Tuesdays, 10pm,
Dave
Greg Davies sets absurd tasks and challenges to five comedians whilst Alex Horne assists and keeps score. They’re playing for each other’s prized possessions.
Likely to err more on the side of comedy than game, but it also sounds like The Sort Of Thing We Might Like so what frankly are you going to do about it? It sounds likely to appeal to the sorts of you who may remember We Need Answers on BBC4 a while back, and Horne has suggested in interviews that The Crystal Maze and The Cube are inspirations – if it’s an hour’s worth of Shooting Stars-esque endgames, I think I can get along with that (tasks suggested to have come up so far include “eating a watermelon as fast as possible” and “painting a horse whilst riding a horse”).
Similarly to We Need Answers it was borne out of one of Horne’s Edinburgh Fringe shows, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent he seems to understand the genre pretty well.
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https://youtu.be/fNQ2yJOCCoI
Mmm, this was good fun, effectively it’s the physical version of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, but with the sort of funny tasks you might get on Big Brother:
1) Everyone brings a prize in, which are then ranked.
2) Eat as much watermelon as you can in one minute.
3) Paint a horse whilst riding a horse.
4) Empty a bathtub of water without damaging the bath (using items from the TaskMaster Cottage encouraged)
5) The live task, get into a pop-up tent and change into a onesie.
Tie-break) Find Alex hidden in the Cottage grounds.
For my money I think Greg Davies could have done with being a bit more antagonistic (I was expecting rather more treachery and comedy arguments in the studio than we got really, although Tim Key did some impressive cheating), the comics playing are all pretty good (Frank Skinner, Josh Widdicombe, Roisin Conaty, Romesh Ranganathan and Tim Key) and it looks like they’re going to be there all series (which may or may not work against it). Looking forward to seeing what comes up next week.
I also did rather like the Gladiators-esque theme tune.
I really enjoyed this. The best panel games, like Catsdown, are those where there’s plenty of time to mess around, which was very much the case here. I didn’t like Greg Davies when I first saw him but it’s clear here, like when he’s on WILTY, he clearly loves doing the show and that’s really appealing. I loved his goodbye when he was clearly desperately trying to avoid corpsing.
Hurling a watermelon to the floor and then throwing up was the funniest thing Rojesh Ranganathan has ever done on television.
I’ve said for ages that Catsdown and now this are the closest we have to an Asian style variety show – where there’s a loose format for a group of regular comics to riff off. Perhaps there will be other good examples in the future.
I’ve started watching a few episodes of Running Man, from Korea, and there’s definitely that approximate feel to it. The big downer, though is that there’s not a lot of opportunities for the participants to interact with one another, they’re all performing pretty much in isolation. Even for the final joint task!
That said, I think I saw a shot in the intro of two of the players on what looked like a squash court together, so maybe they’ll move in to more direct competition with each other down the line.
I am about 120 episodes into Running Man and watching last night’s episode of taskmaster I had the same conclusion.
The interactions between them in studio are the best part – They have 5 contestants and 2 hosts meaning they actually have the exact right number of people to do Running man.
Frank Skinner and Tim Key together could make a perfect EASY Brothers replacement.
As per your Twitter requests:
162,000 (0.8%) for King of the Nerds on Sunday
206,000 (1.1%) for Hive Minds last night
369,000 (2.4%) for Taskmaster
Is 1.1% bad for BBC Four?
As mentioned above, it got 505k for the opener so it implies there’s an audience for this. But to lose 60% of that audience is unfortunate.
I don’t think the scheduling is helping. OC had the benefit of weekly reminders after UC for years. Yes, they’re trying to keep the trailers going but it’s not the same as a “turn over now reminder”.
I think the show itself is quite solid but there’s quite a few things I would recommend tweaking for a series 2. We’ll see if they get the chance.
There was some talk of a companion app which I feel would do wonders for the show. Really am hoping it gets another series, I do enjoy there being a quiz show filmed near my uni.
A pretty damning thing about HM is that the two shows either side of it both did around 500k.
The trend being your friend, this isn’t looking very good for Hive Minds. I almost forgot it was on last week, I DID forget it was on yesterday, it’s out in the middle of nowhere which doesn’t help.
Thanks Paul. KOTN not quite a disaster. I don’t know if that’s a good figure for Dave.
That’s decent for Dave. It’s around about what Top Gear gets for them.
Ta! My knowledge of multichannel numbers is a bit lacking.
KOTN got the same audience share as Wild Things’ premiere then. I’d imagine it’s much more expensive so probably still no second series (though it probably does better on catchups throughout the week and has more social media interest).
Not launching Hive Minds with an app seems like a really major mistake. If it could ONLY CONNECT with audiences more.
KOTN launched with under 100k, so something’s going right for it based on that figure evidently.
Apps are very expensive. For a decent quality one, you’re looking at around £50-100k and a lead time of 4-5 months.
Web games are a bit cheaper but are somewhat out of vogue in this era of smartphones and tablets.
I’m surprised people just don’t make webgames that are touchscreen friendly.
I’m enjoying Hive Minds, but
A) I have series-linked the late night repeat (as I am recording something else)
B) I won’t be counted in the overnight viewing figures as it could be 2-7 days before I’ve caught up on it
And you probably don’t have a BARB box.
Episode two of this was really good, I’d have probably shown this one first – much more what I was expecting it to be like, looser and more arguing. And that tree wizrd song is in my head now.
Your mileage may vary.
Really loving Taskmaster after the first two episodes, both episodes have made me laugh a lot and the tasks are the kind of quirky I like.
Did the Pizza phone task today where you had to phone them and order a pizza without saying “Pizza” or any of the toppings. Was a fun way of getting people involved I thought, and from the sounds of it there was a lot of people trying to do it, so hopefully that bodes well.
Hoping this gets many more series if it can keep up the current standard.
Commissioned for TWO more series! Great news.
Dave showed the first three episodes back-to-back tonight. I hadn’t seen them before (to be honest, I thought it was going to be not quite my cup of tea – too much making the contestants suffer – but other than the cursing and a couple of off-colour references, it was genuinely family-friendly stuff) lots of good ideas there, raised quite a few smiles here and I shall be checking the listings if they’re showing the rest of the episodes soon.
Presumably there is a great deal of The Magic of Television combining the many different games that have been filmed into a number of coherent episodes with exciting conclusions, rather than people being told in advance that “right, we’re filming episode one, games one, two and three today”, but that’s no bad thing.
Yes this is almost certainly the case, although there is an end of series cup thing.
It also sounds like series two and three are being filmed back to back with different comedians in each one.