I may be watching a recording of The Door very late this evening (let’s hope Chris Tarrant signs off with a Nick Ross-style “don’t have nightmares!”), but don’t let that stop you having a chat about it. I’ve run the gamut of opinions on it since it was first launched, from “Oh.” to “mmm…” to “ooooh!” over the last four months, so I’m hoping it’s worth the wait. The second episode is tomorrow night.
And it’s also Partly New Total Wipeout (the good thing is that from next week, there’s no need to make that joke) tomorrow evening as well. How terrifically exciting.
The Door looks very Estate of Panic-esque, love it
I still wonder who the clever dick is to put the first part against both Ashes to Ashes and Lost.
I’ll watch The Door live simply because if my Freeview recorder fails to work like it usually does I won’t have to deal with *shudders* the ITVPlayer
The ITVplayer is a heck of a lot better than it used to be.
Too true, I remember the days of when it failed to loade the show AND play advert after advert after advert, etc. etc.
15 minutes into the door and already the Diary Room style commentaries from the contestants are getting annoying. We know that creepy crawlies are scary.
I include that in the ‘overblown Americanised presentation’ bit – Everything I didn’t like about Estate of Panic’s presentation with none of the humour of it seems to be in here presentation wise.
At the first break:
Bleh at the overblown Americanised presentation, though the content isn’t too bad. Shame about a so far lack of humour, mind, but… Overall it’s alright.
Loving the content, the presentation is…eh.
Dean Gaffney is as always giving top value for this sort of thing.
OK – Correction of earlier criticism. There is humour there. It’s just in the form of movie pastiches (including movie trailers) rather than anything that you’d expect attatched to this sort of content.
Game seems to be there but somethings missing… why couldn’t we just port estate of panic over?
Actually I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here for ‘what the game is missing’
Estate of Panic, while the games could get a bit samey, had the twist of ‘last to leave and least cash is eliminated,’ whereas this is a straight race. There’s no dilemma there, and arguably as a result of that no tension.
To the game, I mean. Obviously there’s the whole ‘deal with fears’ aspect, but I’d say that’s ‘skill’ rather than ‘interesting/agonizing decision/choice’
Still. Certainly better than I thought it’d be.
Shame about Frankie. Oh well.
Anyway, I would love to do this… no, really, I would. I’m very gothic, sadistic, masochistic, anything like that. I want to do Solitary as well!
Two thirds of the contestants have been on major reality shows in the UK (Jennie and Frankie being the exceptions)
1) I think that’s the oldest I’ve ever seen Tarrant look – being under non-conventional studio lighting for the first time in ages isn’t doing him any favours.
2) Holden is about as welcome an addition as a cow’s carcass at a vegetarian convention.
3) I think The Door can be summed up in four words: taking itself too seriously.
I don’t think it’s taking itself too seriously, Tarrant and Overdramatic Voiceover Man are clearly hamming it up as much as they can.
The constant switching between filmic and non-filmic is also doing my head in.
Yeah, it took a while for me to spot exactly what the humour was, but it’s there.
Lets call a spade a spade – Who you refer to as Overdramatic Voiceover Man is Movie Trailor Parody Guy
Otherwise known as Redd Pepper – who delivers every job he’s given in exactly that manner. He sounds no different on this than anything else he does.
Except when he was the station voice of Jazz FM…
I can sum it up in one:
Tosh.
This might have won some extra points if when tarrant made his comment about the speeding up conveyor belt that it cut away and showed him increasing the speed
Oh forgot theres no humor in this show…
The humour of the file in the cake being a nail file?
but whose to say the cake is a lie???
Get out of 2007!
Yes, do catch up to 2010 before you miss the sequel.
Apparently that particular cake recipe, devoid of the obviously inedible bits (sediment shaped sediment, for example), is quite good.
There is humour there…
…It’s just not attatched to the tasks/worlds/doors/whatever
(OK, nail file excepted)
Anyone else find it ironic that Keith Duffy, the 4th most important member of Boyzone (sorry Mikey), describes himself as ‘a leader, not a follower’?
And that while he was shouting instructions, it was always following Michael Underwood’s lead for what the instructions should be.
What’s Duffy’s appeal?
Blandness personified. Dead behind the eyes look, says little of note.
Actually, anyone else enjoying Michael’s brief flashback to his Jungle Run days? “Out of the way you monkeys” (to a bunch of rats, bizarrely.)
…Actually he’s been doing quite a lot of deadpanning.
Oh god, not another ITV programme with Zelebrities… ZZzzzzzzzzzz!!!
Why won’t ITV learn that people don’t care about Celebrities and we want good gameshows back and high quality programming.
Not rubbish like this. It was a rip-off of The Crystal Maze/Fear Factor/Im a Celebrity etc. Rubbish!!!
ok, im slightly disappointed that the views have been largely critical on here. i enjoyed it. its nice to see itv making event television rather than an overly drawn out series.
i did have some issues: the switching between movie guy and presenters jarred, id have preferred no amanda or chris, just voiceover man. this would have solved my other gripe, it just wasnt creepy enough at times. it was creepy, and i loved the back storys to the challenges, but then chris’s voiceover didnt match. grrr.
and also i didnt mind the interviews, but if theyd faded them in a little btter, it felt a little jarred again.
but i love the format, i think its brilliant overall, and if we treat this as a pilot, hopefully some of the problems will be ironed out.
