Another big week for new shows:
- Penn and Teller Fool Us Special: Although this isn’t one of them, obviously. However it does feature Martin Daniels off of Lingo doing his dad’s all time favourite trick (that’s legendary magician and gameshow host Paul Daniels, for the hard of comprehension). (9pm, Sunday, ITV1)
- Only Connect: This week Analysts take on mid-decade indie Joy Division rip-off sensations The Editors in the battle of wits. Or some editors, at any rate. (8:30pm, Monday, BBC4)
- Take the Money and Run: I had a chance to catch up with this over the weekend. It was good. (Tuesday, ABC)
- Minute to Win It: Well Cadbury haven’t sent me any chocolate yet, so this is what we’ll call it because that is what it is. Anyway I went and saw one of these being recorded and I enjoyed it a lot. I have literally no clue what sort of rating constitutes a success on ITV2 on Tuesday night, especially as it’s the night ITV1 tends to tank. (8pm, Tuesday, ITV2)
- The Million Pound Drop – Live! Back for your next six Fridays and Saturdays, the key thing to watch out for here is that it’s Endemol Key Demographic Ratings Smackdown as on Fridays it clashes with the ever popular Big Brother eviction night on Five (although as there is a secret eviction on Wednesday, I’m idly pondering whether there’s going to be an eviction on Friday). Interesting, or indeed, not. I’ve just noticed it’s on for an hour-and-a-half every night! (9pm Friday, 9:15pm Saturday, C4)
- Epic Win: It’s not set the ratings alight, but I like it so sod you, Britain. (5:20pm, Saturday, BBC1)
- Red or Black? Well soon the speculation can end, it’s TV’s self-styled biggest event of the year – seven nights (not quite consecutive as there’s a sports game on midweek) where seven millionaires could be made and all they have to do is watch Derren Brown’s The System by the sounds of it. It’s got the best possible opening and ending night – both scheduled before and after The X Factor – the early show each night being the route to the live finals, and the half hour show later in the evening being the live whittling from eight to one and the determining spin of the wheel. It’s so ridiculously ambitious I’d quite like them to pull it off, but will the reality match the hype? (7pm and 9:15pm, Saturday, ITV1)
Speaking of the Million Pound Drop, I recently bought the board game and despite the many poor reviews and online videos showing how poorly it is constructed, mine works perfectly. The trapdoors are great and there are no misprinted question cards. Maybe they’ve changed the manufacturing process, or I got very lucky.
It’s a fantastic game. Highly recommend it to every gameshow fan. 🙂
Just saw a promo for Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge. The host seems very shouty and drill sergeant-esque.
Mmm, Geno Segers. I haven’t seen anything he’s been in.
Where have you seen this promo? I checked YT, and all they have is a short teaser that doesn’t tell a great lot.
“Shouty and drill-sergeantesque”? Well, that’s an interpretation that might work. We’ll have to see. . .
I believe this person is someone who works at ITV.
I would really like Red or Black? to be brilliant. I would also like the North West programme (I believe each programme contains contestants from a different region) to be on after the 4th of September, otherwise my main reason for not taking part in the first round isn’t valid any more.
The two best TV laughs I’ve had so far this year, as far as I can recall, have both come as a result of Penn and Teller: Fool Us. If this turns out to be a one-season wonder then it’s going out on a hell of a high note.
The only bit of Fool Us I’ve seen was that end trick. And that end trick was BRILLIANT.
Part of what I love about the show is that it is so respectful; P and T haven’t had a bad word for any performer, no matter how rudimentary the trick.
The Wikipedia page includes an inadvertent spoiler for the brilliance of the last trick, but it also suggests that there’s going to be a P&TFU Christmas special, with (some or all of) six fooling attempts and footage of winners in Vegas. Looking forward to it already!
That’s if ITV decide to air it. Last night’s show managed to obtain 1.9 million viewers.
Given how good the show is. It won’t be a suprise if they decide to shove it in the cupboard along with the Who Dares Sings! Christmas special and the final episode of The Colour of Money.
It wasn’t even up against particularly strong competition, sadly – so I think that’s the last we’ve seen of P&T:FU.
Kudos to ITV for trying it out, though.
