Well I’ve just ran from deepest darkest Elstree to Westfield White City to write this up, as I’ve got some time to kill before the off peak trains start:
- This is not a show for audience members with a fear of heights, as you’re situated on gantries 20-25 ft in the air. In fact to be honest it’s not really a show for audience members at all, as you can’t actually see very much of the action from where you are situated. It’s filmed in Elstree’s George Lucas Stage.
- The set is split into two parts – the host’s platform up with the audience, which has an elevator down into the Memory Maze beneath. As is the standard, it all looks a bit like Tron. There are three screens around the studio – two behind the audience which are parallogram shape and mainly show the host, the third one is a large one above the Memory Maze for the audience to look at, showing all the action.
- The host is Matt Allwright off of Rogue Traders and I thought he was quite good – certainly not the sort who needs to rely on an autocue, and in fact there were very few stopdowns throughout the whole recording.
- The game then. There is a pyramid of rooms called the “Memory Maze”, beginning with one room in the first row, three in the second, three in the third, five, seven and finally seven in the back row.
- The contestants enter the maze by elevator (COOL SET BIT) and they enter the first room.
- In each room is a “vault” – a large box with screens and money locked away in a draw. In each room the contestants get a question with four possible answers and they get 30 seconds to lock in an answer. If they are right, they take the money in the vault and put it into a large perspex suitcase they carry around with them. They can then progress into the maze, but it’s important they remember the correct answer, as one of them will need to recite all the correct answers at the end to escape with the money. Questions get more challenging the further in you get.
- If they get the question wrong then all four answers are added to The Exit List. They win no money, and the way forward is blocked, so they must make a sidewards step. The Memory Maze has a voice of a woman, who recites the entire list after each room. Sort a bit like a female Cube (and actually there’s every chance they could overdub it with a different voice for telly, like they do with Colin McFarlane)
- The vault in first row contains £1,000. Second row £2k, third row £3k, £4, £5k and in the back row each vault has £10k, except for one which has £100k in it.
- Matt will tell the contestants the category of question that will come up in each of the adjacent avaliable rooms.
- If the contestants block themselves in (by sidestepping to one end of the maze and getting a question wrong) then the contestants have the option to sacrifice all the money they’ve collected so far and take a forward step, or take the opportunity to leave.
- Panic rooms. Five of the rooms selected before the game are “panic rooms”. There is no money to be won in these rooms, but there is pain for the contestants – they are shown a list of ten things to remember and associated information (like X Factor groups from pictures, middle names of US presidents, that sort of thing). They then have 30 seconds to recall them as the computer flashes things up (such as pictures of the groups). For each match the contestants DON’T get, they are given an increasingly lengthy Panic Room sequence to add to the Exit List, featuring the first letters or digits of each answer they couldn’t match (FWRGHJ, for example).
- To make the most money, the best strategy therefore is to work into one of the back corners and then sweep the back row, presumably exiting if you find the £100k. If you block yourself in in the back row then you have to exit.
- After each question, The Exit List is shown to the players and read out. When the contestants think it’s time to go, one of them is selected to play the end game by choosing a glass cylinder atop each vault, the short straw plays. Their partner exits the maze by following the lights out back to the elevator. At that point, the person still in the maze has to put a pair of headphones on.
- The person on the hosts platform is now made an offer. Based on the amount of money being carried and the amount of answers he needs to give, they’re offered an amount of money to bail. The contestant locks in their choice to bail or not secretly. If they choose to bail then they will only win the offer regardless as to whether their partner remembers the exit list or not.
- Escaping the maze. The player still in the room has 10 seconds for every room they entered. They must retrace their steps, and in each room they must recite one of the entries on The Exit List – that’s one of the correct answers, all the four options of a room in the case of a wrong answer or a Panic Code. The contestant can recite the list in any order, but can’t move on to a different room until something off the list has been given. If they step into an incorrect room, a loud horn goes off and they have to try a different route (although there does not appear to be any other penalty). If they don’t make it back to the lift in time then they’re forced to leave the briefcase where it is and return to the host’s platform, where it may transpire they’ve won some money anyway if the partner took the deal.
- The game is actually fairly sound. However the two lads playing today basically didn’t do very well and had an exit list that had over 20 items on it. Not in itself a problem, but when this list gets repeated over and over after every question it begins to get rather tedious.
- The end game is also not really that spectacularly exciting. Visually the rooms are sparse (they’re basically 5’x5′ boxes) and the only shot we get on the audience screen is the one head-on to the contestants. I fully expect there won’t be very much in the way of close finishes – I think you’ll be able to predict 90% of the time whether they will succeed or not.
