Weekdays, 3:00pm,
BBC1
Shane Richie challenges teams of three to keep a golden wall of cash intact across three rounds with the hope of the team taking away whatever’s left in a nailbiting race against the clock in the final round.
Unfortunately each wrong answer costs 10% of their bank at the beginning of the round – hence decimate – but perfect play could see the team walk away with £20,000.
Main point of interest for us is that it’s from the brain of Hugh Rycroft who did Tipping Point, so doubtless everyone will slag it off then decide several years later it was good after all etc.
This has been on the shelf for ages… Anyone know why?
Just because they had a shelf of other stuff to get through first, I think.
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: The voice that goes “Decimate!” is Hugh himself.
Very nice theme song,
I quite like the keywords and the briefing so far.
Certainly not bad, but the whole time I was thinking it might have worked a bit better as a competitive show. Since they’re never really in danger of crashing out at any point in the main game, there’s not really nearly as much tension as there should be,
Shane Richie is still an excellent host, though. Glad to see Reflex flopping so badly hasn’t soured the BBC on him.
Not a perfect show, but not an awful one by any means. The pacing could do with being upped a notch a little as well. Main game is actually alright, the overrules and passbacks add to the game, even if it can adversely affect it. The bonus round gels well with me, against the clock, suitably hard (ditto with the varying question difficulty.) 8/10 from myself.
Yeah, it’s an OK show. I like the idea of the key words and the discussions so you have an idea of where the questions could go. The Overrules and Passbacks add a decent element to the game so that the 2 team-mates that aren’t playing get some input as the game progresses and the final round has some decent tension to it.
It’s instantly graspable and I get the twists and their implications and think they’re clever.
But I did get a bit bored about halfway through round two. There’s something a bit one note about the music and graphics. I thought the wall would be a bit whizzier and exciting. Surprisingly I think Shane has a bit more to work with on Win Your Wish List despite having to put half the effort in.
Basically it’s a technically proficient format but didn’t really do much to excite me, although I appreciate the wide variety of questions on offer and if you’re more of a quiz nerd you’ll be more forgiving. For me it’s too vanilla, but I wish everyone involved the best of luck.
I suspect they’ll never be a perfect team then. What did they win today?
It’s a shame the BBC won’t take some of the Pointless repeats out of the 5.15pm slot and give some of their new shows a better shot, or at the very least try them there after they’ve proved themselves earlier in the day.
And secede viewers to ITV? Unlikely.
Today’s team took £4800 to the final and lost.
A shame isn’t it that it’s our commercial broadcaster who’ll willingly take off their hit daytime show to try new formats (any news is last years efforts are returning?) while the national broadcaster would rather churn out repeats.
With Paul O’Grady on instead of The Chase at the moment the perfect chance to try something new without giving The Chase an advantage.
The new format of The Paul o Grady Show, there.
I think it’s safe to say neither The 21st Question or Gift Wrapped will be returning, no.
The BBC gets rather more flak for failures than the commercial broadcasters, so I don’t blame them for being more conservative.
In any case, they have more licence to ‘promote’ shows from BBC1 daytime or BBC2, whereas ITV can’t do that so much with ITV2 as its budget and audience is too different.
I agree that it has a good format in it but 45 minutes just drags it out that little too much for me, by the end of the second round I just skipped the third to see what the final was like.
The background music was a nice touch but the whole wall felt pointless, I think Wish List actually works better as Shane has the studio audience to bounce off.
I bet that this is a great show but can anyone give me the full rundown of the show to elaborate more on the basics that were given at the beginning of this post?
Sure, I’ll run down the show for you. There’s a team of 3 with a pre-existing relationship (I believe the team on the first episode was an uncle and his neice and nephew), and there’s a ‘golden wall’ split into 10 sections. Each of these sections is worth £2k, so there’s a total of £20k up for grabs. The team pick which of them will face the first round, then they are shown a list of 10 key words which will feature somewhere in the questions and have 20 seconds to discuss between them any key words that they might not know. The selected team member then answers 10 3-answer multiple choice questions. Each correct answer lights up the section of the wall, but each incorrect answer (punctuated by a voice shouting ‘DECIMATE!’ and a nice effect of the section ‘collapsing’) removes £2k from the game. The team have at their disposal 5 Passbacks which allows the 2 remaining team members to answer the question should the team member answering the questions not know the answer and need their help, and 5 Overrules which allow the 2 remaining team members to change the answer if they feel it’s wrong which they use by hitting a button in front of them.
