Board of Excitement 10th March – 17th March (feat. the Gambling Commission)

By | March 10, 2012
52 Comments

No, it’s NOT April Fool’s Day, we’re just doing the Board of Excitement a day early.

  • In It To Win It – new series of the WILL THEY JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION quiz show. (8:30pm, Saturday, BBC1)
  • The Bank Job Final (9pm, Saturday, C4) And celeb specials next Friday and Saturday.
  • The Love Machine – in which Moyles and Solomon attempt to find people true love with a big machine. (6pm, Sunday, Sky Living)
  • Mix It Up Real Good – This week we’re all riding the HORSE. And you can come on this ride too if you want, it is free to enter. (8pm, Sunday, Pokerstars)
  • Wie is De Mol? Find out – at last! – who the Mole is, and everything they did. And find out who the winner is as well. (Hopefully Monday on Youtube)
  • Breakaway – There appears to be a lot of confusion as to what this is called, however it is definitely called Breakaway, and the whole thing appears to be based on cycling road races. Is it better to stay in the pack and share the £10,000 with better numbers, or attempt to breakaway and win the money for yourself? Nick Hancock hosts, we will have a show discussion page up for it on Monday. (4:30pm, Weekdaily, BBC2)
  • Schlag den Raab – Episode 33, and it’s been three whole months since the last one and there’s a million euro to defend after last episode’s whitewash. Incidentally, no Pointless Celebs next week because of the rugby. Again. (8pm UK time, Next Saturday ProSieben and naughty online streaming hopefully)

Meanwhile, Baggage pilot for C4 films Wednesday week at The London Studios. Don’t know who is hosting. Can’t go myself, but if you do then let us know what it’s like.

Meanwhile, this very interesting story from the Daily Mail came up at the weekend re: gambling and gameshows. Worth a read, because its implications could be pretty far reaching, and not necessarily in a good way.

How We Used To Play #1: Tic Tac Dough

By | March 8, 2012
21 Comments

Deeeerrrr-der-der-DERR-derrr, der-de-dellernerner der-der etc.

Well the gameshow world is very boring at the moment so it’s time to introduce a new irregular feature to the Bar where we look at shows of yesterday and try and work out how we would modernize them for today’s audiences. These do not necessarily have to be UK ones, although some exposure to the UK is nice.

The Show: Tic Tac Dough

What is it?
TTD is a quiz based around noughts and crosses. Players alternately picked squares with randomly determined question categories on. Correct answers owned the square and added money to a pot. The first person to get a straight line won everything in the pot (which rolled over in the case of tied games which happened frequently because of the low level difficulty of many of the questions), played a luck based bonus game (Beat the Dragon) for a prize package and could keep on playing. Unlike other shows of the era (and in this era we’re referring to the classic Wink Martindale fronted episodes of the late seventies and early eighties), there was no upper limit on how many times you could win.

http://youtu.be/A7e3G8hRBcM

Was this ever on in the UK?
It certainly was. We had a popular domestic version in the 60s called Criss Cross Quiz. Whatsmore, the Martindale version of the show was shown on sattelite channel Lifestyle in the early 90s. You know, the one with David Hamilton.

How would I make it work in 2012?
Well it’s certainly quite a fun format, but there are definitely a few things I would change. First of all, given that the whole thing is about money, I’d be sure to set it in a bank. Maybe even a bank vault. Then instead of screens, why don’t we change the game board elements for safety deposit boxes? I think that would work. I’m also thinking about ditching the categories and maybe just going for plain numbers, and to make it more strategic and exciting how about increasing the size of the game to five by five and having four players tussle it out? I think it would be very important to emphasise the inherent strategy of the game by having lengthy, increasingly INTERMINABLE GAPS AFTER EACH SODDING BIT, AND AT THE END OF THE SERIES YOU COULD GET PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY WON LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY AND MAKE THEM DO THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA FOR NOT MUCH MORE MONEY AND BUILD IT UP LIKE IT’S UNIQUE AND EXCITING AND FOR EXAMPLE NOT JUST FUCKING TRITE AND THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE JUST FEELS IMMENSELY LAZY AND OH GOD, OH GOD HELP ME AAAARGH

Next time we’ll be looking at The Joker’s Wild.

Acc-NEW-mulate

By | March 7, 2012
7 Comments

*mouths it*

*mouths it whilst using his finger as a sort of Keynotes style bouncing ball*

Yeah that works, episode five of this FINAL SERIES of student quiz Accumulate is now up. I think I’ve got that shirt, I’d like it back.

There’s nothing exciting happening at the moment is there? Or if there is, what am I missing?

Some dates for your diary

By | March 6, 2012
3 Comments

I’ve mentioned these in a previous comment thread, it wouldn’t hurt to make them front page:

  • Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge Series 2 continues immediately after last week’s series one final i.e. Saturday at 9am and repeated Monday at 5pm on CITV. The series has already been shown on Disney XD in the US.
  • Last year’s surprise hit Four Rooms returns for a second run 21st March, 8pm on Channel 4.

Be a winner with the Game of Life

By | March 4, 2012
12 Comments

We’ve gone done a new feature on US show The Game of Life which garnered a few votes in the Poll of 2011. We’ll have features on other Hub formats in due course.

This week we are mainly looking forward to the anglicised Wie Is De Mol? finale probably tomorrow.

Finally don’t forget it’s Round five of the Bother Series of Poker tonight at 8pm. £5.50 to enter, register now!

The mysterious @jmc116 tweets regarding last week’s Jacpot! revival on S4C: “It’s part of Pen8ros about 5 minutes in. Not as good as in the 90s though…” Video is UK only.

Sorry everyone

By | March 3, 2012
10 Comments

I appear to have developed a stomach bug and as such have no energy to do anything. BSOP round 5 will still happen tomorrow night, the planned feature on Game of Life may be postponed, we’ll see how I feel tomorrow. As you were.