Sunday 1st November, 9pm,
Channel 4
Look, now, you see the thing is is that we don’t actually know.
As presented, Bradley Walsh invites three contestants to a quiz where one of them could win a million pounds. A “one-off quiz event”. The big twist, revealed this week, is that the contestants bring their own bank cards and will be risking their own money to play. This brings with it its own ethical questions, but as much as they’d like you to believe it hasn’t happened before, Walsh ought to have a chat with his The Chase colleague Mark Labbett regarding Grand Slam about twenty years ago. That, at least, worked as an entry fee that someone was guaranteed to win as opposed to betting your own money against the house. There was also a show called Stake Out on Challenge that wanted to do it but got cold feet over the legality and just pretended it was the case.
Scratch beneath the surface however and it looks like something’s amiss – it’s being made by Keo Films, not known for their light entertainment work, but known for making documentaries with quite unusual premises. There was no contestant call-out (we’d notice if someone was asking for potential contestants to risk their own money). There *was* a recording at the beginning of October you could apply for through SRO. It’s all been very hush-hush. You don’t normally put out quizzes at 9pm on a Sunday, especially if you’re Channel 4 and especially if you’re Bradley Walsh. The O in ‘Shot’ looks like a bullethole! Will they have to shoot someone for the million pounds? That would be mischevious and Very Channel 4!
So when the bank card thing came out my first immediate thought was this is some sort of anti-gambling polemic, likely a scripted drama with Serious Actor And The Nation’s Sweetheart Bradley Walsh and if that is the case then it’s sad it’s been rumbled but this sort of thing is quite hard to pull off – gameshows by their nature are public facing at many steps along the way and they didn’t quite hide their tracks well enough, so the reaction won’t be “did you see that?” it will be “well that’s what that was all about then.” A shame, and that doesn’t mean it can’t be a thought-provoking hour (although it might also be a bit heavy-handed and on the nose), but it’ll dampen the final effect.
But we still don’t know, it could still pull out the rug from under us – maybe it is the genre-redefining light entertainment format it purports to be. The sad thing is it’s the most intrigued anyone’s been by a Channel 4 show since that surprise documentary on Russell Brand. I’m sure the reactions will be fascinating, let us know what you think in the comments.
If this is an anti-gambling thing, won’t that be Channel 4 biting the hand that feeds it?
The ad breaks on Channel 4 on a typical Sunday 21:00 slot must be full of gambling adverts. I suppose they could fill it with those gambling adverts that promote the so-called safety aspects of each platform but that would be a bit of a cop out from Channel 4 if that is the case.
I notice on a recent Taskmaster they had a fruit machine task. Greg ‘Taskmaster’ Davies said something about gambling responsibly while linking to the break that he said would contain gambling adverts, and it did.
I notice that Channel 4 are repeating The Experiment a few hours after this on Sunday. I haven’t seen it but I understand this is also within the ‘not quite what it first seems’ genre.