Seeing as #TheChase has got it’s own emoji this weekend on Twitter albeit for an unrelated NASCAR event we ask:

What emoji should accompany #onlyconnect?

— Brig Bother (@BothersBar) September 30, 2016

Lion and water already have a their own wall so I have disqualified them, and I’m only allowed four options. Big decision!

Decades are defined by their rivalries. The eighties? Duran Duran vs Spandau Ballet. 90s? Neighbours vs Home and Away. 2000s? Bush vs Gore. And in the 2010s the only rivalry worth talking about is Pointless vs The Chase. The latter of which reaches its 1000 episode milestone with a special episode today at 5pm. Congratulations!

So we thought it would be fun to dig out our thoughts on the very first episode. Let’s go back in time to the 29th June 2009 and see what we wrote. Unfortunately the old commenting system doesn’t exist any more so we’ll never know who got it right and who has had their blushes spared. Stool Pigeon was an anonymous tip-off box which we basically stopped doing because the quality of tip-offs was usually so poor:

Breaking Stool Pigeon news: “A Bothers Bar regular is a contestant on The Fuse, and they are quite confident it’s better than The Chase.”

Let’s be warned though, every time I’ve read a a write-up of any new show by someone who’s been a contestant, they never fail to point out that they “think it’s a brilliant format,” so we’ll wait and see.

Right, I’m writing this blind of other people’s comments.

• A team of four people who attempt to win as a team but will lose as individuals go up against The Chaser in a general knowledge quiz. Bradley Walsh hosts.
• One by one each indivudual attempts to put money in the team bank. Their round begins with one minute of quickfire questions, each one worth £1,000.
• When the minute’s up, The Chaser comes on and walks to his seat at the top of the board (this is a fabulously irritating shot we see no less than five times throughout the episode. Couldn’t The Chaser just be in his seat all the time?). Today it’s Mark Labbett of The People’s Quiz fame, Shaun Wallace of Are You An Egghead? fame is also promised. Mark will give a disdainful comment in quite an unconvincing manner, although I suppose acting ability isn’t the producer’s primary concern. He’s much more convincing congratulating people.
• The board has eight steps on it like a ladder. The Chaser starts up the top (effectively on rung nine). The money the player has earned lies on rung six. If the player wants, they can start a rung beneath, and The Chaser will offer a fairly derisory sum. However, if the player is feeling particularly brave, The Chaser will offer a decent five figure sum if they fancy starting on rung seven.
• Starting points decided, it’s now a race down the ladder. Three-choice multiple choice questions are asked and contestants and Chaser lock their answers in, starting a five second clock once one of them does so. If the player is correct, they move down a rung. If the Chaser is correct, they move down a rung. This continues until the player gets the money down to the bottom where it goes into the team’s bank, or the Chaser catches up with them, in which case they’re out of the game and leave with nothing.
• Because making it to the end is quite important, the idea of the headstart offers is to become more derisory or compelling as the team goes on.
• Once all players have had their go, the players that remain in the game now race to the exit. They’re given a two step headstart on the Chaser, and are asked quickfire questions for two minutes against the clock. Each correct answer earns another step. The team play on the buzzers for this, which seeing as they’re playing as a team seems a bit odd, but I suppose it’s the quickest way to determine who wants to answer a question.
• Time up, and now the Chaser gets two minutes to catch up with them. Each correct answer brings him one step closer to the team, but if he gives a wrong answer the clock is stopped and the team can attempt to answer the question, being correct pushes the Chaser back a step.
• If the Chaser catches up with them within the two minutes then it’s no money but thanks for playing. If the team escape, they split the money equally between them.
• Right. On paper this sounded quite exciting, and quiz fans should be happy that there’s comparatively little messing around and chatter compared to similar tea time formats.
• However we think it’s missing something in the execution. The way we’d imagined it would be answering questions to progress up a money ladder (represented with actual steps with something like £500 on step one and £50,000 on step nine) with the contestant either opting to stop, possibly by hitting a big red button or something, or being forced to stop by getting a question wrong. At that point some exciting music starts playing and The Chaser literally comes after them by coming down the steps rather than a computer graphic. Is that a bit cheesy? Answer: probably. The current beds are remarkably low key. For a show called The Chase, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of life in it.
• The endgame is OK though. Maybe give the questions to each team member alternately? It IS weird buzzing in.
• This from a Stool Pigeon: “Contestants in The Chase were advised beforehand to “answer back”, if the Chaser dealt them some banter. This should make for some interesting exchanges…” Wonder how much is scripted.

