Some good/interesting stuff on Saturday so here’s a kind of general signpost. All times UK.
- 6:30 – Japandemonium (ITV)
- 7:00 – Big Star’s Little Star (ITV)
- 7:15 – Impossible Celebs (BBC1)
- 7:15 – Time Battle (ProSieben) – we won’t be doing a separate post for this but we will be tuning in as it looks quite fun. From what I’ve learned, teams of two take part, one does some sort of skill-based challenge to earn time for their partner who has to do a quiz round. The best performers win €50,000.
- 7:55 – Fort Boyard (France 2) – Team Bruno Guillion, which tends to be entertaining. Will also be up on Youtube ungeoblocked after broadcast.
- 8:00 – Blind Date (Channel 5)
- 8:15 – Pointless Celebs (BBC1).
- 9:00 – Gino’s Win Your Wish List (Channel 5)
- 10:00 – Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 5)
Roy’s back, back, back! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqWch80522I
And some background here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fpo41My6Us
Thanks for sharing, that was unexpectedly sweet, and I think Roy really enjoyed himself.
Enjoyed it as well. Thanks for sharing
It took him a few minutes to warm up but then he was right back in the swing of things – which makes you wonder why they ever made the stupid decision to axe him in the first place back in the day!
Promo for the new season of the Italian Guess My Age
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdQ30lSlSj8
“For example this lady could be… 65 years old” 😀
The host Enrico Papi is trying to get on the Sanremo song contest. It would be the first time that a gameshow host in Italy finds success later as a singer and not the other way around. In the meantime, he has released a new single
Don’t forget after Fort Boyard tonight is another episode of Fort Boyard, Toujours plus fort. And judging on the teaser trailer Passe Partout will speak! (Just like Passe Muraille did last time)
The amusing thing is, PP used to speak quite regularly back in the early days.
was it just for a year or more often? i remember reading your big yearly article saying he spoke for a year? (Reading that article actually got me more into the French version those many years ago)
Time Battle:
This was 5/6ths quite entertaining, if not a must watch, and one-sixth a bit dull, and unfortunately the dull bit was the final.
Five teams of two play, effectively solitaire – a team will do as well as they can until they are eliminated, then team two will play and so on.
In each round, the players will see what the game is – the ideas are roughly the same for everybody (Round 1 – Steady Hands, Round 2 – Fitness, Round 3 – “Hole in One”, Round 4 – Combination (not sure), Round 5 – Balance) but the actual challenge is usually different for each team, so one team might get stacking a house of cards on different sized floats in their game one, another team might get loading dice onto mousetraps using chopsticks for their game one, and so on. The team will then choose who is going to play the game and who will answer the question – they pick one from five categories (same categories for each team) and no category can be used more than once.
The games are Raab-like and the object is to do as well as possible in each game to earn time for the quiz element, a really good round can earn 100-120 seconds, most people were getting 40-60. Earning zero ends the game there and then.
Their partner will use that time to answer a question and these come in a variety of formats – multiple choice, put things in order, unscramble the spinning words, what is the thing we’re gradually revealing etc. A correct answer earns the team €1,000 and banks the remaining time. A wrong answer ends the game.
Once all five teams have had their run, the two teams with the most money (with ties broken by banked time) go through to the final where one will win €50,000. To begin, fifteen multiple-choice questions are asked on the buzzer (although the contestant must tap the answer on their screen before buzzing). Each correct answer earns their partner 20 seconds, an incorrect answer gives the time to the opponent. The scores start from scratch at the beginning of this round.
Their partners then play a skill game of chess clock attrition (with, I think, the team who ranked second on the leaderboard going first) – today throwing a ball through a circular target. The team who runs out of time first loses, and logic dictates that the other team are therefore the winners.
For most part this is quite a fun show – it zips along without too much padding and fills three hours adequately. There is a question of fairness, I think, on whether giving different teams different games and different question formats is fair (probably not) but the variety is welcomed.
The final however was pretty terrible. The quiz element is fine, but with one person finishing the round with 3:20 to 1:40, the result was pretty much a foregone conclusion (CHESS CLOCK ISSUE AHOY), especially when the skill game seemed a bit too easy – people were getting balls through on their first go quite frequently eating up just two seconds, with goes that took a chunk of time being less frequent – presumably the hole needed to be smaller or to gradually get smaller, something to increase the failure rate. Whatsmore this wasn’t a chess clock battle where the time was immediately switched, instead we get analysis and countdown beeps after every success. Very tedious.