After the first round is finished, the remaining money is reshuffled into 10 new columns for Round 2 (for example, if you got 2 questions wrong in Round 1, there’s £16k in play, so each column for Round 2 would be worth £1,600), 10 more key words are shown and one of the remaining 2 players answers this set of questions. Any Passbacks and Overrules used are not replenished. Rinse and repeat for Round 3 with the remaining team member answering the questions this time around.
For the final round, there are 10 more key words and the team decides who will answer first. For each column, there are up to 3 questions which get progressively easier and 2 minutes to get across all 10 columns. I believe Shane made mention that if all 3 questions on a column are used with no correct answer, that player is out and another member of the team carries on from where they left off. If all 10 columns are lit, they win what’s in the pot, if not, they leave with nothing.
If I’m wrong on any of this, feel free to correct me
Think Shane is much better on Wish List… Which is odd as he has much less to do.
722,000 (14.3%) for TX1. I don’t get Watch ratings so nothing for Envelopes I’m afraid.
That’s not quite great really, although the share isn’t completely awful.
To be honest, nothing for 7 Envelopes probably sounds about right.
7 Envelopes is just Take Your Pick merged with Deal or no Deal. Shame, as it could’ve been a good idea. You needed to spend more time with each person, tempting them with different things throughout the day rather than just going ‘envelope or box’. It may need more prizes and money to make it work properly, but there’s something there.
With regards to yesterday, why didn’t the contestant just quickly Pass all 3 questions on the 10th column?
Would have lost the 10% but still taken some money home rather than nothing?
No, if he’d passed on all three in the last column, he would have decimated out – if all three questions go unanswered in any one column, it decimates and that player is out. Next player steps up, the columns are reset and next player still has to answer a question in that column before they can move on. If same happens to player 2, player 3 then steps up – obviously if they then decimate out, their game is over.
To clarify, they still have to get a question correct in the column even if the money’s gone in it?
Oh hang on – if they decimate out then the money’s re-spread. Do they get a different category for the question?
They get a new keyword (and corresponding set of three questions), which hasn’t been seen by them previously.
Ah ha, thanks Jules. Can definitely see where John R was coming from from the spiel but that also makes sense.
That makes much more sense, but the fact about reallocating the money doesn’t seem to be mentioned by Shane at all in his explanation which was what had me confused!
“If you fail you lose that column and its cash”
572,000 for TX2.
Oof, deserves more than that.
Ouch!
This badly needs to be competitive. At the moment, I’m just wondering why I should care how much these three random people win.
I can recall Perfection, which used to air on the same slot (Coincidence Coincidence) and didn’t go anywhere until the final.
Did anyone win on this on this week, does anyone know? I saw Monday’s and Thursday’s £7,800 failure (which seemed quite harsh given that the first contestant blew through the first five questions).
Really averaging five correct answers to general knowledge questions a minute over two minutes shouldn’t be *that* difficult, and most of the answers are pretty gettable, and most of the keywords sufficiently wide-ranging that something will fall into your lap.
Tuesday and Wednesday were both winners; unfortunately I can’t recall how much each won as I watched them at broadcast and didn’t make a note of it.
Ta, looks like I’ve been pretty unlucky with the eps I’ve seen and heard of, then.
I think it was only Tuesday that was a winner with a pretty good win of about £9,000
On the other end of the spectrum: Friday’s team lost the cash by letting the wall crash before being timed out. Embarrassingly, all three team members couldn’t light the first column.
Does anyone involved in the show know whether there is a plan in case any team gets all ten questions wrong in a round? Unlikely though it may be, it’s certainly possible (we’ve seen scores of 4 or 5 just in the first week)
Alternatively, does anyone who has experience working in TV know of any possible plans? – would they just scrap that show and accept it as a loss of studio time, or could they bring in a consolation prize?
With the pacing of the episode I saw? I suspect they’d find a way of padding it out to fill the 45 minute timeslot.
…That or go with the Chase solution if everyone gets eliminated before the Final Chase of bringing everyone back with a token prize amount (I’d set it to 5% of what they went into the round with – So £1k in the first round, or if they go into the third round with £8400, give them £420 to play for in the final round; not that tension prior to the final round seems to be something the format bothers delivering) – Granted I’ve only seen that happen in The Chase in a celebrity special, but I presume they do it otherwise.
5 wins across the 25 shows which I think were around 4, 6, 9, 11 and 12 thousand.
Not vastly higher as a per-show prize than most BBC daytime stuff and probably balanced in the grand scheme of things by the low per-show wins on The Edge!