Ah, memories. It’s fair to say Mark has grown into his Beast role considerably and clearly we misunderstood the endgame headstart mechanic on episode one. People still complain about buzzing in on the endgame although you wouldn’t have it any other way these days would you? Anyway it grew on us.

Let us never forget that in a parallel universe Austin Healy is one of ITV’s top light entertainers.

Of course no article on the history of The Chase would be complete without that Fanny Chmelar clip so here it is. In many ways this was the touchpaper that caused the show to explode. It has been followed since by several (fairly tedious) attempts to catch lightning in a bottle again, but it will never have the same impact (and in fairness it feels like they’ve calmed down on this front a little of late).

Viewed over six million times! Anyway congratulations to everybody involved.

We hadn’t spotted this but the new series of Decimate begins at 2:15pm today on BBC One.

We hear it has new question writers, although we don’t know if they can save the show from still being a bit dull.

So thanks to a friend for pointing this out, Des Chiffres et Des Lettres returned with a brand new look and a new-ish format to France 3 a few weeks ago in a bid to appeal to the youths, presumably:

Here’s what we’ve gleaned, which may or may not be completely accurate:

• The show now has three distinct parts: the standard figures and letters bits, a duels segment, and in what must surely be a format first, a bonus round for cash prizes.
• The first part begins with a “sesame”, a speed duel, the winner of which can determine whether the tenth and final round of the first part is a numbers or letters game.
• Ten rounds are played, alternating between 30-second letters games and 40-second numbers games (down from the traditional 45). Players no longer pick letters alternately, each player now gets to select the letters for an entire round. But they do so by declaring how many vowels they want in the line-up and ten letters are drawn (it’s been ten since 2010). Furthermore you’re awarded a minimum of seven points for winning a letters game now. Numbers games are unchanged except for time, unlike in Countdown players don’t get to choose how many big numbers there are.
• In the second segment there are five duels played – if you haven’t seen DCEDL they’re a bit like Conundrums but a bit different – spell the long word, find two words that fit a category amongst the ten letters, finding a ten letter proper noun and a shorter common noun within it, tough mental calculation, that sort of thing. There are five of them worth 7 points each.
• It used to be each match was a best of three episodes but it now sounds like one loss and you’re gone. The winner gets to play the bonus round. 8 sets of letters, two minutes, and they have to find a word of the length asked for for each set. €100 for each set beaten so €800 to be won total.

So there we are. They fit a lot into that half hour.

We picked up some details on this a few months ago but it looks like a press release has dropped for Society Game, a new show from South Korea that looks like it shares DNA with Bother’s Bar favourite The Genius (series three discussion linked, others on the Specials Board) – from what we gather same director, same production company (CJ E & M, although interestingly a co-prod with Endemol) and it sounds like Bandage Man might be involved.

But if you’re looking for a show built around clever games my gut feeling suggests you may be a bit disappointed. It looks like contestants are split into two camps, one camp has a leader who will be authoritarian, the other will be democratic. Camps are given physical and mental challenges and it sounds like someone from the losing camp will get kicked off.

So it’s not The Genius, although there’s no reason it won’t be entertaining in more [extreme] ways. the set-up sounds quite interesting at least and will finally answer the age old question as to whether a dictatorship or democracy is OFFICIALLY better I’m sure.

They seem to have gone all-out on the set:

As usual we heartily recommend following Bumdidlyumptious’ Twitter for latest news (and their page). Whether we cover the show with its own page will depend on if it’s going to be subtitled and if it looks like it might be any good or not. The first episode is on October 16th, so allowing some time to sub we only have about a month to wait.

I’m afraid we have no news regarding The Genius Game UK, although we were all aware that it would be a hard sell. Still, TV is a glacial process at the best of times so you never know.