So if you didn’t join us for Schlag den Raab last night, this is a thing that actually happened live on German television last night for €2.5m. It’s game fifteen and the entire night rests on the player’s ability to hook a ring on a string on a hook.
Meanwhile this was probably our favourite game of the evening – snatching – the object is to grab the stick that didn’t match any of the shapes or colours that showed up:
The next episode will be December 20th.
For ringing the bull, the last 15 minutes was quite amusing in places – although unrelated to the match between Stefan and Peter. “Don’t do it Elton!!!” being a recurring tweet… (watch from 45:00 and you’ll understand why)
Schnappen was a great game, probably the highlight for me.
For a sense of shared… schadenfreude, here’s a link to the appropriate place in the commentary stream to sync up with that game 15.
The time code doesn’t appear to have been stored, unfortunately. Any chance of posting the time, then maybe we can sync it up with youtube doubler or similar.
It works if you open it up into a new window. It looks like 3h59m58s.
Scrap that, 4h56m is about right.
RATINGS: Schlag den Raab last night attracted;
2.65m and 13.1% in overall viewers
1.78m and 21.9% in the main 14-49 demo
Last night’s show was up against Das Supertalent and a Wladimir Klitschko fight, so the ratings are pretty good (especially the share in 14-49 demo).
The show was brilliant last night. Passe-Trappe (firing draughts using rubber bands) and Schnappen were my favourites last night. Will catch up with your commentary soon.
Liked Passe-Trappe but probably didn’t need to be best of seven.
Do you know what sort of figures it was pulling after midnight? It’s share at 2am local must have been huge!
Agree about your point on Passe-Trappe. Best of five would’ve been enough.
As for the ratings after midnight, I can only imagine it was high, but I don’t have any figures, sorry.
Reviving a line from three decades ago in another context: “It’s the show where anything can happen… and usually does!!!“
And now for something completely different – I’ve been wondering for a long time now, why has no-one noticed that the Bar’s favourite The Chase consistently looks like a complete set-up?
I mean, it’s not rocket science that Bradley CLEARLY reads questions in a dramatically different pace to the Chaser, than to the contestants. Not to mention the infamous “Corrrrrrrrrrect” from the first couple of series, where he would say it in the longest humanely possible manner.
Also, the contestants have to buzz-in and wait for the annoying VO to announce their name in order to answer, which is not the case with the Chaser.
And what happened in between series 2 and 3, where in the former most episodes had 23-26 steps in the Final Chase, when in the very next series, like nowadays, it’s more like 13-18. Cunning casting much?
And most of all, why should I trust a format in which winning and losing is in the hands of a person hired by the producers, being in their complete control. They can rig it in absolutely any way possible. The “independent adjudicators” thing is obviously completely unreliable, since why would I trust a private company hired by a private company?
I’m basing all that on my experiences having been in the crew producing some game shows in a European company, and let me tell you – any aspect that can be rigged, will be.
What is your view on my doubts?
Mark Labbett is on Facebook so should be able to respond to the statistics but I imagine that they used up the easier questions on early series. As long as the questions are the same level it shouldn’t matter how hard they are to a large extent. Unlike Eggheads, at least they offer the contestants a choice of question packs.
Production companies rarely care about the number of winners because they don’t pay the prize money from the production budget. They try to have a certain level of winners to get a balance but often the difficulty is getting enough winning teams/players.
The game is not even because the contestants can’t get pushed back. The head start and the push back rule are ways for compensating for the buzzer delay.
I imagine Bradley saying correct is that he’s waiting for the next question to appear on his screen. I personally think he paces the questions fairly though I find his accent a bit hard to follow at that speed.
Agreeing with you, and yet one quick thing that could be done to be even more transparent: before the Final Chase starts, show the contestants being offered two question stacks, and show them holding the question stack they don’t use during their Final Chase and handing it back to Bradley so that he can use it for the Chaser. (Or, alternatively, the old Blankety Blank “you can see the two questions – or, here, question stacks – in holders all along” route.)
I know that the question stacks are of equal difficulty. The Chasers are just so used to, and good at, interrupting and answering questions quickly that it’s easy for it to feel otherwise.
I wish they would do that on Eggheads because it’s the most often complaint we receive at the UKGS website (that the Eggheads had easier questions)
On The Chase, it’s less vital since a recognised third party is on situ.
The word “clearly” is a wallpaper word and normally translates to “this is what I believe but I cannot back it up with any evidence” 🙂
This can be explained by simple psychology, when you are rooting for a particular team or player you notice everything that appears to hurt them and barely notice things that benefit, watch any sports crowd to see that.
Some stats: questions in the final chase were written in the early days by TV researchers using standard quiz sources. Now there is a full time writing team containing world class quizzers under orders to find original questions.
This means that in season two contestants were setting an average target of 19.8 and we were scoring about 23 in reply. By season seven the average target is 15.5 and chasers are averaging 18.6 in reply- in other words the question sets are about four questions tougher.
As for game mechanics, a final question takes four seconds. A chaser normally faces 2.5 opponents which averages out at ten seconds and concedes three pushbacks which equates to a further 12. So playing under chaser rules costs us 22 seconds. In contrast buzzing in costs at most 12 seconds…
This game is massively weighted IN FAVOUR of the teams. I will confidently state that I would exchange pushbacks for a buzzer in a heartbeat, I would win 95%+ of the time
And if Lucas is claiming that Beyond Dispute are not independent, he is defaming a talented and honourable bunch of lawyers, not very smart
Hi, Mark the Chaser(?), thank you for your rebuttal.