I wonder if it’s worth asking why it was such a flop in the ratings, even relative to expectations based on timeslot adjusted for the time of year? Has everyone just had too much Jonathan Ross? Are Penn & Teller not a draw? (I remember them attracting attention based on their series on Channel 4 back in the day.) Have people’s magical/showmanship preferences moved from traditional stage acts to the slightly more gussied-up stylings of Derren Brown? Are people just out of love with stage magic these days, relative to the twentieth century?
It’s even more disappointing considering The Magicians on BBC1 was getting over 5 mill.
It appeared to be made entirely for the benefit of Penn & Teller rather than for television viewers, and as such 1.9m is over-performing by approximately 1.9m.
Didn’t the final episode of TCoM go out buried in the Xmas schedules on a lunchtime or something?
It was originally scheduled to go out around 5.30pm between Christmas and New Year in 2009. For some reason at the last minute it was replaced by a repeat of Rosemary and Thyme.
Who Dares Sings! Christmas Special (recorded in May 2008) was planned to be shown in 2008 but never saw the light of day.
I wonder if Penn & Teller: Fool Us would have worked better on a somewhere like Sky 1?
Perhaps if they’d have had the word Magic in the title it would have done better?
At least I’ve discovered Penn & Teller from all of this and stuff on YouTube such as the brilliant Bullshit!
I think the fact that nobody outside of internet discussions knew it was on probably harmed it last night. The main series ended a month ago and it was in a random slot with no promotion and a rubbish lead in. It was never going to do well (it got 2.2m with HD and +1).
It’s a real shame as it’s a great show. The main series averaged 3.5m so I thought it had a shot but I think it just lost that chance last night. Hopefully they’ll have the decency to air the Xmas episode though, even if it is in a graveyard slot on New Year’s Eve or against the Strictly Come Dancing Final.
I wonder if Penn & Teller: Fool Us would have worked better on a somewhere like Sky 1?
Ahhh! Very interesting. The other way of looking at this is that you don’t naturally leap to ITV when you think about watching magic on TV, do you? It may just be culturally relatively BBC, or relatively Channel 4. Sure, ITV have had things from time to time (the Masked Magician revealing secrets was a hit as a small number of one-offs, long ago; Magic Numbers – sorry, Paul – didn’t really take) but it doesn’t feel like the intuitive place to look, somehow.
I may be even more off-base than usual with that one.
From my perspective, the summer series was not that much of a flop, and – compared with last year – performed entirely adequately. The trouble is in the schedulers’ office: Penn & Teller’s is an old-style show, attracting relatively elderly audiences, and they don’t watch so much telly in the summer. Stick it on New Year’s Day evening, might well do something good. Stick it on after , would have done twice as well.
When Fool Us started, I made the point on here that when the tv audience latch onto the fact that with those acts that go to Las Vegas you will actually never find out how its done, because P & T even though I suspect they know how it’s done, will never tell – it renders the show slightly pointless.
Unlike The Magicians where most people watched because (a)it was magic, and (b)they were still blinking into the Saturday night haze left because X factor wasn’t on.
With P&T you sort of knew if you watched you would be told how that trick was done, or up which sleeve he was hiding the cards ect. When that didn’t happen – the novelty wore off quickly.
Also it was a mistake to run it as a series. Maybe 3 or 4 one off speicals strewn around the schedules during the year (with the Christmas one swung towards seeing how the winners got on in Vegas) would have worked better.
Here’s something to ponder- how many people are actually going to win the million on Red or Black?
Assuming it’s a straight 50/50 chance (i.e. the wheel will have no zero), here are the odds:
7 winners or 0 winners- 1/128 chance
6 winners or 1 winner- 7/128 chance
5 winners or 2 winners- 21/128 chance
4 winners or 3 winners- 35/128 chance
So going by strict probability, it’s a bit more than 50/50 that 3 or 4 people will win, and about 80% likely anywhere from 2-5 people win. Given that, I’ll go low, and say THREE people win the money.
Mmm. I was wondering whether they have laid off the cost of offering somewhere between zero and seven million pounds in prize money; I’m sure that some firm would be willing to take on the risk for four million pounds, and there might be someone prepared to do it for as few as 3.6 million. (Idly, I wonder whether they could distribute the risk and get viewers at home to take the risk on at only a slight EV cost – possibly less than other insurers/gamblers would quote – but the cost of administration would surely be fearsome.)
There dose seem to be a fair bit of holding onesself hostage with such a prize structure; one might imagine that the not-too-thoughtful world would cry fix were there no more than one winner, which will happen one time in sixteen. Then again, I don’t recall the anti-WWTBAM? call being too venomous when that took years to pay out its top prize in the UK.