So it’s a shame really, concept has potential (it’s a bit strange they don’t do anything with their banked time at the end), Final needs to be much smarter.
In a word: German.
Well this did pretty badly, apparently.
I enjoyed it, although it didn’t need to be three hours long (but having said that, it went pretty quickly) and I’m not sure I’d watch another full episode of it. If they did a 1-hour version, it could be quite fun.
The games were pretty fun – I particularly enjoyed Hupen, in which they had a squeaky dog toy just too high to reach and a car horn at ground level, and had to sound them alternately as frequently as possible. Ridiculous and funny.
Re fairness – I think the bigger issue was the wildly differing difficulties of the questions. Some of them were incredibly easy, but then there was also “identify this species of fungus from the picture, which is slowly revealed by a thin line tracing across the image at random angles”. I’d have had no idea even from the full picture.
Although I do think the revealing-image questions worked best – the amount of time available was actually relevant for those, because it obviously gets easier as time goes on. Whereas with the multiple-choice questions, either you know it or you don’t, and can give an answer in a few seconds – so the amount of time you’ve banked from the game is basically irrelevant, as it’s only used for the leaderboard ranking.
Agreed that the endgame doesn’t work. I’m not a fan of the chess-clock mechanic to start with. I’m assuming that the contestants turned out to be considerably better at the game than they were expecting, but there’s basically no way to make the chess-clock thing exciting.
German-language Twitter reaction was overwhelmingly negative. It seemed like a lot of people tuned in expecting great things and were disappointed.
So yeah: the concept definitely has potential, but it needs a bit more refinement.
I think you’re being kind, describing it as ‘5/6ths quite entertaining’. Whilst it had a pace that most German shows lack, it was so boring after 30 mins! Repeating games (understandable for fairness reasons), poor quiz elements and an uninspiring format made it pretty unwatchable before the end. And then came the final! And there’s another 3 weeks of it.
Prosieben have committed to new Saturday night shows (episodes) from the beginning of August to Christmas. Here’s how the first 4 weeks have done.
Show – Total Audience – 14-49 demo
Beginner gegen Gewinner – 0.78m (4.0%) – 0.49m (8.9%)
Die Beste Show der Welt – 1.19m (5.6%) – 0.87m (13.9%)
Schlag den Henssler – 0.96m (5.4%) – 0.63m (11.5%)
Time Battle – 0.60m – (2.5%) – 0.33m (4.9%)
It could be going better.
I caught the last round- what made the difference is that one of the question answers missed two questions, which was an 80-second swing (if she had gotten them both right, it would have been 2:40-2:20 instead of 3:20-1:40, and the winning team had just about 1:40 left on their clock).
I’d probably would have set it up like this- each team gets 1:00 to start, then each player 5 questions individually (perhaps on a specific category- show four categories, team who did best gets to pick the categories for both themselves and their opponents as a reward for topping the table)- right answers give them 10 seconds, wrong answers give 10 to their opponents. Then the last 5 questions are on the buzzer (if they used categories, team behind on time gets to choose)- right answers give you 20, wrong answers give your opponents 10 automatically and they can get the other 10 by getting the right answer from the other two options- if they miss though, they give the other 10 back to their opponents. That might have made it a little closer, and not as dependent on who is faster at the buzzer….
Am I going insane or did I read on here that Fifteen to One was back on the 3rd of September? It isn’t showing up on my EPG. What is showing up is Tenable, a new series begins that day.
That was me. I’m in a 15-To-1 group on Facebook and one user kept telling us that she’d heard it was due to start showing then. She’s now going around saying she had an email in her junk folder now saying October, so make of that what you will. I really don’t know what’s going on with it, why it keeps getting pushed back to make way for other things.
Just a quick update – Time Battle has been cancelled after one episode. Ratings were so bad they’ve jumped ship pretty quickly. Prosieben to show films for the remaining three weeks until Schlag den Henssler on 22nd September. Their promise of shows from ‘August to Christmas’ broke quicker than I thought it would.
I don’t understand how I could be foolish enough to think they wouldn’t cancel it without a game show as replacement. Would have been too good I guess.