- Something that gets more difficult to get out of the further you go in is one of the all time great mechanics and as such here we’ve actually got a fairly decent game. It’d make a brilliant end game if they had to do everything in three minutes. But as is the usual there’s a lot of filler chat here, which in a game of short term memory might be actually a little unfair. This said it’s going to be difficult to judge how it will come across on screen from today’s recording, they’re almost certainly going for two or three games on an episode, these guys were going for over 90 minutes (so long, in fact, they didn’t try and film a second game in the recording session) basically non-stop.
Alright, I’ll take questions when I get home.
It’s a flop. The concept is too difficult to understand for the average Joe watching on a Saturday night. It won’t make entertaining tv if it’s tedious repetition.
Accusing a gameshow of having ‘Tedious Repetition’
Haa.
Joe, did 101 Ways To Leave A Gameshow totally pass you by? – and it’s a trap that Total Wipeout falls into now with increasing regularity..
I’m assuming that the contestants don’t know where the Panic Rooms are when they’re told the categories of the rooms they can move to, and there’s an appropriate lighting change/sound effect when they enter one?
This sounds good on paper (though I agree, it would make a good endgame slightly modified), but we’ll have to see how it goes in practice.
Yep, the first time anyone knows it’s a panic room is when they step inside, when the lights turn red and an alarm sounds.
I agree, it’s all well and good reading how the game’s played, but it’s another to actually see the game played. From what I’ve read, though, it sounds like it’ll be a good game and I’ll look forward to seeing it on TV.
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In what universe is Elstree –> White City –> Cambridge a sensible journey!? I’ve been working in White City for a month so you should’ve mentioned you’d be in the area.
Re: Exit List, there’s some clever touches in there that make it better than I thought – I particularly like “Wrong answer = 4 items added”. I think the Panic Rooms ought to have been much simpler – e.g. a physical trap that drains money/time until they get out of it. It does all sound rather complicated, though. The restricted room sizes will hurt their camera angles too. Shame the rooms aren’t themed a bit more.
Oh it’s nothing to do with being sensible, it’s everything to do with killing time. Elstree -> White City -> Liverpool Street -> Cambridge in fact, the show finished recording almost an hour earlier than planned and I had a travelcard, so you know.
I think you’ll quite like the Panic Rooms when you see it, I think it’s actually quite a fun diversion. There’s quite a lot of playalong factor in this show.
However I think lots of teams are going to get stuck a few answers from the end, and the end game doesn’t feel quite frantic or exciting enough I don’t think.
Sunday nights in the Spring was suggested, which sounds about right.
There were some quite fun Allwright Rogue Trader anecdotes during the end of show downtime.
Can I just ask Brig: when you go into watch a studio recording, do you have a pen and pad to jot down everything you see at the time of recording whilst it’s happening? That’s a lot of details you remembered if it was just by memory!
You sure it’ll be Sunday 7pm in Spring? Isnt that The Cuboid’s timeslot?!
It’s all memory. It’s not that difficult, after all viewers will need to work it out.
They implied Sunday nights in the Spring, then decided they didn’t know.
I can’t comment in titles and music incidentally because they admitted they weren’t done.
Joe, As I’ve done a Watching Telly reviews of both Pointless and Perfection, it’s actually quite easy to soak up what’s in front of you in on the set.
It’s just the same as watching a new format on tv for the first time, then writing about it a couple of hours after transmission.
It’s surprising how much you remember when faced with the cold glow of notepad fired up on the laptop when you get home even 3-4hrs later that day.
Pointless took 90 mins to nail down (a 25 min walk home from the station also helped get the round by round process down in my head)
Basic ‘how Perfection works’ notes were quickly scrawled down on the back of the e-ticket sitting outside the IBM building next to ITV London, whilst waiting for my mate to arrive from Waterloo, and going through the format over the road in The Mulberry Bush over a foaming pint a short while later, helped again.
Just to check my understanding: on the way out, can contestants name any item in any room without needing to get the link between the items and the rooms which generated them correct? Could you confirm my understanding in this scenario: suppose you answered the first room wrongly and the next three rooms correctly then decided to take the money at that point, you could get out by naming just the four incorrect answers from the first room, one per room.
Strikes me as relatively easy, but that may not be all that bad a thing. Sounds like a good show rather than a great one, but I’m more inclined towards “hit” than towards “miss”.
I *think* that what Brig was implying is that you can provide any of the items on the list in any room, but that if you get an answer wrong, all four options count as a singular item.
