Oh this is an interesting thing to have land on your doorstep (Discord) on a Thursday evening. Iain Lee has uploaded the pilot for a UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and it’s extremely interesting – it was made before the US one went out and it’s much closer to the computer game. But is it more successful?
“Not sure” is my answer to be honest, there’s a lot here that doesn’t quite work – evidently half the questions if the scores jumping about were anything to go by. Early 2000s Iain Lee was extremely punchable. The flow isn’t quite there, the humour is very of it’s time i.e. isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly which I don’t remember the games really going into, and the answer explanations don’t feel very convincing, probably because this was probably designed for Friday nights and they’d expect lots of “isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly”. The players either didn’t understand the Jack Attack or were completely useless. But if you want the computer game in TV form, well it hits a lot of the feature points, but I’m not sure this would have been a great TV show. still, an early writing credit for Victoria Coren which I’m sure she remembers fondly.
The timeline is quite interesting, YDKJ UK came out in 1997 (it’s interesting seeing who did the writing on that, people like Mel and Sue, who aren’t involved in this), Princess Productions piloted this in 2001 but even though it didn’t make it to air they evidently liked it enough to take the same sort of high-culture-meets-pop-culture ideas that underpinned it but without the license and came up with The Deadly Knowledge Show (which I believe somehow came under the schools/education remit) in 2005 with Dave Berry. I remember quite liking it at the time, although that was twenty years ago now. It’s got Not-Screw-Your-Neighbour and Not-Dis-Or-Dat, jokes which may or may not land after some questions, although they haven’t quite merged both cultures into questions so much as gone “here’s a reference, now here’s a sort of connected reference”.
In other news I’m off to see The Long Walk at the cinema tomorrow (which is when it comes out), the film of the Stephen King novella based on a deadly dystopian endurance event, likely to be The Sort Of Thing we’ll enjoy.