Show Discussion: The Big Spell

By | January 8, 2017
6 Comments

Sundays, 5pm,
Sky One

Join Sue Perkins, Moira Stewart and Joe Lycett as twenty kids vie across eight episodes in spelling-based challenges in order to become champion.

The show is based on Endemol’s Spelling Star format which has had some success as The Great Australian Spelling Bee on the Ten Network in Australia.

Spelling Bee formats were all the rage about ten years ago (see Hard Spell, Spelling Bee) and then they just sort of fell off the face of the Earth.

I’m afraid we forgot this was on until halfway though episode one, but if you watched it or caught up with it let us know what you thought.

Skill and Judgement

By | January 7, 2017
10 Comments

You might have seen this pop up on my Twitter feed yesterday, the first broadcast episode of Family Fortunes with Bob Monkhouse. Forget how really pared back the format for the first series was, what I found most interesting was the great pains he was in to point out how much skill is involved, from back in the day when the IBA would frown quite hard at shows based around luck. Did Play Your Cards Right, a show with a significant and obvious luck element, get Brucie to do the same thing when it first started?

A schedule as complicated as its questions

By | January 6, 2017
5 Comments

Don’t forget that quintessential weekend show Only Connect‘s baffling move to Fridays at 8:30pm (except in Northern Ireland where it’s 9:30pm) after Mastermind starts tonight, except for viewers in Wales where it’s on Saturday nights instead. Obviously.

No I don’t know why a popular and successful show such as Only Connect now has a schedule as complicated as its questions.

Show Discussion: Spies

By | January 4, 2017
12 Comments

Thursdays, 9pm,
Channel 4

Another year, another entry into the burgeoning Tough Occupational Reality Challenge subgenre, this one is Spies from the makers of the gritty SAS: Who Dares Wins.

This one features fifteen people being put through their paces by three proper spies and being eliminated if they don’t make the grade.

It’s not the first time this sort of thing has been done, there was a very well-regarded show on BBC3 back in 2004 called Spy (UKGameshows link) with a very similar premise, although doubtless this one is going to feel grittier. We didn’t really watch SAS: Who Dares Wins, we had just watched Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week which scratched our endurance itch and was basically the same thing, but it’s been a long time since there was a good show about learning the art of espionage (does Hunted count as espionage?).

It’s only four episodes. The first episode is promising a mole amongst the trainees, which is a fun twist. Let us know what you think.

Show Discussion: !mpossible

By | January 1, 2017
101 Comments

Weekdays, 2:30pm (2:10 for ep 1),
BBC 1

Rick Edwards hosts a new quiz from the feverish mind of Tipping Point‘s Hugh Rycroft where contestants fight it out to win a daily £10,000 jackpot. We’re not quite sure of the format at time of writing, but from what we’ve pieced together contestants answer questions and earn points with the highest scorers from each round going through to the final where the big set-piece exclamation mark will hopefully give up it’s monetary contents, but along the way anyone who gives not just a wrong answer but an impossible answer is eliminated. Losers come back the next day.

Presumably we’re looking at multiple choice questions here, we’re certainly intrigued to find out what makes an impossible answer impossible and whether this element is interesting and different enough to make the show stand out. Rick’s an intelligent guy but he doesn’t scream BBC daytime. We’ll see.