First of all The Answer Run starts its new series this afternoon from 4:30 on BBC1, might as well use the previous Show Discussion post for it. Similarly 007: Road To A Million starts on Friday, and here’s the previous Show Discussion post for it to use.
However we were alerted to A New Thing that may well be of interest starting tomorrow on telly person Ben Justice’s Gameshow Guru channel on Youtube, The Loop, a quiz with professional graphics from proper telly people Marvellous Machines made on the cheap.
This seems like a very ‘in’ thing, we know there are some professional TV developers working on a quiz show podcast we’re just waiting to get details on – it will be interesting to see how well these skills transfer to new mediums, whether they gain traction, how much gumption they have if they don’t immediately take off in what’s probably quite a challenging space. Then I’ll make a Netflix documentary about it all and make millions.
In other news: a channel dedicated to mildly entertaining New Zealand reality show Treasure Island: https://www.youtube.com/@treasureislandtv
Hopefully the Irish and Aussie versions will end up there at some point, Channel 5 showed the Australian one back in the day and it was quite fun.
You can watch episode one of The Loop here:
https://youtu.be/_RP5ZTvvLJ0?si=dQ2chMVB85nQUnCQ
Got to be honest, it felt like a long 35 minutes, feels far too slow for Youtube. I thought it had a few nice ideas, the idea of a market is a good one and doubtless it’s one that loads of people have tried and hasn’t *really* had much traction as a quiz mechanic (not counting Deal or No Deal here). The Peek is quite good, give the viewers an element of knowing something most of the contestants didn’t know, and the way it worked out in round two was pretty good because it allowed us to infer the question from what little was revealed, the problem was that the audience having worked it out, we have to wait ten minutes to watch a dull roll-and-move game before we got any sort of resolution. Also this *needs* more sound effects! The camera movement and automatic scoring might be quite whizzy but there’s not an awful lot interesting to look at, it’s basically someone pointing a camera at a Trivial Pursuit board for 35 minutes.
It’s a shame you’ve got a bar with a load of number on the right but lots of +/- 1s, 2s and 4s on screen, I wonder if using single/double/quadruple arrows might help explain the idea of the market to slower audience members.
I appreciated the way the final round worked out this time but it felt like everything sort of lucked out into place, without knowing what the other mystery squares are we don’t know if holding on, on a board that offers big scores but great difficulty in acheiving it, was a good tactic or not.
I don’t think I’d go out of my way to watch this, not enough going on when I’ve got the entirety of Youtube I could be browsing, but there are germs of some interesting concepts.
I’m getting 404s at present when trying to access UKGS – is anyone else?
(If this is something that has been planned, clearly I’m not aware of this plan. In any case, thank goodness for the Wayback Machine.)
Wondering about this also. It’s been happening to me for days.
There have been ongoing 404s for a while, but I’m sure I used it last week. No idea, basically.
I should clarify – I have been receiving 404s for ukgameshows.com on and off for days. The site’s down right now, but I was able to successfully access as recently as two days ago.
Right, apparently it’s been the victim of a traffic attack, normal service will hopefully be returned soon.
An idea that idly entered my head today to potentially improve the format is to spice things up a little with a quickfire buzzer round, maybe just before the final loop. In a somewhat similar manner to The Wheel’s Moneyspinner but not really, we could do one quick lap of the loop with a new question for each of the seven question spaces; and we can still have answers hidden behind their first letters but their actual meanings can change each question, with the first correct lock-in to each question earning a flat 5 points. This would still keep the main points of the gameplay while adding a fast twist to proceedings. It would also bring the maximum possible score for absolute perfect play in all rounds to a nice round 100.