Weekdays, 5pm,
ITV1
We’ve always known that physics is cool and great for games but it’s only really since Tipping Point that television makers have tried to tap into this burgeoning branch of science.
The latest show to try not to fail in the The Chase summer slot is Freeze Out hosted by Mark Durden-Smith and involves players answering questions and playing variations of shuffleboard on a gigantic circular ice table which has different graphics projected on it each round to create targets.
This is a fun idea but just a few alarm bells are ringing, namely because of this from the press release:
Freeze Out is essentially a brand new sport – combining accessible questions with a table game of skill, precision and power.
Hosted by the ever-affable Mark Durden-Smith, and officiated by former Premiership referee Uriah Rennie.
Nothing says they understand the lightness of a touch a 5pm quiz requires than suggesting ‘hey – we’re not just a quiz, we’re a sport!’ and having a premiership referee on hand to officiate, something not seen since Paul “Durks” Durkin on Simply the Best.
Also it’s not helped by Hello Campers basically tanking at 4pm, although having Tipping Point repeats as a lead in might be too much physics for the average viewer. We’ll see.
The closing date for contestants was just three weeks ago, so this is a super fast turnaround or they’re hoping to make more very quickly if it takes off.
Speaking of Tipping Point, did you see this review by a New Zealand writer?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/70649349/TV-Review-Tipping-Point
Amazing!
I fell by the wayside when it came to being on this show, BUT if it goes well, then who knows? I could be called up to be on a proper series and after seeing how the game works, I could think of some strategies to help me win.
Next Schlag den Raab – 12th September
Thanks!
Well that was a BOAWJ….
It’s as if someone thought “Tipping Point has done well – let’s go down to the arcade”, and they found an ice hockey table.
Alright, the first full episode is under our belt so you know what that means. Yep, time for the complete format rundown. Another reason I always like knowing the full rundown of the format is because I also wonder if the show would do well in America.
Yep, that time again 😀
OK, 5 players compete in a series of elimination rounds all played on a giant circular sheet of ice, with the sole survivor having the chance to win up to £10,000.
Round 1 is Smash Out. In the centre of the ice table is an arrangement of 7 blue sliders (they look like smaller hand-held versions of a curling stone with a dome on top for grip). Each contestant in turn then answers general knowledge questions against the clock. Each time they get a question correct, they earn an orange slider with which to try and knock the blue sliders out of the marked circle on the ice table. This is repeated for all 5 players, with the slowest player going out.
Round 2 is Centre Slide. The ice table is divided up into 5 coloured rings worth 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 points with the centre red spot worth 100 points. Each player takes it in turns to push a colour-coded slider onto the ice table (pink, green, orange and blue), which will determine how many points they will get for a correct answer, and knocking other player’s sliders IS allowed. After each player has been asked a question, they repeat the slider phase for the next round. This is repeated 4 times with each player getting to push their slider first. Lowest scorer is out.
Round 3 is Ice Breaker. The ice table is divided into 3 coloured zones consisting of 8 jagged shards. Questions are now on the buzzer. If you get a question correct, you get to push a slider onto the table. Should your slider cover more than one shard, ALL of them are removed, and if your slider lands on an opponent’s shard, that too is removed. If you get a question wrong, you are frozen out and your 2 opponents each get a free slide. The first 2 players to remove all their shards are through to the next round.
Round 4 is Face Off. The ice table is split in half with a circle marked in the middle. Questions are again on the buzzer. Each correct answer allows you to push a slider, with the aim being to get as many sliders as you can into the centre circle. When the time is up, whoever has the most sliders in the centre wins. On this first episode, though, it ended in a draw as neither player had a slider completely in the circle, so they did a tie-breaker called Super Slide Off. One more question was asked on the buzzer. If you are correct, you can choose to slide first or second, a wrong answer gives your opponent that choice. You then each get one slider and whoever is closest to the centre wins. The obvious tactic here is to ALWAYS go second, so you can knock your opponent’s slider away or pitch it closer if they fall short, so this was an easily exploitable situation, I think.
