Episode 03: The NCSdfC Special

The-LineupHo ho ho! It’s Christmas, and that means it’s time for the The Line Up Christmas Special!

But it’s not just a Christmas Special, we have inverted tradtion to make it a non-celebrity Christmas Special! Also it wasn’t meant to be the Christmas Special, but thanks to timing it now is.

Once again the questions have been supplied by our good friends at QuizQuizQuiz.com. We like their about to be updated app. And we’re not just saying that.

Here is the direct download link for the episode. It’s just shy of 27 minutes.

And for those who are interested, a couple of show notes. Note that these contain SPOILERS, so you should probably listen to the show first:

  • This was meant to happen towards the end of last month but everyone involved was quite busy. The next one will be, fingers crossed, end of January.
  • I’ve just noticed this has been exported in higher quality audio than usual. So that’s a nice Christmas bonus for you.
  • Our contestants were the lovely Caroline and Ronald Stewart.
  • If the opening conversation seems a bit more stilted than normal, that’s because I forgot to set Audacity going until the category reveal so I had to recreate my bits in post. All the contestants chat comes from MP3 Skype Recorder, which wasn’t *brilliant* in this instance but will usually do. It’s certainly easier to edit.
  • The mystery category. I thought it would be quite a fun idea to have a category for each contestant that they won’t know what it is but also would be different for each other. Because this ending is so exciting I forget to reveal that this episode it was hairy/bald people, it might be more interesting to have a more oblique connection next time, we’ll see. As an idea it will be staying.
  • I’ve changed the time up effect to the one off of Bob’s Full House. This was the closest I could get to a clean version in the time I had.
  • The tie-break was genuinely made up on the spot after glancing across a bookshelf which is actually a ridiculous state of affairs. Happily I think it worked out OK. The new bed I created for it is more shrill than I thought.
  • Water rat/water vole is unfortunate.
  • A thing that TV’s David Bodycombe bought up after the last recording is wondering if it would be interesting to look at the results and see what the minimum you could have restricted your opponent to with the question ordering. By my reckoning, I think both Caroline and Ronald could have been restricted to 9 points, Ronald 10 if we accepted his final answer. You basically couldn’t split these two.
  • Once again our thanks go to Quizquizquiz.com for setting the questions. Here is the official spreadsheet revealing all the questions alongside their difficulties.

7 thoughts on “Episode 03: The NCSdfC Special

  1. Brig Bother Post author

    A quick guide to the restriction methodology I used, if you have a better model then do speak up:

    * Rank the categories by the amount of questions the contestant got wrong then place in the following order:

    * Where a contestant gets one wrong in a category, stick them in the highest scoring R3 slots..

    * Where a contestant gets two wrong in a category, stick one in the highest remaining R3 slot and in a R2 slot.

    * Where a contestant gets all three in a category wrong, stick one in the highest available R3 slot, one in R2 and one in R1.

    Reply
    1. Ronald

      Slightly more optimised version.

      Rank the categories by the amount of questions the contestant got wrong then place in the following order:

      * Where a contestant gets all three in a category wrong, stick one in the highest available R3 slot, one in R2 and one in R1.

      * Where a contestant gets two wrong in a category, stick one in the highest remaining R3 slot and in a R2 slot.

      * Where a contestant gets one wrong in a category, stick them in the highest scoring R3 slots… unless you’ve already placed questions in the other 4 categories, in which case stick it in R2.

      Reply
  2. David Bodycombe

    “Water rat” came after 14 seconds of thinking time, it has to be said…

    It’s not just the minimum score you can look at, there’s also the maximum score that you could have had if the questions had been put in the most generous slots possible. And the real result will obviously be between those two extremes.

    Reply
  3. Chris M. Dickson

    Enjoyed this again, and turning the final into The Weakest Link was good improvisation, which is probably one of your greatest strengths.

    Reply
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