In other news, Unbeatable starts its three week 30 minute run after House of Games tonight, before returning to 45 minute episodes in the daytime. Our show discussion post of the first series is here.
Die 100,000 Mark Show 2022
Tonight saw the return of Die 100,000 Mark Show to RTL. Old currency. Old host. (Largely) old games. It actually had roughly the same amount of content as the old 90 minute show, but incredibly despite being twice as long (three hours) it wasn’t until towards the end I was feeling the length a bit.
I don’t think it gets off to a good start – it immediately looks and feels quite a bit cheaper than the 90s original (there are plenty of eps on Youtube now, but you can read a write up of an episode here) although thankfully it kept the banging theme music. The original made out to be the most spectacular show on television – this clearly was not going to be the case in 2022. Similarly to the original it opens with an eliminatory obstacle course which hit many of the same beats as the original but not in *quite* the same way, and unexpectedly with a lengthy explanation video for everyone who doesn’t know how an obstacle course works, presumably. Clearly that was how it was going to stretch to three hours, but no this did not continue.
The show got rather better after that – a slightly dull meet the contestants true/false quiz followed by the first quite old school game, the human pinball machine, where one contestant acting as a “spring” had to pull themselves forward and let themselves go to launch a pinball into play, whilst their teammate had to simultaneously press buttons to keep the ball in play whilst sorting out a stripped and rearranged picture on a video wall for two and a half minutes, played three times and somehow worked. The rest of the show largely featured buzzer quizzes or physical set design that by the standards of the 90s show probably have the lowest budget necessary for it to work, but the games were certainly solid enough – many of them retreads as it is. Other places where you could see the stretch was the lack of physical bidding round replaced by both couples performing the task as a time trial.
There were also a couple of fun twists – the winning couple could choose to add a (expensive) car to their potential winnings if they also gave up their earnt money before the final, and the first game of the final came with a choice of condition – the lower the time limit they chose, the more false cylinders would be removed at the end. Disappointingly the Hot Wire was now a five minute (plus any time left over from game one) job, losing all the moving obstacles, pace and shouting that made it compelling almost thirty years ago. And the wait between entering the code and revealing whether it was correct or not felt like five minutes.
I’m not entirely sure awarding all prizemoney in Deutschemarks really added anything (basically halve to covert to Euro. I hope contestants don’t have to pay a conversion fee). Ulla Kock um Brink was very good though, if she hasn’t really done much television in about twenty years you wouldn’t have known it.
Four shows have been recorded and will be going out in due course – not weekly.
For no other reason than it makes me laugh, here’s the original intro to De 100,000 Gulden Show, the Dutch show Die 100,000 Mark Show was based on.
Here is most of the very first edition which comes before they learned what pace was, or a well thought out finale. Still, though.
Wie is het genie?
Ooooohhh we didn’t know about this, thanks to longtime FOTB Squared Eyes for this interesting bit of trivia:
3rd October! Perhaps THIS was the thing that Jinho was working on?
I’m so pleased the Dutch have actually done it (even though secretly I now what to see what the Flemish would make of it) – they love their use of existing soundtrack so that element shouldn’t be an issue, but I’m fascinated to find out what sort of look they go for.
Show Discussion: Fastest Finger First
Bank Holiday Monday 4:30pm,
Tuesday-Friday 4pm,
ITV
Well this is a bit of a curio and no mistake. It’s not the first Who Wants to be a Millionaire? spin-off (there’s 50:50 and Hotseat) and it’s not the first show to act as a feeder show to its bigger brother (daily Money Drop winners in Spain could gamble their winnings to play on the big money weekly primetime show). However it’s fair to say we’re really baffled by the broadcast strategy for this – the winners of each episode each weekday this week will play on upcoming episodes of Millionaire with Jeremy Clarkson on Saturday nights but there’s a weird anti-synergy going on, nobody’s really going to give a toss where the players have come from in the following weeks, mainly because there’s no way for Clarkson to advertise it in show because by the time the first Millionaire ep goes out, the series of FFF has finished. All it’s really likely to do is piss off the Tipping Point audience, which it’s replacing for a week.
Strategy aside, we’ll have to see if as a show it can stand on its own merits. We liked Anita Rani as host of the underappreciated The Answer Trap on C4 so no real danger there. As we understand it, so may be wrong, people will “do” fastest finger first ordering questions to earn a spot in a hotseat to make their way up a points ladder (so it’s not just people staring at screens pushing buttons). The two people highest up the ladder will duel off in more fastest finger first questions (this bit does sound like people staring at screens pushing buttons) for the win and the right to sit in the Millionaire hotseat at some point during the upcoming Clarkson run.
It might be quite interesting, at least, to see if people who qualify through the show and have shown off basic quiz talent average bigger winnings than those who only have to answer one question on the night.
Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Bother’s Bar Plays Badly: Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
Bonjour la classe and welcome to another fascinating piece of consumer journalism as we spend £24.99 to playthrough Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (out on all major formats, XBox tested) so you don’t have to. The game comes with 6,800+ fully voiced questions it says here, most of which are easy, and you can pay an additional £8.39 for an additional 3,000+ questions if you’re that way inclined which feels generous compared to WWTBAM‘s 2,000 or so. You can turn US-centric questions off, I don’t know what proportion of questions that is.
The game sort-of follows the format of the show, there’s no money ladder (you earn points) and you have to work your way up the grades, answering two questions in each one. Differently to the show you can choose the broad category for each of these questions. The questions are normally triple multiple choice, occasionally true or false and extremely occasionally you’ll have to select a point on a number line or point somewhere on a map. You get a delightful/annoying kid to help at each level each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you can copy their answer (like on telly), ask the class or swap the question (unlike on telly) if you get stuck. You can use points to buy new desk trinkets and looks. The game ends if you get a question wrong, unless you’re playing in multiplayer in which case you see all eleven questions and the highest score wins.
There are a lot of whizzing set elements. You can skip past all the chatter, but it still feels like it takes ages.
There is no Noel Edmonds.
Der-der-der-derrrrr
Top find on the Discord last night, a Youtube vid with all the The Big Breakfast competition jingles up to 1996. Get Your Knobbly Nuts Out will always be my favourite I think (the best ones are when they have the jingle then a repeat with a dance breakdown), and More Tea Vicar is a design classic. You will never realise how many variants there are for Spot the Pudding.