In The Final, you get 60 seconds of quick-fire questions with each correct answer earning you a slider. The table is then divided into 4 rings worth £500, £1,000, £2,000 and £4,000. The idea is to push a slider into each circle in turn, starting with the £500 circle. If you manage it, the slider is returned and you can move on to the next circle. If the slider ends ANYWHERE other than completely within the circle, the slider is taken away from you. After you have completed the 4 circles, you can then attempt to get a slider in the red spot in the middle for £10,000.
As an addendum, after you complete each circle in the final round, you can choose to leave with what you have or play on for the next circle. I’m guessing that if you DO play on and you lose all your sliders, you lose everything.
Okay, skipping the set description as Brig already summarised it well enough…
Freeze Out sees five contestants compete over four rounds to reach the final where a £10,000 jackpot is at stake. One player is eliminated every round and the game is essentially curling on a gigantic ice-hockey table (using “sliders” more akin to something seen on an air hockey table if you ask me), though each round has a different spin.
The show starts with us being introduced to all five contestants, who give their name, location and an interesting fact about them. We are also introduced to the show’s judge and adjudicator, Uriah Rennie, who is referred to for the rest of the show as the “Ice Judge”. As well as announcing the name of each round, he makes the final call when the result of a slide is unclear; and there is a running “gag” throughout the show in that he remains steely-faced the entire way through and will not respond to any conversation thrown towards him unless it’s related to the result of the game itself – this is not funny AT ALL, and will probably grate after several episodes.
Round 1 is Smash Out and is a quick-fire quiz played one by one. The table is set up with 7 blue sliders in the centre. A correctly answered question allows the player one use of a set of orange sliders; which they must use to knock all the blue sliders outside a ring that takes up about a third of the table’s centre. If any blue sliders bounce off the table’s edge and back into the ring, they remain in play. The slowest player to complete this round is out.
Round 2 is Centre Slide. The four remaining contestants now take one side of the circular table, on which a bulls-eye is now projected. Players take turns to slide the slider as close to the centre as possible, with 100 points on offer for hitting a red circle dead centre of the table; and decreasing points for landing mostly in a ring outside the centre, with the circles increasing in size and the point value decreasing the further out you go: 50, 40, 30, 20 and 10.
After all the players have played their slider, they are each asked a question in turn to bank the points their slider ended up on – an incorrect answer scores nothing. Because all players slide before the questions are asked, one player’s slider may hit another and change the value of the question for that player by moving it to a different ring. This is played a total of four times; lowest cumulative score is out.
Round 3 is Ice Breaker. This time the table is split into thirds; one third for each player, their third being the side furthest from their buzzer. This round is a buzzer quiz, correct answers earning the right to slide again. Each player’s third of the table has “cracks” superimposed onto the ice splitting the ice into 8 chunks. Any chunks the slider land on to are removed from play; and the aim is to remove all 8 pieces of ice from your side of the field – though if your slider lands on someone else’s third, you will remove THEIR pieces! This is played until two people clear their field.
Round 4 is Face Off and is another buzzer quiz. This time the two remaining contestants are aiming to land their sliders so they rest completely inside a ring in the centre of the table (which is only about twice the diameter of the sliders themselves). A correct buzz gives the player one shot; an incorrect answer passes the shot to their opponent. When the buzzer sounds, the player with the most slider in the centre is the winner.
In today’s episode, this was a tie, so a tie breaker was played which was entitled Super Slide Off – this is simply one shot each, closest to the centre wins.
The Final is imaginatively called just that. The remaining contestant plays a 60-second quick-fire quiz to earn one slider per correct answer, with which to use in the end game. This game is basically Centre Slide again; however the rings are now much smaller and further in. The player must aim for the ring furthest out first; and land their slider so that it remains COMPLETELY in the ring. Success gives the player their slider back and earns £500; but they can then gamble to try to hit the next ring inwards. Further successes win £1,000; £2,000; £4,000 and finally £10,000 for a successful shot dead centre. However, if a slider does not completely land on the ring currently in play, that slider is lost to the player and they must try again – if the player runs out of sliders, they leave with nothing.
If anyone sees any details I missed out or thinks they can make this clearer, please feel free to improve my summary. I was not watching with complete attentiveness today, but I believe I gave a solid description nonetheless.
