Show Discussion: Release the Hounds

By | October 27, 2013
20 Comments

releasethehoundsMonday 28th October, 10pm,
ITV2

One-off horror comedy gameshow with a view to a series. Reggie Yates communicates with a team of three friends sent into a scary forest to complete apparently terrifying tasks and challenges for money, which they only get to keep if they can outrun the titular hounds at the end and escape the forest.

It taps into the primeval fear of it being very dark and the possibility that something may or may not be there. Letting people scare themself with their own imagination has been done before (in MTV’s Fear, for example), and has proven highly entertaining.

It looks like basically an hour of people getting “BOO!” shouted at them in the middle of the night for money, and whilst it sounds like a bit of a one-joke show it can be a helluva joke. I hope it’s got a little more meat to it then that otherwise we’re not sure it has a lot of places to go for a full series, but this is something we’ve been looking forward to for a while so are keeping our fingers crossed is good.

Show Discussion: Prize Island

By | October 26, 2013
25 Comments

PRIZE_ISLANDSundays, 5:40pm,
ITV1

It began in Mozambique last Autumn and somewhere between then and now it sounds like it got lost in Editing Hell – we’ve heard a number of interesting stories on the grapevine, our favourite being that ITV decided after filming that obscure TV host Alexander Armstrong turns out is a bit too posh for the ITV audience so they’ve tried to edit him out a little – I reckon the reason he turned up on fellow Endemol show Your Face Sounds Familiar was to try and ITV him up a little bit so they could actually broadcast this. I love these sorts of stories and would be fascinated to see what the original edits looked like. Oh and hey look, the brilliant Emma Willis is here as well, it’s not like the show is lacking talent. But despite this it’s not being advertised but it also doesn’t have much in the way of competition for the first episode, other than an American Football game and the first twenty minutes of Countryfile.

We may never get to find out the full story behind the development of Prize Island but that it’s been treated so badly seems rather a shame because on the face of it it’s Exactly The Sort Of Thing We Like. The press release:

Hosted by Alexander Armstrong & Emma Willis, Prize Island is a new, action-packed gameshow set on a sun-baked tropical island. Here, ordinary couples arrive in an extraordinary place to participate in incredible games and challenges to win prizes.  The island is a magical place, remote and untouched by the modern world – it is exactly the kind of paradise where we all dream of being marooned, filled with wildlife, sweeping landscapes, the odd vast shipwreck and tons of prizes.

The entire island is the show’s set, with over-the-top stunts and colourful games scattered across the landscape. A surprise lurks round every corner… fitted kitchens appearing from the ocean, TVs in the undergrowth, even hairdryers with very modern technology that lock in moisture dug from the prize seams beneath the abandoned Old Gold Mine. There is even the wreck of a half-submerged pirate galleon in one of the bays across which the contestants must race to stay in the competition.

In this episode four couples arrive on Prize Island to compete in games like ‘Coconut Superstore’, ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Swiss Family Plumbing’. After each round a team is eliminated, leaving only one couple to compete in the final located at the remote and mysterious Moonfish Bay. In ‘Buried Treasure’ the finalists will attempt to locate and win the ultimate prize buried in the sands – a new car and £50,000.

What’s not to like? It’s difficult to do action adventure in a way that a big mainstream audience will buy into, so I guess we’ll find out. It wouldn’t be the first show that channels have tried to bury but turned out to be quite entertaining – the BBC’s Drop Zone with Steve Jones comes to mind, so keep an open mind.

Edit: For balance, Richard Osman is suggesting the editing hell stories are nonsense.

Edit Edit: Thanks to Ashley, to everyone asking where it’s filmed, it’s believed to be Bazaruto Island off Mozambique.

Saturday Summer TV Massacre

By | October 25, 2013
9 Comments
  • That Puppet Game Show? AXED. I said it would be a hard sell, but ultimately it deserved better.
  • I Love My Country? AXED. Harmless fluff.
  • Your Face Sounds Familiar? Apparently there’s “no room for it in the 2014 schedule”, so look out for next Summer it sounds like ITV have MASSIVE plans.

