According to the normally reliable @tvscoops on Twitter, tomorrow there will be some sort of press reveal about Red or Black, Simon Cowell’s new big money game format. This is what has been revealed so far, it will be interesting to see how much of this has turned out to be accurate and if anything has changed:
- It’s going to be set in a stadium and will feature thousands of contestants. At one point there was a plan for some sort of pay-to-enter raffle to choose the contestants, although that’s gone a bit quiet.
- It will be stripped across the week.
- In each episode, several You Bet!-esque challenges will feature. The contestants must decide if the challenge will be completed or not. A correct answer means staying in the competition, a wrong answer means elimination. It’s sort of a bit like Ultra Quiz.
- However, what we do not know is if audience members are going to be assigned a response or whether they will get free will. The object is that at the end of the week one person will remain. Forced responses will get the numbers down quicker but will give rise to the suggestion that the ultimate winner doesn’t really deserve it, free will risks not getting the numbers down quick enough.
- Once the winner is found they simply have to guess whether a spin on a roulette wheel will end up red or black. Guessing correctly wins a million pounds.
- Ant and Dec are set to host.
I wasn’t initially all that enamoured with it – sure, it’s likely to get decent viewers for the final ten minutes but with so many contestants it’s going to be difficult to care about what’s happening for the first X-1 days. However I’ve since come to the conclusion that if the challenges are interesting and spectacular enough then it might be in with a chance if it can look and feel like event television and not, for example, Famous and Fearless. We’ll soon find out.