Seems like Kesh was a lot faster than I was at summarising the format, sorry that there are now basically two similar comments 😛
Don’t worry about it, yours seems much more cohesive than mine 😀
I actually rather enjoyed that – much better than Tipping Point – I can’t understand why that still exists!
Full credit once again to ITV for actually being willing to take The Chase off air rather than just stick on repeats as Pointless do.
“Fun” fact – at time of writing the episode 1 on itv player online is different to the one broadcast today.
Amazeballs!
I noticed the Sky EPG said the ITV broadcast was Ep2 but I assumed that was just a mistake.
Freeze Out left me… cold.
It didn’t do anything wrong, but I didn’t feel wowed by it. The ice judge felt weird – thought they were going for an Osman/Armstrong combo, but it didn’t work (i.e. they both have to talk).
At least they used the central prop far more than the like of The Edge
It was all fine but just didn’t resonate with me.
Now, it’s been pointed out that people felt that way at this stage with Tipping Point, and I do agree with that sentiment, it could warm up. At the moment it just feels a bit ‘meh’ to me.
Still, good luck to it, I do wish it all the best.
I actually enjoyed Freeze Out and I’m kinda bummed I didn’t get a chance to have a go. The different rounds are novel concepts and a couple of the games have decent tactics you can employ, such as knocking other player’s sliders away in the Centre Slide round and the Face Off round was VERY tactical.
I DID feel that the final round was a tad unfair. I would say that if the majority of the slider is in the circle, then it should be given as I feel it’ll be VERY hard to get the slider completely within it. At this rate, it’s hard not to think that there’ll be quite a few shows where nothing is won.
Kudos has to go to the graphics projected on the ice table as I love stuff like that! I think, with a couple of tweaks to make it a bit fairer, this could be a hit.
It wasn’t clear what was counted as ‘in’ and ‘out’ in the rounds, the sliders needed better marking.
Whilst the rounds were different, I could help but feel things were quite ‘samey’ at points, can’t put my finger on why, there was no reason to think that and TP does it too.
Yes, I agree, there DOES need to be a clear distinction about what’s counted as in or out. Tex lost the Face Off round just because the TINIEST bit of his blue slider was over the edge of the gold circle, but yet in Centre Slide, they used the majority rule to determine how many points their sliders were worth. There needs to be consistency.
The DS community absolutely HATE the show! Oh, and they’re not called ‘sliders’ any more, they are hereby named ‘thingies’ 😀
I can live with ‘thingies’.
Was it me or was Uriah Rennie paying an homage to Shaun Wallace? 🙂
“World Series Of Dating” (BBC 3) is also brought back to me, its referee also paid a tribute to Shaun.
Given the no-touching rule, the £10k appears to be virtually impossible to win, in the same league as (or even more difficult than) the £25k on 1000 Heartbeats.
Otherwise, though, I’ll echo the other comments and say that I liked this more than I thought I would. But if there’s no variation in the games played from day to day, it could quickly get a bit repetitive.
Side note: I would pay GOOD MONEY to see the role of the Ice Judge played by Joe (“zero pounds”) Lycett.
It looked to me like the centre dot in the endgame was almost exactly the same size as a slider, which doesn’t quite sit right with me. That’s a gamble nobody will take. I can’t think how the rules could be modified though to give a more enticing gamble.
Here’s what I’d do:
-Instead of doing the rings in order from outside to in, they can do the rings in any order.
-it doesn’t have to land full but it’s where the center point of the slider lands.
-once a ring has been landed on, it goes black, and counts as a miss if you land on it again, with one exception.
-the bullseye is always live; land on it you can use it to take out any ring you haven’t gotten to that point, but to win the 10K you have to land on it after all the other rings have been hit.
As an aside- Countdown had one of those unusual incidents with the letter picks today…don’t think it’d be accepted though.
https://youtu.be/Cb9zt-bFFhw
Agree the referee was completely redundant, but on the whole they got the rest right – even Mark Durden Smith wasn’t too annoying. I somehow missed the final round – I’d assumed they’d actually gone for a head to head final with a guaranteed winner, and somehow missed the rest. I’m 90% sure I didn’t fall asleep!