Thing with Millionaire though was that it (obviously as a result of it being a multiplce choice quiz with no proper ‘trick’ questions) wasn’t necessarily always a 1-in-4 shot all the time. “It’s only easy if you know the answer”, and that.
Wasn’t the wait for an American millionaire longer than ours? I know they had that rising jackpot for a long, long time meaning the first millionaire got something like $2.2m.
Not at all – the show went to air in the States in August 1999, John Carpenter won the first jackpot in November that year – and a flat rate $1 million, the accumulator didn’t start for a couple of years.
What was slighly ironic was ABC’s Spin City aired an episode featuring Millionaire and the first time the $1 Million cue was used. That episode was aired 24 hours before John Carpenter’s well known phone call.
After they gave away the top prize for the 6th time the show had a streak where nobody was either winning $1 million or risking $468,000. Which is why after 50 or so shows they decided to add $10,000 for each episode the top prize was not won. So the rollover jackpot started at $1,500,000 or something like that. Our US friends should clarify to what I’ve stated.
Would you like some French news? Go on then.
N’oubliez pas les paroles has yet another run starting next week (longest-running version of the format by some margin now?) albeit with a few tweaks – contestants have to sing for the audience before they get to play to test out their music skills; they’re adding a fourth ‘switch’ lifeline, and each player’s being paired with some moderately famous face from France 2’s programme catalogue.
Change for change’s sake, you might say…
Jeff Stelling’s decision to stay on as Countdown host next year has apparently been rejected by Channel 4. He will leave in December after all.
Jay Hunt thinks a high profile name will rescue the show (as if Jeff isn’t high profile enough). Forget the timeslot or its superfluous length, celebrities with no interest in the game is what the Countdown audience want!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2011/08/30/countdown-host-jeff-stelling-is-leaving-the-show-after-all-115875-23381865/
Well – I’ll throw my name into that hat!! I’m more high profile than half of the celeb BB stars! Ahem.
Just been over to the ‘fair’ betting site so check the odds of the new host of Countdown.
All the usual suspects are listed – Brandreth G, Dent S, Armstrong A, Fry S, Bremner R, Vorderman C. There are also ludicrious ways to never see your money again like shoving fivers onto a wild stab in the dark that one of the two Desmonds would be coming back for another stab or even longer odds shots on Giles Coren, Bradley Walsh or even Mike Gatting filling the presenters seat.
My investments (if I could be bothered) would be that given Jay Hunt has mentioned the ‘f’ presenter word (as in female) howsabout Liza Tarbuck (very good value at around 35/1)or now that you could record 3 weeks worth of shows in 3 days whilst sitting down, Sir Terrence of Wogan (4.5 to 1).
I don’t know if amyone has posted this[apologies if they have], but the BBC have another Saturday Night Pilot being recorded on September 26th. Tickets are available here http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/shows/the_shredder
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””The Shredder (pilot)BBC One | 26 September
The Shredder is a brand new Saturday night gameshow for BBC One that is being piloted in a studio run-through this September.
This is your chance to be in the audience and be amongst the very first people in the UK to see this exciting new format led by a celebrity host.
What’s the show?
The Shredder is the very first show in television history to give couples the chance to eliminate their bills for up to 10 years of their lives. How is this possible? Come and meet The Shredder and find out.””””””””””
Ta, applied.
In other shows in progress news, this looks like Faking It meets The Moment Of Truth:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/beonashow/the_dare
Will clearly live or die on the hosting and the challenges themselves.
Pretty sure this was going under the quite clever title of Pros and Cons previously.
I saw this on the tickets website a couple of weeks ago. Given it’s called ‘a Saturday night gameshow’, I suspect it’s a lottery show – so will probably be the only chance to see it in London, before it get booted up to Pacific Quay..
It does though sound like could be a more gimicky reworking of For The Rest Of Your Life/Set For Life doesn’t it..?
At least it’s explicitly, with the “pay off your bills” angle, recognising contestants’ financial reality.
FTROYL never did that, it was far worse than DoND ever was at pushing the GAMBLE!! angle at the contestants. Everything I (wrongly) criticised Noel for on DoND, Nicky Campbell demonstrated in spades on FTROYL. Including at the taping I went to, which not-unrelatedly produced the grand non-total of £0 prize money…