Having analysed your maths, it appears to be correct. Also, if the change in Final Chase steps is caused by different question writing, and it affect both sides, it’s rather fair.
However, it still doesn’t change one of the big observations I’ve written – the win most definitely is in the hands of a producers-controlled person. You’ve accused me of saying I think BD is a fraud, but that’s not true. I however see it as a black box – I know what’s coming out, but don’t see why. It’s like a Banker in DonD, you have to believe the banker doesn’t know the contents of the cases. Frankly, I don’t because I don’t believe the telly, having worked on it 😉
I wonder what could possibly be changed for the show to look more transparent. I’ve seen some suggestions in YT comments, they could ask the same set of questions to both contestants and the Chaser, but that’s not a solution, because the Chaser would be hearing the answers from the backstage…
I can’t see any way that could be improved, do you?
Lucas: as I said above, the prize budget is very different from the production budget. The producers don’t get paid the prize budget. They get a fixed fee for making the programme, regardless of how many winners there are.
From the BBC shows I’ve worked on, the programmes are funded to 100% of the prize budget and any excess (from losing shows) is handed back at the end. On ITV shows, they aim for a certain minimum (e.g. one winner a week) to keep viewers’ interest and then they have a reserve budget if more people win than chance dictates. But it’s not like the producers ‘get’ that money if there’s no winners, so there’s not much point in them rigging the show.
Ultimately, TV is a conceit. They can only go some way to demonstrate that what you’re seeing is real. There are some territories, and even some other UK TV shows, that massage the truth but there’s nothing going wrong that I can see in current quiz shows.
The aim of the Chase is not to produce wins for the chasers, it is to produce good exciting shows. A steady diet of easy wins for the chasers is bad news, ideally most games should come down to the last ten seconds or so.
But the big problem here is perception: once people have made up their minds there is nothing you can do. The producers could show a bunch of sceptics every compliance and security feature we have and you know someone would turn around and go “yeah but…”
The Chase is straight. All modern quiz shows in UK are. I routinely get asked “are we fed the answers?” And my reply is “No. If it was, you would not have the four chasers you see. Instead you would have four much better looking actors doing the job”
Back in the day, Bother’s Bar blew the lid on innocent malpractice at . Amounts weren’t put into the boxes in a proper random style, the producers spotted the problem, it likely didn’t affect the result. Ten years on, about two people remember “sequencegate”.
So yes, things can be done wrongly on game shows. The least I require is concrete, factual evidence. So let me throw out some questions. This isn’t confined to , and I’m not having a pop at *anyone*.
What is the upside of rigging a game?
There has never been a successful cover-up of a rigged game show or competition. Why would producers want to end their careers in a tawdry charade?
How many people would have to be paid off to keep this a secret?
Specific to : Shaun Wallace was in at the start, ten episodes in 2009. Why would he risk *his* day job (barrister, lawyer, upright pillar of the community) for taking part in a fraud?
Why would ITV hire in some external people to make fake adjudications when they could do it all in-house?
Where’s the evidence? Actual evidence, not just handwaving waffle.
Thank you Ian 🙂
Thank you all for your responses, it’s a very interesting read having that insight from the making of the show.
To Weaver, well, the purpose of rigging would surely be ensuring that every aspect of the show can be controlled and the program will be predictable for the producers, exciting for viewers and doesn’t go over budget.
You all seemed quite surprised by my doubts, but you surely remember the huge phone-in competitions scandal… That did surface obviously.
The drivers are quite different though.
In the case of a game show, the objective is to get you to watch. The production company will either be looking for a commission or for the opportunity to pitch another (hopefully more successful) format.
As long as the game format is well designed, even the most volatile formats (such as DoND and Millionaire) will trend towards an average expected return. Unless the show has a mammoth prize on offer, the prize fund will probably be dwarfed by the production costs in any case.
A great example would be Millionaire when it launched in 1997. With a top prize of £1m and multi-million pound funds associated with the show, they audited and published their accounts on the Internet to show their integrity. In addition, they said that if the show finished, any surplus funds would be donated to charity rather than be retained by the company to avoid accusations of fraud. I recall they built up a fairly hefty surplus during the two-week blitz days, although that would have been exhausted when ITV did the longer-run stints of two or three shows a week. They have paid out around £60m in the past 17 years.
We have seen cases where the format was exploited too – such as the Press Your Luck scandal where Michael Larson won $110k on a format with an average return in the low thousands. The TV company paid out because he wasn’t technically cheating – even though they tried to play it down for nearly 20 years because it was such an embarrassment.
In the case of the call-and-lose scandal, the objective was to get you to call. Many of the production companies were set up exclusively for “quiz programming” and while to start with the competitions were fairly amenable, as the competition increased it started a vicious cycle – to offer big prizes (the biggest paid being over £130,000) they either needed to a) get more callers, b) take less answers or c) make the questions much harder.
The production companies knew that long-term recommissioning was unlikely, so they played the short-term game instead. Minimise the cost of production as much as possible, and maximise the call revenue – for some of the ITV programs this exceeded £100,000 a day.
We all know how it ended – situations where answers were impossible (such as the Quizmania suggestion that a handbag contained rawl plugs, and The Mint word search looking for “Tuna” on a grid without a U) or waits of up to an hour for a call to be taken on an “easy” puzzle.
Even more reputable programs got caught up because they didn’t follow the rules properly – although usually lazy rather than malicious.
I’m not going to say that a game show scandal *isn’t* possible, but in the current climate I don’t think the drivers are there for it.