Tuesdays, 9pm,
U & Dave
It’s nice to see Dave try and get back into the game, especially since TLC has basically taken their territory in terms of original programming and on the face of it this sounds Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like – Mel Giedroyc challenges two teams of comics led by the thinking man’s Stephen Mulhern Ed Gamble and Nish Kumar to “do” bespoke escape rooms, hopefully with hilarious consequences.
The format has actually done pretty well internationally – it’s originally Flemish (so likely to have a slightly insane touch) and has done six series, Amazon Prime recommissioned the German version quite recently and apparently it’s very popular in the Netherlands. For some reason they’ve chosen to launch this right up against the first Eurovision Semi-Final, presumably nobody at Dave believes there’s any crossover in “the sorts of people who’d watch comedians doing escape rooms” and “the sorts of people who are above-averagely into Eurovision”, an interesting strategy and we’ll see if it works out for them.
Four episodes. Let us know what you think in the comments!
It has completely passed me by, but you’ll be able to watch it on All 4 if you can’t be bothered with UTV’s player.
What lies behind ‘The Door’?
Good fun, although it never really threatens to become must-watch.
Casting is pretty good, Mel is fun as host (although it never really stretches her), and Ed and Lou have such good chemistry I could watch them put up a brick wall and be entertained. I’m not a fan of Nish or David, but I felt like they largely brough out the best in each other. Odd to relegate one of each team to the commentary booth for each run, they never really have much chance to banter with Mel or each other.
The rooms are well designed, linear enough to make good telly without feeling barren or like total railroads. Some decent puzzles, although insisting that something is “science” and then not explaining the mechanism behind it at all is a bit pointless. Editing wasn’t too spoilery for the most part, felt like you got a decent chance to play along before they started making the solutions super obvious. Editing in general was pretty strong, the choice to use confessionals only as pre-ad break bumpers was unexpected, def wise to use them so sparingly
Watched the first episode of The Way Out – it’s fun (although not hysterically funny), probably a bit closer to ‘comics attempt four discrete extended Crystal Maze tasks’ than a cohesive escape room per se. All four episodes are up on All 4 (or whatever U’s service is). The sets feels quite creative given that each ‘bit’ feels like it’s in a small room.
Given it’s pretty clearly one team doing the rooms followed by the other and edited together, it’s been edited quite well – if everybody in the control panel has had to sit through both attempts knowing the answers for the second attempt you’d never know.
Amid all these “psychological” shows doing the rounds it’s nice to have something that’s just undemanding fun, and possibly one of the more Taskmastery of the post-Taskmaster attempts by U&D to catch that particular lightning back in the bottle (and a bit more ‘silly’/less ‘concept’ than Battle in the Box, which I quite enjoyed but clearly too few others did!)
Immersing people in an ‘environment’ and challenging them to solve the mystery at hand to achieve their success has worked brilliantly in the past – paging The Crystal Maze ‘mystery games’ for instance – so with the right people in the right situations this could be a laugh, though they’ll also need some properly viral/social moments of the Wilkinson potato-throw ilk to properly cut through as a hit these days, and without such clippables it’ll just pass the masses by unnoticed I fear.
Also liked the ‘this ad break has escaped!’ meta-gag at the first junction, though presumably it also helped stop at least some people from bailing out at the earliest opportunity…
Episode two more Escape-roomy and has some amusing practical joke moments, and Ed Gamble starting to get a bit annoyed.
You can’t see the lasers very well in the rocking laser maze.
Bit odd it’s the same cast all series – and a pretty poor cast at that. Presumably they alternate the two who do the rooms.
It’s OK but just doesn’t quite hit the mark. Would be better with real people actually playing for something.
First episode of The Way Out did fairly well on Dave, 226k (Thinkbox), watched twice as much on catch-up as overnight.
Pre-broadcast doesn’t show up on Thinkbox and the rest of the series went up that night, so the following episodes will be difficult to publicly judge. Still, being on All 4 almost certainly boosts it.
The Way Out ep 2 dropped to a Thinkbox 144k, but as they were all up on U and 4OD after the first episode I’m not sure what to make of that really – 1st to 12th. At the very least it maintained the sort of figure QI XL gets at 9pm, albeit with considerably more watching catch-up than live.