Yes, any item or set of items in a room. And you remember three and not the fourth, you can switch to a different item or set if you like, although seeing as you’ve got to remember everything on the list to win I’m not sure if there’s a decent argument for doing so.
Edit: Oh no, sorry I’ve misunderstood – No, in one of the rooms on the way out you’d need to name a complete set before you’re allowed to move on, although you don’t have to do it in the room you got it wrong in.
The decent argument for doing so; taking out an item (singular or multiple) you do know, and buying time to get the last item in the set. Although it sounds like there’s at least one designated room where you’re forced to name a set, should you have a set. (It’s perfectly possible that a team might get every answer right before walking away, thus having only singular answers and maybe one or more Panic Codes. However, this would probably only happen with a team who were not only very good but hit the £100k pretty swiftly on the last row.)
Well… it’s not really buying time, because you’re up against the clock to escape anyway, so you’re going to have to remember it at some point anyway.
Incidentally, SPOILER ALERT, it was implied a pair won the £100k on one of the first recordings, so it is possible.
It definitely sounds possible – basically you have to get to the last row any way you can, make enough sidesteps (potentially zero, of course) to get the £100k, then turn back and remember your answers. And of course there’s a tremendous incentive to keep chasing the £100k as long as you can – but every step you go on increases the risk of leaving with nothing, and you might not even be able to get to the £100k anyway. It’s a properly interesting risk-management element.
I’d probably expect a six-figure win about one game in twelve.
(Oh, the other thing, though possibly less relevant if the teams are couples rather than pairs of friends – to win more than £20k *each* you have to go to the back row *and* chase far enough that you’ve got a sizable chance of finding the £100k anyway. £20k is of course a very common perceived utility curve inflection point these days amongst UK contestants, as anyone who’s followed DoND for a bit will have noticed – that’s another reason why the High Stakes format is *so* spectacularly broken.)
I think I get the gist of it:
Suppose a team goes through 9 rooms:
Room 1- correct, 1 answer
Room 2- correct, 1 answer
Room 3- Panic Room, 5 letter code
Room 4- incorrect, 4 answers
Room 5- correct, 1 answer
Room 6- Panic Room, 4 number code
Room 7- correct, 1 answer
Room 8- correct 1 answer
Room 9- incorrect, 4 answers
So they get 90 seconds to retrace their steps, but could give the Exit List in this order:
Room 9- 4 answers from room 9
Room 8- Panic code from room 6
Room 7- 1 answer from room 7
Room 6- 1 answer from room 8
Room 5- 4 answers from room 4
Room 4- Panic code from room 3
Room 3- 1 answer from room 5
Room 2- 1 answer from room 2
Room 1- 1 answer from room 1
One other question about the Panic Rooms- are they able to go forward no matter what the outcome of the Panic Room is, or is it treated like an incorrect answer if they fail to recall all the items and end up with a code on the list?
Yep, that”s bang on.
As far as I know all panic rooms stop forward movement, although the guys failed to get all ten in any of them so I’m afraid I can’t make guarantees.
Edit: actually if a panic room was on the side that would mean a guaranteed block in, so actually logically ten out of ten may let you go forward.
I would also presume the Exit List will be added in post for the escape, as it was the only time there were no graphics on the large overhead screen.
Got it, thanks; good example.
Not sure this will be a “must watch” every week, but I am looking forward to it now!
Hey, Brig, a 7 minute edited version of the pilot is on C21Screenings. How does it compare to that, if you can see it?
I was hoping it would be a bit more fun watching it. Not that much. It still feels like it should be a lot more fun than it actually is. I have no idea what they could do, but something feels missing.
That’s fun, I’m in C21 and can’t find it. Is it under a different name?
Ah found it, ta.
Mmm, I think it’s a reasonable enough interpetation of the game, but it does feel quite dry, and I also think they play down the show’s playalong potential.
They’ve improved the graphics a lot since they filmed that (and also reduced the top prize from £250k to £100k), also there’s a lot mroe filler chat. And the final doesn’t have Matt saying “that’s right” after each answer which I can see getting annoying, the contestant says an answer, presses the button and gets a ding or a buzz then they move on.
But as I said, they’re going to have to edit down a game that took 90 minutes down to about half an hour so…
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I’ve just watched this week’s programme on ITV2 and I actually enjoyed it.
I think it has a good pace and I thought that the gent had actually took the bail out rather than let his wife try, but he didn’t! The suspense at the end was great as well as she only had 4 seconds to get out with one vault left.
I enjoyed it and will watch it again.