Wheel of Fortune, alongside Jeopardy, I’ve always said is one of those shows that if you launched now would fail – there’s really not a lot to them, and there’s going to be not a lot to them for sixty minutes at a time now. In many ways it’s exciting that we get to test the hypotheses out, and Jake Humphrey and Sony must have worked their black books to get the talent for Whisper North given that ITV have turned down commissions for both of these shows in last few years – Jeopardy with Richard Madeley and Wheel with Alison Hammond, there must be proper belief that the talent is going to bring in the viewers – what Norton is going to bring to the wheel is anyone’s guess really. I am certainly intrigued to find out.
Also today Ryan Seacrest was announced as new host of US Wheel after Pat Sajak retires after the next season.
Monday to Friday (and the next Monday) 8pm, More 4
It’s radio’s cult music quiz Popmaster but now Ken Bruce isn’t working for Radio 2 anymore, it’s on More 4.
There are some modifications for this TV outing – five sixty-minute heats all this week with the winners going through to the Grand Final the following Monday, and each heat will have five contestants in it. As I understand it, although may have duff info, the five will get reduced to two in various rounds and they will play a traditional game of Popmaster to determine the winner. Whether it will have better prizes than the one on the radio remains to be seen. You can play along with the daily show on Greatest Hits Radio every weekday from 10:30am, if somehow you weren’t previously aware of its existance.
Let’s hope it’s better than a 3 in (out of) 10. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Been a while since I’ve done this! But that’s the reality of everything getting shot in Salford, so when something new and London based turns up I’ll try and jump on it.
Password is a remake of an old US show that has been tried here several times 40-60 years ago and last year Jimmy Fallon bought it back for a full run after using it as a filler item in his late night show for a number of years.
We of course don’t really have that association, it will have to stand on its own two feet. I think it does a better job than I think the format would otherwise do being played more straight, there’s a game being played here, but the stakes are relatively small (the top prize is £10,000) and they’re playing up the comedy. The result is a fun show, but also a bit messy, a bit sloppy, and I’ve no idea how it will edit. The hints suggest it’s aiming for a weekend post-watershed slot, not dissimilar to the one The 1% Club holds, and it seems to be 45 minutes rather than an hour – two ad breaks.
My first thought is “goodness me, this is a large set for what is basically some fixed cameras pointing at a 10ft elongated table”. It feels larger than the one on Fallon’s show. The theme tune seems to be the same one as Fallon’s – hip-hop jazz trumpet.
Our host is Stephen Mangan, who plays the role pretty straight I thought (main job being to distribute the password packets – yes this bit hasn’t changed in 60 years), leaving the two regular team captains to do the heavy comic lifting – Alan Carr and Daisy May Cooper. Carr is good with his catty comments, and if like me you think explosive expressions of frustration is the highest form of comedy, and hiding under the table to puff on a vape between takes, Cooper’s got you covered. Cooper’s a bit of a loose cannon, good when its funny, but also on occasion undisciplined.
There are also two civilians who will pair up with our captains. It’s the captains who introduce them and do the interviewing.
Round one is regular Password. Players take it in turns to convey a word to their teammate using one word hints – 6 points on the first try, 5 on the second and so on. The first to 25 points wins the round. There are two lifelines that can be used – “swap” which changes the password and “boost” which is a bet that you can get them to solve with the first hint, the downside being that if you fail the opposing team also get to play the word for the full ten points.
How you say a word can be as much of a hint as which word you use, there are rules on “overacting”, the very first word had to be chucked out as both were a bit too full on, which wasn’t a good start. There were a few times where Cooper said a word and you couldn’t really make out what it was behind the vocalism, one of which cost their partner who realised what the Password was after the clue was said normally and thrown across. To be fair, both captains gave decent clues and made decent guesses throughout.
In the audience, we can see the Passwords on the screen, I’ve no idea if they’ll have a “the Password is…” on a voiceover. There’s a panel on the front of the desk you would assume will have a graphic inserted on.