Looks like this is only on for two weeks so any idea what follows it – I’m assuming the 21st Question isn’t returning.
Talkback Thames’ other show Rebound, presumably.
I don’t know if this has been stated somewhere else, but Rebound does indeed start on the 17th August.
Well this was a bit of a mixed bag and no mistake.
The table initially looks really impressive (and gets less exciting after looking at it for twenty minutes) except that the ceiling projection is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse – in the opening round, when you get the head-on shots it’s not always easy to distinguish between the blue ones they’ve got to knock out and the orange ones they use to slide. Later on this same effect becomes quite useful in seeing if a slider straddles a line. David B on Twitter suggested putting lights in the pucks to counteract the projection, I suppose you could also turn them off where more useful.
Using “slide on!” when you mean “correct” got *very* tiresome *very* quickly. I know you want your show to be memorable, there are better ways of doing it without irritating your audience frankly.
Really hate the lack of clock in round one it would be the best way for viewers to determine how well a player looks like they’re doing. I know that makes it easier to edit but more annoying to watch.
Pounds for Points was OK.
Round three, Ice Breaker, was my favourite round I think – fun to watch, good sense of progression, seems a bit strange that you’re trying to break your own ice and not trying to eliminate your opponents’ but it wouldn’t be much fun to watch if two people ganged up against one to be honest.
Face Off is mildly clever in that the last player to act has a large advantage, but as nobody has any idea who that will be and generally the best answerer has the best chance it doesn’t feel too golden snitchy and goes rather back and forth throughout. Will be interesting to see if anyone tries any blocking plays, or if the table is too small to make such a thing a reliable tactic.
The final I think I need to see someone get more of the questions right before I can make a proper judgement, it seems like a sound idea but not crossing the line feels rather harsh, and that £10,000 can’t be much bigger than the size of the puck itself which is a ridiculous gamble, but the questions certainly came thick and fast during that minute and certainly 12+ chances seemed possible.
If that’s the ending they’re leading the show with, god knows how the rest of the run is going to pan out.
Mark Durden-Smith reminds us that actually he’s quite decent at this sort of thing. Not sure what to make of Uriah Rennie to be honest. He doesn’t do anything that Mark and a quick edit couldn’t do, my gut says if they were going to do this sort of thing, someone who is still blunt but a bit more physically expressive, like a Vic ‘n’ Bob character, might work a bit better. I’m not sure.
The music is largely terrible, and the screeching during the final round question answering completely unnecessary.
Does it smell like a hit? I don’t think the show’s completely awful, but your show’s big USB the big table is not actually all that interesting (it doesn’t have the wow factor of the Tipping Point machine to be perfectly honest), I think the games could do with being a bit more aggressively tactical (they sort of touch upon it but don’t really go far enough), there’s quite a mismatch in tone between host and contestants and set and presentation, “slide on” is bloody annoying… I can’t see it myself at this point in time.
I haven’t watched today’s ep, but I’ve read a suggestion that the final round is guaranteed money if you get in a ring i.e not a gamble. Is this true? I think this is a good thing.
Yes, if you get the £1k circle, it’s yours guaranteed
Probably a personal thing, but the sliders looked extremely light – which really annoyed me for some reason.
I liked the board and Mark Durden-Smith presenting though, but the referee was completely pointless and didn’t like the sound effects.
1.53m (13.1%) for TX1.
Thanks.
It is no way going to be a hit. We have tipping point, The Edge and now this mixing a sporting element to a quiz. That 1.53 is going to start falling rather rapidly methinks…
The other fun element to this is that Hello Campers is tanking, *really* tanking, 540k last night according to a post on DS (or about a third of a Tipping Point), so it’s done quite well to get 1.53m with a lead-in that isn’t helping it.
I feel a bit sorry for Rebound though, there will be a sizable amount of people who tuned in yesterday probably expecting The Chase, Rebound in a fortnight will have no such advantage and will have to build from little.
