As I said, some “proper” stuff next week including some news on The Exit List, hopefully, and also Absolute Zero, fingers crossed. Tomorrow I’m spending most of the day at an exciting poker tournament (speaking of which there will be exciting Bother Series of Poker 2012 news soon. Why not sign up to Brig’s Poker Club in preparation? Joining is free.) . So what to update the blog with?
There are a wealth of US gameshow pilots on Youtube, today we’re looking at quite a fun show called King of the Hill from 1975. The relevance comes from the show’s end game in part two, which may seem familiar.
Don’t forget to get your Fantasy X Factor guesses in for tomorrow night, managers. And they are timestamped, so don’t think I won’t know!
Countdown is no longer allowed to have child contestants, due to circumstances beyond the control of Mr Eadie and co…
http://www.c4countdown.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8653
A real shame, that – having kids compete on the same level as adults was a key part of the show’s unique character. 🙁
It’s The Cube in Ukraine- hosted by an American reality TV star…
http://youtu.be/Lla11YrmfSs
Is it me or is their version not filmed at Fountain Studios? It looks like they picked up everything and produced in their native studio.
Apparently yes, they did tape it in their own studio, according to the page translation at gameshows.ru…
I found a trailer and a behind-the-scenes video last week that I forgot to post here, but this is a pleasing find! Love foreign Cube!
Who is it? I don’t recognise him.
Maksim Chmerkovskiy- he’s one of the pro dancers on Dancing With the Stars over here…
Ah ha, ta. I idly wondered Dancing With the Stars after posing it.
Also did the Ukranian version of The Bachelor (as the title character, not the host) from what I understand..
King Of The Hill: definitely decent. I like the speed and I quite like the variety between the different styles of question from step to step with the consequence that a winning contestant must be quite well-rounded. Some of them are quick fun, but it would probably be better still if the categories varied from game to game. Improvements in graphical technology would also assist. The direction isn’t quite there in terms of making it absolutely clear which contestant is on which step, but they probably hadn’t evolved as far as Strike It Rich/Lucky by that point. Some gentle colour-coding of the steps could also do the trick. I’d like to see a bit more made of the King (or, here, Queen…) motif but perhaps it’d be considered all a bit Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place, or whatever it’s called.
The Temptation pilot linked to at the end of part three is a little belter, also, though the sound quality isn’t great.
It’s been forever since I last watched this pilot, but I think my biggest complaint was about the whole “King’s zone” bit. There was something that struck me as a bit unfair about how the first part was mostly just position-jostling, while in the last part, one contestant could blow the entire game for the others. Now that I’ve seen shows like Tout le Monde, the “champion has advantages” format makes a bit more sense, but it still feels a bit off in this show.
It’s a Knockout is back on Aussie TV tomorrow. It’s being filmed on another country’s set for The Biggest Game In The World, which the production company is really trying to push internationally.
But when it comes down to it, it really is just Simply The Best, basically.
I think The Chase has gone a bit too far with these celebrity specials and are essentially fixed results, telling some of the Chasers (apart from Mark) to deliberately get the questions wrong. Next series, the Chasers should have their own money at stake which goes to charity. Then, we might see a fair game.
I agree, I think logistically-speaking it is one of the most ill-suited formats to convert to a celebrity special for charity.
The Chase has never struck me as completely transparent. I would like some more explanation as to how those “offers” are decided. They shouldn’t even be called “offers” if the money isn’t the Chaser’s, or at least is not indirectly related to the Chaser’s fee.
If we were told the Chaser’s fee was docked for losing, I would be satisfied with the integrity of the celebrity specials. The Chasers also seem to have more recently done away with their ‘nasty’ edge that they were instructed to put on in the earlier series, which makes you even less likely now to believe they wouldn’t just throw a game out of kindness/at the producer’s behest.
I know the Chasers actually decide the offers to give the contestants for going nearer/away from the Chaser. If you follow Mark when he is on. He tends to use his maths to give the offers. Usually he would triple/quadruple the amount they had in the cashbuilder to go a step nearer. Also as we saw last night, Paul gave Phil Tuffnell a big offer to give the team a nice round £80,000.
I don’t know about their appearance fee. I won’t be surprised if they’re doing the charity series for no fee since they recorded all six shows in two days.
All what is going on The Chase is nothing new. Celebrity Eggheads is basically the same. However, (unless I am wrong) if the celebrity team loses to the Eggheads then they get nothing for their charity. The jackpot is rolled over as normal and whatever money is left at the end of the series is donated to Children in Need.
But it’s not the Chaser’s money to offer, this is the thing. I see what they do with the carefully-pitched upper offers to round the jackpot up to a nice amount that divides evenly, that’s terrific (and I approve of how they’ve been cranking up that multiplier with each passing series to get more people to take the gamble). But those offers clearly have to come from the prods – there’s no way the Chaser would have the clearance to make those sort of budgeting decisions.
Even if it wasn’t deliberately mentioned on the show, the existence of a system would make the whole thing feel a little less open to fixing. I quite like the idea of the Chaser being allowed to “give away” money from a prize fund up to a maximum of £100,000, and pocketing a fee of £1 for every grand not given away, tripled if he/she wins the final chase.
Well, Mark’s Final Chase last week looked even more dodgy than Paul’s… 😉
If anybody would like to follow me on twitter right now @travisapenery then I am doing a running commentary of the Dutch show Let’s Get Married. It’s basically The Shane Ritchie Experience but with Russian Roulette trapdoors.