The World’s First Ever Limitless Jackpot, Provided You Don’t Count The Other Ones

By | September 9, 2021

Who Dares Wins, The People Versus, Pointless, Pasaparabla, Boom! 100% (sort of)! Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place! Jeopardy! etc.

https://twitter.com/antanddec/status/1435966317396324366

This is the new title for Fortune Favours the Brave, presumably.

14 thoughts on “The World’s First Ever Limitless Jackpot, Provided You Don’t Count The Other Ones

  1. Joey Clarke

    This could do it guys.
    This may break the record for the biggest Gameshow payout in British Television.
    The record currently sits at £1,500,000 set back in 2012 on Red or Black.
    We may get British TV’s first ever Multi-millionaire. (If people actually watch it)

    Reply
  2. David B

    In defence, the other shows require you to win multiple times. On this show, you can win millions by playing only once.

    Reply
      1. Chris M Dickson

        It’s a bit of a technical and possibly even semantic issue, but I wonder if this might be a show where a new record might be set in one game and then immediately broken in the next game? I don’t think that’s a superlative that can quite be claimed by any of the others in your list, at least by typical definitions of the distinction between one game and the next – i.e., the jackpot doesn’t have to start at a base level and rolling up all over again.

        Anyway, looking forward to finding out in the fullness of time. And then, perhaps, finding out years later whether there there really was a hidden limit all along, in the Shafted stylee.

        Reply
        1. stuart shawcross

          Absolutely no hidden limit… its limitless.
          I know, I had a few sleepless night about it before record!

          Reply
  3. TVTom

    “featuring the world’s first ever LIMITLESS jackpot and a money ladder that never… ever… ends!…”

    “…as long as it falls within the threshold we’ve given our insurers”

    Reply
  4. Des Elmes

    Unless I’m being ignorant, after Who Dares Wins stopped being a Lottery show didn’t it also stop allowing the winners of the last game of the series to continue their run at the start of the next series – therefore introducing a limit of sorts?

    Kirsty Young’s sign-off on primetime People Versus: “Remember: you didn’t know it, but this is the show you’ve been preparing for all your life.” Pretty bold considering that people were still applying in their droves for a certain other Celador big-money game show (even though, of course, that show did have a limit and still does).

    Veering off-topic here, but how reasonable is it to say that TPV would have done considerably better in primetime if all the good bits of the daytime format had been there from the very start? (The Bong Game wasn’t one, of course.) It probably still wouldn’t have gotten the monster viewing figures that the other Celador show got, but it might well have developed more of a following than it actually did.

    Mind you, ITV might have then never imported The Vault…

    Reply
    1. Chris M. Dickson

      See, I thought Kirsty’s sign-off more related to the way the contestants picked their own subjects. There’s a weak argument that you’ve been preparing for all general knowledge quizzes for a your life so I suppose you could stretch to saying something similar about Mastermind at a push.

      What _were_ the other good bits of the daytime format? The set and the rotating camera were quite fun, I enjoy the subjects motif and the opening credits were pretty swish, but I don’t remember anything else about it being anything other than clunky.

      Reply
      1. Des Elmes

        “What _were_ the other good bits of the daytime format?”

        Well, certainly the four-minute time limit, which allowed far more questions to be asked in each episode than the seven that were actually asked in the entire first primetime episode.

        And I’m sure I’m not the only one who preferred all the questions being GK aside from Flip questions on specialist subjects – in theory at least, the viewers could play along that bit more, and they had a greater chance of tripping up the contestants (and so greater jeopardy for the contestants themselves). Whereas with all a contestant’s questions being on one of five specialist subjects, if that contestant happened to pick five SS’s that they knew every single little thing about *and* many viewers did *not* know many things about…

        Of course, none of this is to say that the primetime version had no good bits whatsoever. Its set certainly was impressive, and the full title sequence was excellent (I’ve probably said this before, but I presume the zooming in towards the contestant’s eye was considered a bit *too* dramatic for the daytime version). It was fun, too, when the setter of the current question was phoned up only to say “unfortunately, that’s the right answer”. And obviously, in both versions the graphics and the Strachans’ soundtrack were top drawer.

        Reply
        1. Chris M Dickson

          Mmm. I remember not being a fan of the prime time version at the time, but I’ve just watched a full episode and two partial episodes of it. If you watch it at 1.5x speed, it’s a much more interesting and eventful-feeling show than I remember it being. I have a horrible suspicion that that may be a life hack for many quizzes that I consider to be too slow for my tastes. However, if a show needs to be watched at 1.5x speed to be good, then that’s a problem with the show.

          On reflection, maybe it’s just an unfortunate coincidence with the string of episodes I chose, but it’s extremely bloke-y: all male-presenting contestants, and if not completely all then very close to all male-appearing names supplying the questions. Conceivably male contestants pick male-focused subjects which lead to more men setting the questions and hence more male contestants. creating the cycle.

          Reply
          1. Des Elmes

            Another reason, then, why it was better that all the questions in the daytime version were GK (aside from Flip questions).

            Mind you, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Millionaire could itself be a bit blokey at times during its original run (particularly in the mid-2000s), albeit for different reasons.

  5. Des Elmes

    Since I’ve mentioned The Vault… that show’s jackpot seemed to be limitless, before ITV capped it at a million.

    This, of course, took place in the latter half of the third and final series – when, it’s probably fair to say, ITV were almost out of faith in the show, having already moved it from Saturday nights to the Tuesday 8pm death slot. And the final straw may well have been when Karen Shand won the million live on air *and* over the phone, and despite the novelty value fewer than four million watched, compared to nearly seven million for that night’s Holby City and a similar figure for Pat Gibson’s Millionaire win a few months earlier (which had no novelty value whatsoever unless you count the fact he had two lifelines when he was asked the million-pound question)…

    Reply

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