This show is delightfully naff and terrible in the greatest way possible, from the slightly awkward format, the frankly weird and unnecessary “Ice Judge”, and the endless awkward references around “freezing” and “slide”. I found it really entertaining in a bad-ITV-gameshows-of-years-past way.
Also, today’s contestant looked a bit like Carolina Giammetta from The Armando Iannucci Shows, and that can’t be a bad thing.
Another addendum to the rules. In the final round, if you make it to the £1,000 circle, that’s guaranteed no matter what happens afterwards. That’s good, at least you get a safe haven instead of it being all-or-nothing like a lot of shows are these days.
I think they ought to do the same for the 4k because that middle dot is insanely small.
You DO get to choose whether to take the 4k or go for the 10k
The point David’s making is that it should be a free shot if you make it to £4k, because as a gamble it’s ridiculous.
Yes, in hindsight, that’s what I thought he meant. But having a guaranteed £4k means there’s no element of risk, so the pressure to make the 10k shot won’t be there. I’d personally have the 2k as the safe haven as it’s the middle value.
A gamble is no good if nobody is going to go for it, this is unbelievably misunderstood, at least there’s *some* excitement if someone actually attempts the super tough final.
Anyone know the ratings for the second showing?
I can’t be bothered to look it up, I’m afraid, but from memory it was something like 1.45m (12.9%). It’s within 200,000 of that anyway.
Finally saw this today…I can’t believe how annoying and unnecessary I find the “ice judge”! He’s wooden, stilted and impassive…I’d understand that a bit if they were trying to build a “character”, a pantomime villain…but they don’t use him enough to be doing that. Having him “announce” each round REALLY irritated me, as it sounded like a bloke who doesn’t read aloud particularly well reading it off a card…and yet the fact that, having announced each previous round, he didn’t announce the final ALSO irritated me…no consistency. AND…when MDS refers to him for a judgement, it seems like he’s just standing there – no nod to his point of reference, he’s just stood around. Would it have killed them to have a flat screen alongside him, with an overhead shot of the table on there so it actually looks like he’s judging?? In terms of gameplay, surely no-one’s going to take on that 4k to 10k gamble, are they – it looks impossible!!
Apparently they were going for some kind of comedy angle (I heard it’s made by the same people who do Keith Lemon’s shows) but MDS might as well be talking to a wall, really.
The “judging the line” thing really grates. Not only are the rules somewhat inconsistent between rounds (sometimes straddling the line is good, sometimes it’s bad) but a computer would be much better at making these decisions. The Edge uses ball tracking to light the LED strip, so why not do that here? Also, the quality of the projection is so fuzzy that these line calls are subjective at best.
MDS meets MDF.
1.37m for Wednesday according to this:
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showpost.php?p=79186209&postcount=10146
Not quite a disaster yet, but resolutely not a hit and if it doesn’t pick up today or tomorrow it won’t ever.
It’s probably not doing any worse relatively speaking than 1000 Heartbeats did and that got renewed. Reaction to that show was more favourable though which may have helped. Plus I don’t think 21st Question did much worse and that got the chop, so it’s very much borderline at this point I’d say.
The problem is what would be the point of renewing it? You might as well just try something else.
Also I dare say 1000 Heartbeats got a slightly easier renewal because of people involved in it. We’re informed that ITV management were backing it heavily.
When it comes down to it, the only 5pm renewal was getting 2m. If you can’t get 1.5m reliably then I’m not sure what the point of continuing is.
I’d agree with that, it does seem a waste of time. Fair point about 1000 Heartbeats, that isn’t something I had considered. Having said that, they renewed Who’s Doing The Dishes with dismal ratings so there doesn’t seem to be all that much of a pattern to it.
You have to wonder why they persist with these 2 week Summer trials, they never seem to work. They’d be better off doing what they did with 1000 Heartbeats and trying new quizzes at 4pm sandwiched between Tipping Point and The Chase, or at least leave Tipping Point on if they’re determined to use 5pm.
Wait a second – those “failed” Summer trials resulted in The Chase… and also The Fuse, which I thought was far better than most of the dross being wheeled out these days.
