity in these cases, but after one refusal it becomes lousy television (so goodness knows why viewers keep doing it). The effort and expense gone to must feel like a bit of a waste.

However Sunday night according to our chums at Tellymix the live trial should be immense. It’s called The Critter Cube and is based on the popular-ish ITV1 show and is even going to have Colin McFarlane and a version of The Body. This sounds like it might be tremendous, I hope the viewers don’t stuff it up by voting someone in who woun’t give it a go.

9 thoughts on “Trial trials

  1. Lirodon

    Tomorrow is the bone-chilling(?) two-hour(!?) season finale of Canada’s Smartest Person. If you did not hear about it, it’s a sort of cross between Krypton Factor-esque studio games and a structure similar to Britain’s Brightest, except that the winner is decided with a race through multiple challenges (i.e. a “put the shapes in the hole” puzzle, having to play back multiple tunes on a piano-esque thing, one of those “get the red block out of the parking lot by sliding around the other blocks” puzzles, a Cube-esque jaunt where you have to carry balls on a ring across a teeter-totter, and filling in the middle letters of a bunch of words by dropping blocks into a stack.

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  2. Tom H

    Hello, it’s been a while etc.

    Some news from France: Face à la bande (the quiz discussed here a little while ago where celebs answered viewer-contributed questions) has been axed by France 2, apparently to be replaced with a Turkish format called Joker – which wouldn’t inaccurately be described as a Millionaire rip-off.

    Here’s an episode from TRT earlier in the year:

    http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-HVWHjJUFtU

    If you can’t be bothered to open the link, there are multiple-choice questions, a money tree and 10 ‘jokers’ to ‘cover off’ wrong answers. Only quirk seems to be you can fall down the tree but move up again.

    My Turkish isn’t fantastic but from what I’ve seen on the TRT website it’s already been moved to an 11pm timeslot.

    The French version will be hosted by Olivier ‘La Cible’ Minne though (Benjamin Castaldi from Secret Story and radio presenter Bruno Robles also did pilots but were passed over) so that’s something.

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    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I gather Minne Pyramide hasn’t been doing very well. He’s a great host but…

      Do you know how Cheapo Prendre ou a Laisser has been doing?

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      1. Brig Bother Post author

        Actually I wonder what they’re going to call it, there was already a quiz called Joker on France Televisions not so long ago.

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      2. Tom H

        Not really surprising when it’s being scheduled next to Mot de passe – two highly similar formats.

        Cheapo APOAL has started haemorrhaging viewers; D8 are currently running two episodes back to back. Presumably because they’ve got nothing better to show.

        First episode last Friday (aired at 1700) 184k/second episode (1750) 456k.

        Was about double that in both cases a fortnight before.

        Reply
        1. Setsunael

          It’s been like that since the start – Le Maillon Faible has been also running doubleheader (with the first ep. being a rerun) in September but it should stop soon as a new program has been announced for the 5pm slot.

          There’s been quite some variance in the slot too – since Maillon first eps,the ratings were swinging each day between 450k and 700k, but with good % on targets so they’re quite happy with that.

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  3. Alex McMillan

    Been waiting for OC’s “Connection” Sequence for a while, thoroughly enjoyed them flailing about with it. Although I do wonder whether the sequence was altered to accommodate the order the connections were done in, or if the connections were in a fixed order. It’s most likely that the sequence was dynamic, but I do fear the question would have been a smidge easy if the first clue had been “Web domains and Elements”

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    1. David B

      I had wanted to do that during my reign but there are two problems: first, the recording of the show usually does what you see on TV in that round 2 follows immediately after round 1 with no break. However, the computer needs to be reset and reloaded if you make any changes to it. So I imagine they had to fake some kind of technical problem to allow the computer operator time to do this.

      Second, in my version I wanted to use the 5pt clues as the sequence rather than the connection answers, which meant that pictures and music clues make that difficult to represent. I suppose you could wait for a show where the multimedia questions happened to be picked 5th and 6th, but you might be waiting a long time. I did also consider doing this as a pair of grid categories – so that four 5pt connection clues appeared as a grid connection in one team’s grid, and four 5pt sequence clues appeared in the other grid. Problem with this is that if you ever had to swap out any questions for whatever reason during recording, it could ruin your best laid plans in the grid round.

      In the end, it worked out rather well in practice given that the team who got that question had to remember their opponents’ question.

      Reply

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