The contestants swap partners, Round two is Super Password – once again you give and receive passwords but the passwords go up on a board and they have a link. You can win the round by correctly guessing the link, alternatively in a rule which feels unnecessary and also sounds like they were on the verge of dropping (and should have) you can win by getting the 25 points (despite saying it in the Autocue, Mangan said “oh I thought we were dropping this” during the round itself. But as the previous lifelines appear to have disappeared the only way to do this is to get all five words anyway so I’m not really sure what it adds other than the person behind getting to pass or play first, but that’s easily solved. The civilians can take one guess if their team correctly solves a Password. In one instance, Carr who has worked it out but can’t say anything backsolves an answer using the Super Password hints, which was smart.
If each contestant has won a round a tie break is played – essentially it’s a Super Password board on the buzzer – five clues are revealed, buzz in with the password and win, get it wrong and the opponent can see all five words and have a guess.
The winner goes through to Alphabetics which is so exciting they remove the desk and put in some podia. The winning player must convey ten words to the celebrities in 60 seconds – thirty for each – each word starting with 10 consecutive letters of the alphabet. When this originally was done in the US in the seventies it’s quick and tense, here it feels loose and a bit bloated – the segment took about twenty minutes to record – although we’ll see how it edits. The contestant earns £500 for each Password got, doubled to £10,000 if they get all ten.
However if they don’t get all ten they get a final chance to double their winnings risk free with The Last Word – one word, one clue, they then turn around whilst wearing headphones whilst Carr and Cooper discuss it for 30 seconds to come up with an answer. If it’s right then yay double money. I would presume given the £10,000 topline they’ve been going with throughout the show you don’t get to play if you win at Alphabetics.
They actually had to record this bit twice this afternoon as something happened I’ve never seen before (but probably happens a fair amount) the audience giving the answer away. Without revealing complete details in case they want to use the word again, I don’t think we were meant to see this final word on our screens, the contestant gives what I think we’d suggest is a not-premium clue, captains start discussing unofficially before the ‘proper’ thinking time starts and hit it and the audience gets very excited. They then have to discuss it for 30 seconds awkwardly pretending they don’t know what the answer is. The adjudicator adjudicates they have to do the whole thing again, only now it’s properly tense as the contestant already thought they won the money. Happily they understood the reasoning – that it has to be fair to past and future contestants, but the cheer when it goes right the second time was quite something. I don’t want to spoil outcomes, and I don’t think I’ve given many clues away as to which episode this might be, but I think in this case I do need to explain the story.
Ultimately it was quite a fun 2-and-a-bit hour recording. My fear is is that if you’re watching it at home you might suspect the funniest/rudest stuff will be left on the cutting room floor, and I suspect you’ll be correct to think that – the material wasn’t especially innuendo laden in the main, but there were plenty of “fuck’s sakes” flying about. It was a bit messy, which is fun as a live experience, but I can’t work out how it might feel in the edit. I’m certainly more confident it might pick up a following after watching it than I was before though, although I hope their expectations aren’t too high.
Great to see the return of 2021’s HOTTEST host promo trend, the crossed arms, which looked like it was falling out of fashion for a bit.
Thursdays, 8pm, (8:15pm ep1) Channel 5
Historian host Lucy Worsley invites six people to compete in rounds involving various aspects of puzzle solving (words, maths, lateral thinking, observation, memory – it’s like the Olympics OF THE MIND) starting off as two teams of three and then the winning team competing against each other to find the show’s winner.
Might seem like an unusual commission for Channel 5, but it is the sort of thing that you think might suit its current audience targets (slightly older and upmarket than other channels try for) quite well, they have form here – Eggheads does alright for them, they tried Britain’s Best Brain years and years ago, and what is this if not basically an upmarket version of Brainteaser? The obvious headline here is it’s Channel 5 trying to tap into Only Connect‘s audience, how successful they are at that remains to be seen. I’m hopeful but sceptical.
Haven’t done this for a while, and my peak work period is over for the year which is just as well because look at this little lot coming up:
22nd June: Puzzling on Channel 5, 8pm. Lucy Worsley hosts new puzzly gameshow on Channel 5, two teams of three compete in challenges of logic, observation and mental agility, the winning team must then compete against each other to determine an overall winner to go through to the final. We’ll have a Show Discussion post for this in due course.
23rd June and various: Password with Alan Carr and Daisy May Cooper films in London and there are still tickets avaliable.
