I’m so excited, episode two of amazing gameshow discussion podcast Fifty 50 is out, and you can download it from the show site! Joining Lewis Ogbajoj this week is top Friend of the Bar and low-budget gameshow host and Line Up contestant Daniel Peake!
Jacpot, Baggage and Accumulate! all feature, as well as tangents.
I know the Bar is basically plugging our own and other people’s podcasts at the moment. But there’s not much exciting on! At least Breakaway returns next Monday.
Only Connect ratings, as per Brig’s twitter request:
861,433 (3.5%)
Highest multi-channel rating in its slot.
Cheers Paul!
By the way, seriously, if anyone has anything to say about the show I’d love to hear comments. I am trying to improve week on week, and I am learning, but input is much appreciated.
I also have possible guest ideas out the wazoo, but if anyone has any suggestions for guests they’d also be welcome. Most of my ideas are admittedly pie-in-the-sky (can you say Banker anyone?) so more down-to-earth ambitions are probably necessary.
Another good episode. I think I preferred the three-way format because that felt more of a party and more likely to get different points of view. But I realise getting two guests is 100% more fiddly than one.
It’s funny, I’d originally planned to have it be a one-guest format but then two guests stumbled into my skype the day of that first recording, and it all worked out.
I think a regular cohost and a guest slot would be a good compromise, but that would require hiring a regular cohost.
But the thing I liked most about the first show was that both guests brought new information and insights about stuff they had an inside track about, so it felt like a very full half hour of genuinely new information. Unless they were VERY active in creating or seeing new gameshows, a regular cohost wouldn’t bring that to the table.
If it’s hard to get 2 guests on any given week, I hope you agree it would be even harder to get 2 guests as interesting and diverse as Nick and David on a weekly basis!
It seems that show 1 has started at a brilliant peak of greatness that I can’t match unless I get stellar guests on weekly, which I won’t be able to follow up on (or at least not for long). I live in fear of the week when I cannot find a guest, either due to running out or just lack of availability, and I have to make a dry solo news and single feature show that everyone will hate. At least that one will be easier to edit.
Depends how often people are prepared to contribute and how many you can find. If you can find 8 people to appear once a month each, you’re golden. Just juggle your selections to match the topics you’re going to talk about.
I would hope not for it to turn into The Brig Bother Show because I think that would ultimately become quite tedious. However if you get desperate, I’m usually free and happy to come on on early Sunday afternoons at fairly short notice, and there are about five or six foreign shows I’d be happy to bang on about if there isn’t much happening domestically.
Unfortunately I think pilot season is probably done for a few months now, but if something is filming in London I will always make the effort to try and catch it. You should probably look into trying to get a Manchester correspondent at some point.
I think there’s a moderate chance that Dan Peake may read this thread, so I have a question for him. Dan, did you ever consider doing series of different formats of your own device rather than multiple series of Accumulate! as happened in reality? (Did you have different formats that you considered and rejected? How did you decide?)
I’ve long thought that something similar could be a good idea for Channel 4 (or possibly someone else…) – a number of weekly shows, each with a completely different surprise format. Perhaps some kind of commonality – all live, same host, perhaps some guaranteed way of a contestant winning £100,000 or something to pull in the punters.
This would be a really good way to try big, ambitious formats that wouldn’t necessarily work as a series or have some kind of surprise element that would limit the possibility of recurring. Kind of like a Gameshow Marathon, but for entirely new formats.
That said, I suspect exactly ten people would get excited about the idea, and they’re all regular commenters here…
It seems like the natural way for the UK to break into the German concept of ‘one episode/mini-series every few months’ for light entertainment, which… Some formats, frankly, need, by having a series (6-10 episodes) of these formats, which can naturally be done every six months or so.
From memory, there was once a proposal that Michael Barrymore might get a show to host where the principle is that three different game shows, with different contestants, are placed on a revolve. Barrymore doesn’t know the games or contestants before the show starts. Barrymore introduces all three, the audience vote which they want to see and Barrymore hosts the winning option.
Going back to your proposal, I imagine this turning out as something like “I’M GREAT AT EVERYTHING”. Every show has three contestants, of which one may be a returning champion from a previous show. The gimmick is that every show has a different game. A winning contestant may choose to take a prize or gamble it by coming back to play another game in the next episode. Winning five episodes in a row earns a jackpot. (Perhaps there would be a rule that there would be a guarantee of at least one quiz, at least one physical game and at least one strategy game – but you don’t know whether you’ll get three of one, or one of each of those and two completely different things, or some other combination.)
The obvious argument against is that generating radically different game material, and equipment to facilitate it, is very expensive; most game shows amortise the cost of sets and equipments over many episodes doing the same thing and this completely misses that opportunity. I’m not also sure how well “watch this and you’re bound to see something new” competes with “why would I watch this if I don’t know what sort of thing I’m going to get to see?” in practice.
Hey Chris – sorry I haven’t responded before now, I’ve been a bit lazy. Ahem.
Once the Accumulate ball got rolling, we didn’t want to stop it. We wanted to make a flagship programme for RU:ON, so we just kept making it. Because of that, we didn’t really think of any other shows to do instead of it, I was involved in a few of the other shows off air though.
Between talking about Accumulate with Stuart Wood (then head of RU:ON) and filming it, very little changed. If I remember rightly we decreased the length of round 2 from 60 to 45 seconds, and increased round 3 from 60 to 90 seconds – that was pretty much it.
Hope that was an interesting / informative answer.
One thing I’d like to make clear from the podcast is that yes, I’m applying for a few telly jobs, be that format developer or researcher or runner, but I’m also applying for a fair few meteorology jobs (as I’m well qualified), and it’ll be a case of whichever suitable jobs comes along first, that’ll be my next career decision. To be honest, stacking shelves is starting to look like a good career at this point in time!
Good luck either way! There’s a dilemma in there about your career sector options; will Daniel go with his heart or his head?
What specifically was your PhD thesis about?
If you can be better than the National Grid at predicting how hard the wind will blow wind turbines, there are lucrative jobs available in the energy sector. (Not the company I work for, though, we’re tiny!)
My thesis was about modelling air pollution in coastal regions.
I have seen a few jobs in the energy sector around. Who knows where my career will next plump? Not even I…
Actually, Brig called Avanti a music-hall-’em-up game show on Twitter the other day. By the same token, could a weather forecast be considered a mathematical-model-’em-up game show, to put it in the same category as DoND and every Prisoner’s Dilemma show ever?
Rachel Riley to host, obv., the acceptable face of mathematical modeling.
(Ah, l’esprit de l’escalier, which does sound like a rejected name for the French version of Knightmare.)
I sorta know the person in seat 4 on The Chase today. It’s SO. FREAKING. HARD to not mock her for taking -6k.