Edit: Good news everyone! It sounds like Break the Safe has been recommissioned. Despite everything.

This sounds like fun

By | October 24, 2013
2 Comments

Iain Weaver has a ticket for thing that the likes of you might be quite interested in:

Are you free on Friday next week? Think you can outrun a horde of zombies? Can get to east London? Read on!

2.8 Hours Later is a four-mile walk around bits of a city. Groups of explorers set out, and are directed from location to location by actors. Unfortunately, there’s been an outbreak of the undead, and the route passes through clusters of ‘em, grasping and clutching and lurching like ITV2 viewers who couldn’t operate a remote control and reached “Only Connect”.

So the good walk is spoiled by sprints to outpace zombies, culminating in a frenetic run-for-it at the end. 2.8 works as a piece of immersive theatre, and a game of tig. It gets into the places the public don’t normally see, like the underbelly of a shopping centre. It lets people do things they wouldn’t normally, like call the police names. And it pokes gentle fun at the “would you survive the apocalypse” endtimes, because everyone gathers for a pint in the bar afterwards.

Winners get to gloat about surviving the end of civilisation as we know it, and the assurance that they can run faster than me. Losers get make up and then scare the bejesus out of hen parties on the way home.

This is a ticketed event, and tickets sold out in July. Following an injury to my companion, I have a spare ticket available, and I’d like to share it with someone in the game show fandom.

Here’s why: I’m going out to record the sounds of the event and create an audio documentary piece, hopefully good enough for publication. So I will give priority to anyone who will agree to join me and be recorded while answering the question “what just happened?”

Practicalities – the start is 7 pm on 1 November, and it is an all-evening event: don’t expect to be finished before 10. This year’s event is in east London, around Stratford and Canning Town. Face value of the ticket is £40, price is entirely negotiable.

Email the special address twopointweaver@rediffmail.com if you’re interested. I’ll contact all applicants by early next week.

If you’re interested then go for it!

Also! I expect David Bodycombe is still looking for contestants for Pen-damonium planned for this coming Monday, so go and have a look. Why not apply for Pen-damonium and use the prize money to buy Iain’s ticket? Joined up thinking.

RIP WWTBAM

By | October 22, 2013
11 Comments

The Mirror reporting that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? has finally been put out of its misery. Chris Tarrant is leaving the show after the remaining contracted specials.

Millionaire is probably THE most important TV format of the last twenty years and there is not a single show on television these days which doesn’t try and ape the presentation style or real life human drama element. But like any addiction the viewers required bigger and bigger hits, but there was nowhere left to go once Judith Keppel won the million, and by that point reality TV was in the beginnings of its boom and people the drama of people making idiots of themselves became more appealing than people answering increasingly difficult quiz questions.

In its final years it sort of just bumped along with celebrity specials and the occasional civilian episodes the internet cried out for but few actually bothered watching. And bloody hell, the guys from JLS were *robbed*.

Happily for Chris Tarrant who averages about one properly successful format for every fifty he fronts, he’s probably about due another one. It’s been suggested he’s a regular panellist on upcoming ITV quiz Show Me The Telly, a title that is roughly as appealing as Cook Me The Money but you never know.

Who Wants to be a Millionare? defined a time, but it’s of its time, and may be the last show we ever see that will pull 15m ratings on a regular basis in the UK.

And now 21 Questions Wrong in Russian

By | October 21, 2013
7 Comments

Because obviously:

 

Nice graphics.

Interesting about the lack of time limits to answer, I think that’s what makes a lot of Italians lose, but going by instinct is a lot of the fun of it I think.

Incidentally Twenty Questions Wrong with Ewan Spence is well worth a listen this week. Probably a few too many Person A or Person B questions (a very easy trap to fall into, in the Brig ‘n’ Dan 21QW “production” “bible” we deliberately set out to try and avoid this) but a fun game.

Don’t know when 21QW will be returning in audio form, we all seem to be moving house.

The Italian show seems to be breaking all demographic records, if Italian TV people on Twitter are anything to go by,