26th June: Popmaster on More 4, 8pm. Ken Bruce brings his music quiz to TV. Do you remember the Popmaster vs Ten To The Top Wars of about April 2023? Great days. A show discussion post will appear in due course.
27th-29th June: One Question with Claudia Winkleman is filming in Hammersmith, tickets are available.
28th June: Muscles and Mayhem on Netflix. You wait 30 years for a documentary on American Gladiators and then two come along at once – the recent one on ESPN was well received, what different stories this one will have remains to be seen.
30th June: Is It Cake Too? Launches on Netflix.
1st July: It’s the OFFICIAL start of Summer as Fort Boyard returns to France 2, 8:10pm UK time. Catacombs, a new big platform, watchmaking and a pirate ship all promised, amongst other novelties, and Pere Fouras has nine new assets (well, some are repeats from last year) to modify and shake up the format. Last year France 2 dropped their geoblocking between 8-11pm UK so you could watch it live if you wanted without messing about with a VPN so fingers crossed you can do the same this year. Discussion in #fortboyardchat in the Discord.
4th-7th July: Deal or No Deal is filming in Salford and there are still tickets available, although some shows are starting at 9:15am so God knows how early you need to get there for those. Also it’s being done by Applause Store, so they’ve probably given out three times as many tickets as seats and you’ll probably have to open a box to determine if you actually get in or not.
8th, 15th July: It’s the other two episodes of Die 100,000 Mark Show on RTL which are being burned off, which is a bit of a shame but there we are.
This new Korean show came out almost a fortnight ago on Netflix but thanks to peak-period work and, er, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I’ve only just got around to starting watching, I’m four episodes in now, and my Tl;dr opinion is: it’s good and an interesting idea, but it’s appeal isn’t quite immediate and you’ll need to be prepared to stick with it a bit.
Netflix are calling it a combination of Physical 100 and Survivor, I don’t think they’re terribly helpful things to compare it to to be honest but there we are. 24 women come to the Island of Fire to test themselves, they are in six teams of four each representing a different high-pressure physical job (police, firefighters, soldiers, stunt actors, athletes and security guards). First job – cross 1km of mudflats to get to a different island, grab your flag and pole (60kg) and come back across the flats to plant your flag in the arena. This is a race, as the fastest teams get to make a big strategic decision – on the island are six ‘bases’, each with their own pros and cons in terms of location, size, ease of access and such like. The map they’re given only shows the locations of the common amenities and their own base, they will have to recce to work out where everyone else is stationed. Every day, at any time, a siren will go off across the island marking the beginning of an eliminatory Base Battle – before each battle each team will hide a team flag somewhere in their base and each player will carry their own personal flag upon their back. If your personal flag gets captured you’re eliminated for the rest of the battle (and this is announced to the rest of the island so other teams have an idea of your team strength), but if another team manages to infiltrate your base and remove your team flag, your team is eliminated from the show and that team will take over your territory – so there’s lots of talk of strategy, who to attack, how much to defend, that sort of thing. There’s almost a fencing like quality to these base battles, lots of spying looking for an opening, feints, counterattacks and the like.
What there isn’t much of is a great deal of levity, at least in the initial episodes, these are Very Serious Women playing a Very Serious Game and it’s not really until after the first Base Battle the show chills a bit and gives us a bit of slice of life and gives us a chance to learn about the contestants so we can start backing them. Between base battles, the teams can buy food, equipment and defensive supplies to improve their base from the store, the currency is the calories burnt in the previous day – there’s a communal gym they can train in to earn currency although perhaps tellingly the team with the most to spend seems to be the one which does the most running. There’s also an Arena Battle, the one I saw was quite good, making and putting out fires and was probably the first chance anyone got to breakout and look quite heroic, the winning team wins equipment and timed-shield so their base can’t be initially attacked during the next base battle.
I think they could have done a bit more with the mysterious island setting, it seems a shame that other than each other’s bases there’s not much else to find through exploring.
I’m invested now so I will watch the rest, helped that episodes (other than the initial hour long one which dragged a bit) clock in at around 45 minutes. There are definitely some interesting concepts here – I don’t think defense building and base raiding has really been done before, but it’s not something that might click immediately.