It’s quite fun to see what the situation was like at the time ITV decided to pitch their formats against each other, at the time Golden Balls was running in the 5pm slot but had been in decline, from a peak of 2.1 down to about 1.2m when it was axed (Wikipedia), Weakest Link would also have been heavily in decline by this point (2009).
The standards at the time were much lower, it would have been quite interesting to see if today’s shows would have been more successful five/six years ago.
And that for all of Golden Balls’ success, at its peak it was only ever half as popular as an episode of Pointless or The Chase today. 4-6pm is hyper-competitive now, sometimes it might even be the channel’s best rating of the day bar the news.
I do wonder if they’re showing two weeks of Freeze Out and then a fortnight of Rebound to see which performs better and then that gets a longer run. Isn’t that what originally happened with The Chase and The Fuse?
Well they’ve done this for the last few years, The 21st Question and Gift Wrapped didn’t return, and neither did Take on The Twisters the year previous.
They certainly are looking to find a new decently popular format, but the slots are so competitive that doing relatively better than the other is no longer good enough. The Chase and The Fuse was 2009, Tipping Point is the only replacement show that’s gone on to be a success.
Yes, good points. When Chase/Fuse came along, there weren’t many quizzes around and the bar was definitely lower.
The failure, imo, of Freeze Out, draws a line under quizzes with physical “things” in the them.
The main reason I can see for people hating on Freeze Out is because ‘it’s not The Chase’. I grant you, The Chase IS a decent show but I’m starting to go off it because of the many players taking minus offers now, so I’d rather see something new for a while. That being said, we can’t have The Chase on all the time so ITV are trying some new stuff out. And yes, I also agree that the Ice Judge IS unnecessary and makes the show grate a bit, but it’s not a bad show at all from my perspective, but as with anything, your mileage will vary. The Chase has set the bar so high that if any show isn’t as good as it, it’s automatically seen as crap which is unfair, I think.
I don’t think the problem is the props themselves: Big Break proved there’s nothing wrong with a quiz-and-skill combination so long as the skill is there. And if I understand the press release, Rebound may have a very different one.
The problem may be the playing surface. Freeze Out has two problems from Ice Warriors:
1) Ice only offers a limited vocabulary: go fast, hit something, stop on target.
2) “Comedy” character who amuses the host and annoys the viewer.
It’s pretty ridiculous to give a quiz ten episodes to see if it will stick. It might have worked when there were only 3 or 4 channels, but with todays multi-platform, multi-channel choices, it’s just a plain unfair. The fact that The Edge and Decimate have been re-commissioned 25 eps each, means that the first 25 each they did didn’t particular bomb, but didn’t excel and didn’t even do well…just so-so…so it was difficult to make any decision on either. So…they are basically doing a first run of each again to see if one does a bit better this time, not just in ratings, but audience research documents.
Joel Golby of The Guardian doesn’t exactly like it:
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2015/aug/10/on-thin-ice-is-freeze-out-the-most-ludicrous-game-show-ever
“It’s a quiz. It’s a curling competition. It’s got ex-Premier League referee Uriah Rennie in it. Meet the series so bizarre it’ll make you question the entire concept of game shows”
And what’s this I hearl about Monday’s episode being a repeat of the series opener?
It’s another one of those “it’s not just people answering questions behind a desk, therefore it’s THE MOST MENTAL SHOW EVER” pieces that I love. See also: every Digital Spy thread ever.
I pass for question two.
“There are no bad ideas in the graveyard slot of 5pm on ITV.”
Insightful.
I’ve seen all nine episodes so far and about thirty seconds of the first one again when it was reviewed by Kevin O’Sullivan on the Wright Stuff (right at the end of Friday’s episode, at 11am). I can resolutely assure you that the episode aired last Monday was not the same as the episode aired the Monday before that.
I think people who watched the “first” episode that was available on ITV Player might have got confused where they had seen the episode before.
Guess this will never see the light of day again then, though a shame really as it’s not that bad really – certainly better than Tipping Point and it all moved along at a decent enough pace. A couple of the rounds possibly need tweaking and the ice judge ditching but think it warrants a second trial run at least.
And at least it wasn’t Take on the Twisters!