Most of my criticisms of it are more ‘…Arrrgh, this could be brilliant but instead it’s decent’ style accentuating the negative, actually.
And on that note, viewing it as a pilot rather than the first in a two parter, how I’d modify it:
Up the humour content – There is some, but there isn’t enough. The ‘films gone wrong‘ theme to the comedic elements, including an exageration of movie trailers for each game, is a decent enough theme for the comedy, but… More emphasis on it (So sequences of games that roughly mirror the ), and darkening it up, would have been nice.
Some sort of decision to the games – At the moment, it’s ‘cooperate to get access to the competitive game,’ and there’s no decision to be made. What about if the contestants could partake in a cooperative game to get the cash up (Or individual games to get their cash pot up?) but would be eliminated if they were the last out of each room? Which is to say ‘What estate of panic does but where not every game is gross version of Grab A Grand’ – So in the Alcatraz game there could have been something to do in the cell to increase your cash/the group’s cash and the tunnels to escape through.)
There really isn’t any point to multiple presenters on this. Chris Tarrant is the better presenter, so drop Amanda.
It’s a good effort, and there’s clearly a very good show here waiting to get out, but… “Not there yet, 6/10” is my grade for the first episode.
(Oh, and ‘lose the overblown American editing, and even if you must have ‘coming up’ and ‘previously on’ segments, lose the ‘cut away during the game to the contestants talking about the game,’ obviously.)
I agree with the thrust of Sphil’s comment. The Door was a pilot, it had rough edges, the joins were visible if you knew where to look. And sometimes if you didn’t – Holden contributed approximately nothing to the show, the game with the lasers was a handicap for the sake of having a handicap, etc etc (see comments passim).
My bottom line is that, as a first run-through, this was far more good than bad – most of the challenges worked, I was pleasantly surprised by the casting. The simplicity of each challenge helped: the challenge was to get in, get through, and not be the last in the room. Anyone can understand that. Even parents of a five-year-old can understand that!
Are we in danger of over-analysing this? We commentators at the Bar are not yer regular viewers. The vast majority of the audience won’t have seen Estate of Panic over the interwebs, they won’t have seen French-language Fort Boyard, they probably won’t have seen British Boyard. This will be a new concept to them, and ITV did well to make it so very easy to follow.
Anyway, on a scale of For The Rest Of Your Life to The Mole, this comes in somewhere around The Chase: not something I’d set a video for, not something I regret watching at all. I hope (rather than expect) a second edition to be commissioned, perhaps for the late-August bank holiday.
Expect a decently long review in the Week of 25 April, when I can do it justice, and I’ve had a chance to compare it with the original Fort Boyard, back on TV5 on the 16th.
“Expect a decently long review in the Week of 25 April, when I can do it justice, and I’ve had a chance to compare it with the original Fort Boyard, back on TV5 on the 16th.”
ABOUT TIME!
I can’t help but think everyone’s going “well look, it was mainly full of not very good bits, but other than that it was brilliant!”
If it gets a second shot then good luck to it, I’ll watch it and hope it’s a bit more like episode two than one. With those ratings I won’t be getting too excited just yet.
Fort Boyard has been watchable but not brilliant for a while sadly.
Mmm – The problems are mostly production, I think (Although the games are all essentially ‘just races’ so there’s no tension like Estate’s ‘go for cash or get out fast’) – Tieing the games to the locations more (c.f. the laser maze and the nuclear reactor from episode 2) rather than ‘here’s a scary/creepy/gross location. Here’s some stuff to disgust/scare. Get to it.’ we tended to get, making the humour more apparent (in the pilot I think they were all meant to be movie pastiches outside of The Dungeon) losing the US centric presentation, losing Amanda, etc, are all quite easy to solve. Due to the lack of tension of an interesting decision for the contestants to make, it’s never going to be as good as Estate of Panic without changing the structure of the game, but…
I’m really not sure it’s a pilot. Where do you go from it, and how are you going to turn it into a series? There was surprisingly little actual content there as it was (this is a bigger problem than the presentation), and they are surely not going to go to the trouble of kitting out 18-24 different sets for it that will be necessary.
Martin Kempton (lighting director) has labelled the show a game show taster rather than a pilot. Yet, he has mentioned other pilots he has worked on.
I’ve taped it tonight but from the views I’ve seen I’m not sure I’ll ever get round to watching it – sounds as awful as the original pitch suggested, with the added annoyance of American editing too.
To be fair the american editting is nowhere near as bad as the colour of failure
Quite.
More like actual American gameshows than The Colour Of Shit’s exagerated beyond belief version.
(Actually ‘If you could tolerate the editing on Estate of Panic you’ll be able to tolerate the editing on this, although the content’s not as good as Estate’s’)