Right, quiet week. Don’t forget it’s The Exit List tonight at 8pm.
So let’s root through the Youtube archive and see what we can come up with… ah! This will do, Duel with Nick Hancock:
Still surprised nobody tried turning it into a daily afternoon format. It beat Only Connect in the 2008 Hall of Fame as well.
And then it got axed for The Colour of Money, which beat everything else in the 2009 Hall of Shame.
Take note, ITV. Although I suspect you won’t.
Although CoM rated higher than Duel (at least until it moved slots), so clearly ITV got that one right 😉
Worse shows than Duel have got a second chance.
Not quite sure how you’d sort the figures for a daytime version – and think for the exit accelerator questions there should have been a risk of being eliminated. I guess to daytime it and keep the prizes decent you need the format to allow people to go home empty handed, as indeed they do most days on The Chase and Pointless.
I reckon for ITV daytime they would slash everything by five. £20,000 as a starting jackpot and each chip is worth £200.
I gather to win the jackpot you need to win five consecutive duels (one more than the original series) and receive something after winning two.
When the US did a 2nd season, they changed it to where the chips had no value- the money won by the contestant in a duel was based on the number of questions the duel had lasted (up to the 10th question), and then could double it with an accelerator question with one chip. Losing duel 2 or 3 lost all the money they had won, but if they won duel 3, they were then guaranteed half of their winnings if they played on and lost duel 4 or 5. Winning 5 duels won the player increased the winnings to the maximum amount of money that could be won if all 5 duels were played to the top value and all the doubling question were correctly answered.
You could do it like that- each question asked in a duel adds £500 to the game value, up to a max of £5000- which can be doubled with a correct accelerator question. Jackpot starts at £25,000, with any money lost by players playing on and losing added to the bank until it’s won by someone winning 5 games.
Slight correction, 5 Duel victories won $500,000 no matter what was won previously.
Yeah, the feature of the first 5 episodes was that if you got £10k or 10% of the jackpot, it was at risk on your next Duel, but what almost always happened was that they’d just leave, pretty much removing the element of someone doing 4 Duels for the jackpot.
If I was doing a daytime version of the show, I would:
1 – Have each chip on wrong answers worth £100 on top of a starting jackpot of £1,000
2 – Like the first US series, if there’s any remaining chips from a duel, have each chip worth £100 each into a personal bank for the player, so they have a little something should they lose further on
3 – Instead of an Accelerator question rewarding the player with money, add it to the jackpot (1 chip – £1,000, 2 chips – £500, 3 chips – £250) to make it more enticing to win, also like the first US series
I was thinking about this, and I came up with:
1) Start the jackpot at £10k. Five wins to take it home. You don’t get to choose contestants, the next in line is who you get.
2) £200 a chip, going into the jackpot if they are wrong.
3) Winner of a Duel gets one further question with the chips he has left, if he gets it right he can keep the value of any chips he has left, if he gets it wrong he gets no bonus. Discarded chips not added to the jackpot.
Simple and relatively cheap, whilst allowing the potential to build up large jackpots. I’d also limit each question to 45 seconds thinking time.
Actually I say relatively cheap, you’d be looking at an average of about £8k in prizes per episode with 2 and a bit games. Maybe £100 a chip.
£8k per episode is bang on for ITV daytime, I’d say.
Don’t forget DoND is still on £15k an hour.
I posted a comment about how a daytime show could work on dond.co.uk a few years back. Still think it’s a good idea.
Here’s how I think it can work in 2012:
The jackpot starts at £25,000, and increases by £100 per question. To win the jackpot, you’ll need to win 5 games.
You start every game with 10 chips. After each game that you win, you receive a ‘cash chip’, with increasing values:
1st game: £1,000
2nd game: £2,500
3rd game: £5,000
4th game: £10,000
Cash chips otherwise act as ordinary chips, and when placed on wrong answers, enter the machine, which increases the jackpot by their value. Cash chips and ordinary chips always add up to 10 before the start of a game.
