The Sun had it this morning and now he’s confirmed it:
Rotating co-hosts for the forseeable, the jostling to become the show that inevitably replaces it is going to be a lot of fun – it’s been on a slow decline for a fair while but it’s still pulling in very respectable numbers, I can’t help but think that with one of the key reasons departing that decline is going to speed up. Perhaps they’ll find their Johnny and Denise though.
Saturdays, 8:30 (ep 1), 9:30 (subsequent),
ITV
It’s one-half Test The Nation: The National IQ Test and one-half Everybody’s Equal, Lee Mack gives 100 people £1,000 each and challenges them to hold on to it by answering multiple choice logic questions that have been tested by a sample of the public. The questions get harder as the game progresses representing fewer of the sample that got the question right in testing. Getting a question wrong means forfeiting your money to the pot and elimination. Answering the final 1% question correctly wins a share of the pot. And there’s a bit towards the end of the game where you can take your money and run if you want.
It is the sort of thing we quite like – always enjoyed both of the elements it seems to be made from and I’m a big Lee Mack fan. Tainting it a bit are the stories we’ve heard about loooooooong recording sessions and the audience/contestants not being treated very well, frankly. It sounds like a second series has been commissioned before the first one has gone out, I understand, so let’s hope everyone is a bit better second time around.
That presumably won’t be coming out in the broadcast episodes though, let us know what you think of the finished product in the comments.
So I realised when playing Netflix’s Trivia Quest yesterday that although none of the questions relate to US minutiae, I hope you’re geared up for US history, US geography, US entertainment and crucially US sports. No real attempt to localise for local culture.
This is always going to be a problem for streaming services. You can’t just “do” a quiz with US contestants based on US mores and assume the rest of the world is going to give a damn, and you probably aren’t going to make a whole load of different versions for a whole load of different territories.
The appeal of quizzes during the day is a) they’re cheap to make, b) you can knock them out quickly, c) they fill time and d) some of them are even quite popular. But in ten years time where everything will be streamed this is just not going to hold value, there will be no need to “just fill time”, the question will be “how much new stuff do we need to be worthwhile” – and that is all likely to be in competition entertainment series (you won’t eliminate gaming), drama and documentary.
The current Channel 4 hoo-ha is fun but largely irrelevant – by 2035 (maybe earlier) I reckon broadcast television will be all but finished – some of the big US streamers will consolidate and each territory will have one, maybe two local offerings. We can fight this if you want but looking at the numbers it feels increasingly inevitable.
A new “thing” dropped on Netflix today hot on the heels of interactive quiz cartoon, a quizoon if you will, Cat Burglar, is a new daily trivia quiz Trivia Quest based on the app of the same different name (Trivia Crack).
Each day you can face 12 (or if you want to have a crack at the hard mode, an additional 12 to make 24) multiple-choice questions loosely based around a theme based around categories that are basically the same as Trivial Pursuit‘s. Each question you get right you earn coins, earn enough coins (and it keeps track day to day) and you get to release one of your ten friends from captivity as part of the thrilling ongoing storyline (sort of, the story bits are incredibly short and you don’t get it between quiz questions). You can replay each episode to get a better score if it bothers you that much.
Each set of twelve is done and dusted in about four minutes. In theory there are new questions every day in April. I didn’t think the harder questions were that much harder than the standard ones – certainly workoutable in the main, but your mileage may vary.
It’s not bad, in the Interactive Netflix Is A Step Higher Than Interactive DVDs sort of way. The question is: is this going to become your teatime fix (and if you liked Bamboozle on Teletext it’s really not much different except you don’t have to wait for the page numbers to tick round and you don’t get sent back to an earlier question when you get one wrong. Oh and Voice Acting.), or like a lot of this sort of thing, is it going to become work and you end up resenting it? I’d be really interested to see what sort of numbers it does throughout the month – sadly it’s unlikely we’ll ever be privy to them.
We watched the first episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (hashtag #FFS LOL) which promised to fill the Apprentice shaped hole currently in BBC1’s Thursday night schedule. It was quite interesting – Ramsay going big on investing in the person not just the business and as such there will be tests of character as well as business acumen, starting with a swim to a cliff than a forty foot jump off it – who knows how important these tests are, followed by a proper business-y task of selling street food on a Cornish beach. To its credit, the business element felt far more real and on the level than a similar sort of task on The Apprentice, which these days are mainly entertaining contrivances based on how business is run only really on a homeopathic level, with a much bigger emphasis on costings and margins, but it’s not nearly as amusing as The Apprentice and by the end of the episode I can’t say I really gave much of a damn about any of the contestants to be honest. Ramsay is coarse but constructive throughout as you’d expect, although his “we’re DONE” walk off after elimination was inadvertently comic rather than dramatic.
In short: it’s alright. It marks itself as being different from The Apprentice quite successfully but I don’t feel all that compelled to continue, although I’ll probably give it another week at least.
However there was another show that combined adventure with business acumen, and that was The Rebel Billionaire: Branson’s Quest For The Best, Fox’s spoiler for The Apprentice about twenty years ago. In it, Richard Branson challenged 16 people in challenges consisting of tests of character and business acumen, to the point where I did wonder if these shows are related somehow. However, whilst Ramsay seems much more about the business, Branson is more about the adventure. One of the contestants has posted a potted version of the show, the finale seems to be available in full.
Happy 25th birthday to Channel 5! For the first five years or so of its life it was probably THE place to go for The Sort Of Things We Like – four series of Fort Boyard, two brilliant series of The Mole, The Desert Forges, Whittle and of course a show that predated the escape room craze (even if it didn’t know it at the time) by a good ten-fifteen years or so Jailbreak from 2000. Someone uploaded another episode last year, look:
Escape rooms as TV shows is still the nut everyone’s been trying to crack to not much success – our favourite being Race to Escape, but that was only a one-series wonder.
Of course we can’t forget Big Brother, of varying quality, but “David’s dead” is the greatest reality TV moment of all time, so there’s that.
Nowadays there’s not much on Channel 5 that we watch, unfortunately. But we hope that one day they dip their toes back into adventure.