Going Dutch: The Big Picture

By | February 2, 2015

bigpictureSo a new show from our good friends at Talpa debuted on RTL4 in The Netherlands yesterday evening, based on an Israeli format by production company A Capella. The Big Picture is essentially Picture Who Wants to be a Millionaire, hosted by the same guy who hosts Weekend Millionair usually in the slot, Robert ten Brink.

The show’s big USP is that sponsored by the Bankgiro Loterij you can play along at home on the app and win some money yourselves. The show is prerecorded so they put your face and name up using whizzy live post-production.

One person is selected from the audience (photos of everyone up on the walls which spin round until one stops on the big main screen) to play. They are 12 questions away from winning €1m. Each question is based on a picture displayed on the large screen, which might be as simple as just identifying who it is of but might also be a bit more general knowledge, using who or what is in the picture as a theme. Each question has four multiple choice answers. If they are wrong they will leave with nothing. If they don’t know they can use one of their three “escapes” to swap the question but it might force them to share a quarter of their winnings with a Bankgiro Loterij player (also each time this happens one of the live app players is selected to win €5,000). If they get it right they can opt to climb the ladder (€100, €500, €1, 2, 5,000, €10, 20, 50,000, €100, 200, 500,000, €1m) (they do not get to look at the next question before making this gamble, which I dislike as a thing because exciting television requires contestants to be encouraged to take risks and asking people to gamble blind encourages conservative play with the numbers involved, although when they get past €10,000 they can at least look at the picture before deciding to take the question) or get out.

bp2When they choose to get out they see one more picture before deciding if they want to take a question. If they decide to walk away then the money is split with the Escape Loterij players, no harm, no foul. However if they opt to take the question and they get it correct then they get to keep their entire bank and the home players leave with nothing. If he gets it wrong, they split the entire bank between them.

It’s OK. If you stopped watching Millionaire before then there’s no real reason here you’ll go back to something like this, on the other hand if ITV wanted to fill a Millionaire shaped hole in the schedule there are worse things they could use. It debuted to decent viewers last night on RTL4, over a million which everyone seems happy with.

Don’t just take my word for it though, if you can get round the geoblocking you can watch it for yourself.

Weekend Miscellany

By | January 31, 2015

If you want to appear on Fifteen to One they are looking for contestants. And why shouldn’t you? It’s not as if anybody’s watching if you make an idiot of yourself. Send an e-mail off to 15to1apps@remedyproductions.tv by March 31st. You might win £40,000.

In other news, BBC 3’s very exciting I Survived a Zombie Apocalypse starts soon. It’s basically Dawn of the Dead: The Game Show as a group of contestants run round a shopping centre for a week doing tasks and making decisions but one touch from the zombie horde means you get eaten. I hope the real contestants aren’t quite so drama school:

 

Finally I’ve been asked when we’re “doing” Mario Kart 8 again. Next Saturday evening is the answer, details to come during the week. You will need the DLC, so you’ve got the next week to acquire it. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do Jackbox in a way that works for us, but don’t worry I haven’t forgotten.

Afternoonageddon

By | January 28, 2015

So here’s fun, from next week it looks like Deal or No Deal is moving to 3pm where it meets Tipping Point and The Link. The winner gets to play whoever wins out of Cambridge United and Manchester United in the next round.

We don’t quite understand the logic here although I’m sure there is one – DOND is currently sitting at 700-800k in its 4pm slot against (the tanking, as we suspected might happen) Mel and Sue. Traditionally against Tipping Point in the slot DOND loses about 300k and they move straight over to Ben Shephard. TP is by no means a Bargain Hunt-esque monster, but it’s performing admirably well in a slot it doesn’t deserve and it’s being missed as a lead-in for The Chase. Meanwhile Antiques Road Trip is pushing 3m, and Pointless is regularly getting 4.2m (which is making The Chase‘s 3.3m-ish looking lacklustre even though by any other standard it’s a huge number to be getting regularly).

The replacement is the mildly entertaining Shipping Wars UK (where people bid against each other to make deliveries, it’s Postman Pat as competitive reality show) and Couples Come Dine With Me.

And then there’s The Link. It’s probably too early to suggest your second favourite new show (certainly not mine) is just the latest show to overperform in its first series and underperform subsequently, but for all the idea that the second series was going to iron out some of the issues of the first one I’m not seeing it. The first round still has too many situations where your reward for getting the link right is to literally directly benefit everyone else (hint to format designers! If your two options are not “do something to benefit me” or “screw someone else over” you don’t have any strategy or any decisions with any meaning, and getting the contestants to talk about their irrelevant decisions doesn’t suddenly make it in any way strategic.) Round two is still decided on basically what sort of mood the clue setters are in when they set the questions. The Superlink is a fine idea in theory but so rubbish in practice – the reason there aren’t many winners? Because sometimes they’ll give a list which requires a straight answer, and sometimes they’ll give a list where they want something more specific but don’t tell you this, so when the contestant gives a completely reasonable and technically correct response it’s judged wrong and they don’t get the time back, once or twice a game. It could really do with the “have another go” rule on Only Connect. It makes me SO MAD, BUT WHO AM I TO ARGUE WITH YOU, THE PUBLIC? It’d do a quarter-mill less without Mark Williams’ eccentric hosting.

Afternoons from next week, there.

You Don’t Know Javascript

By | January 26, 2015

OK, I know there are some You Don’t Know Jack fans here, in lieu of other news you might find this quite interesting – a couple of guys are trying to convert the really old 90s CD ones (the EU versions as you can buy the US ones freely on Steam) to Javascript and hence browser playable. Currently they have some of the French demo disc converted and playable, I gather they’d quite like the UK demo disc (if anyone still has it, and that’s as opposed to the full game). It’s in early stages right now, take a look if you want, and here’s their Twitter.

In other news Bear Grylls is going to host a celebrity endurance elimination show Mission Survive which basically sounds like 71 Degrees North in a jungle.

Карточное безумие

By | January 22, 2015

Hey! Do you remember the Russian guys who do a super-super-slick Youtube version of 21 Questions Wrong called Against the Flow (which we wrote about here)?

Well here’s a pilot of their Skype version of Play Your Cards Right. Similarly quite nice graphics but not quite as engaging to watch as AtF because of the slower pace of the game and the language difference. As a show, the benefit of real giant playing cards can’t be understated. Still, десять из десяти for effort as Google Translate says. They’ve suggested they’d like to do international editions, so keep an eye out.

The episode has some rather unusual strategy employed, although we quite like it when the contestant goes “wheeee!” when the cards go their way. People should have done that on the Brucie version.

POLL RESULTS LIVE! and Afterparty #bbpoll

By | January 20, 2015

Join us LIVE at 9pm for the results of the UKGameshows.com/Bother’s Bar Poll of 2014. The link will propagate on Twitter and you will be able to watch the live stream here. At the end of the broadcast the written report will go up on UKGameshows.com and the voting percentages here, like in the last few years.

If you have questions tweet them with #bbpoll and we’ll try to answer them if we remember to check Twitter.

Here is the recording and here is the final report. Join us after the cut where I’ll post voting percentages and the results of other polls we conducted during our broadcast.

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