If you lose a game, and have any cash chips in hand, then you leave with their total value in winnings. There’s no obligation to place cash chips into the machine (a ‘no-chip’ lockdown is possible when out of ordinary chips).
Questions are timed: after one player locks down, the other has 3 minutes to respond (can be edited for TV).
Instead of 2 accelerators, there’s 1 accelerator (7 seconds to respond) and 1 ‘snatch’: any chips that the opponent places on the wrong answers becomes your own. They can be combined, with a delay of 7 seconds between uses (means you have to switch before accelerating; also gives time for host to explain what’s happening).
This can give a player with few chips a chance to get back in the game. Before, it would be common for a player to have an accelerator in hand, but find it hard to deploy late in the game.
There’s no penalty for attempting to use an accelerator/snatch before locking down (a sound effect will play), and can be attempted again after lockdown.
For show changes, I would replace Nick Hancock with another comedian (perhaps female, though knowing the target market…), and make the set considerably smaller.
Instead of players choosing who they want to face, make the selection random. This gives more time for the audience to get to know who’s playing.
Aim to have 4 games per show in 1 hour, with the set redesigned (e.g. using touchscreens for accelerators/snatches; chip counts; game status; etc).
That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there’s a lot of ways the show can be remade for 2012.
I for one thought if there was one format that benefited from a lack of risk to previous winnings, this was it.
Here’s my idea for a daytime version:
Start the jackpot at £10K, each chip into the jackpot is 100 quid. 5 consecutive wins to win the jackpot.
Upon winning a Duel, the champ gets 3 bonus chips (perhaps color these differently?) for a bonus question against the Accelerator to determine how much he gets per regular chip left from the preceding win. Nail it with one bonus chip and he gets £200 per regular chip, two bonus chips and he gets £150/chip, three bonus chips for £125/chip, and failing the bonus question nets him £100/chip. Regardless, he gets to play on without risk.
Or an alternative version of my bonus question idea: 4 bonus chips, if the champ elects to cover all 4, he gets a guaranteed £100/chip; if he gets it wrong, his remaining chips are dumped into the jackpot instead, also at at £100/chip.
Reading all this makes me want to go back and watch Duel all over again! I taped all but one of the UK series episodes and I got both US series, only with one episode missing of Series 2.
Do the full episodes exist online, or is this your personal collection? I’ve found the first 11 episodes of the UK version, but that’s it.
It’s my personal collection. I grabbed the US series while they were showing using mIRC. To this day, I still have no idea why Episode 5 of Series 2 never got put on there…
Boy, I really wish I would’ve known about this. Now I really feel like going back and watching the first US season, but I can’t find it anywhere save for a couple clips on YouTube.
Any chance you might be willing to upload what you have?
Or are they still available on an IRC fserve somewhere?
I wouldn’t know if they’re still on IRC, and I burned the US episodes onto DVDs, but I do have an effective DVD ripper so maybe I could try uploading them somewhere. Where would you suggest?
Maybe upload them to MediaFire? (Are we allowed to talk about this sort of thing on here? If not, I apologize to Brig.) You can always HJSplit them if they’re over 200MB. Or there’s YouTube, although you’d risk getting a copyright complaint.
Any chance you could point me in the direction of the UK ones that are online, Poochy?
They’re on a certain ‘boxy’ website that’s well-known to the punters around here…
Like most people here I agree increase it to five duels for the jackpot. Not quite sure where to start that jackpot – think I’d try and go £25,000 + £250 per chip but if having to slash the cash I’d slash the starting money (perhaps even to zero) and try and keep the money per chip higher.
How many “Duels” did an episode used to get through – as depending on editing you could have as many as 4 or as few as one in an hour probably.
Three sounds about right, I seem to recall the jackpot rising at about £50k an hour which would equate to just under three Duels’ worth.