Watching Telly: The Whole 19 Yards

By | March 4, 2010
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Well that was a long old day.

  • Ticket says doors open at 3:30, close at 4pm. Read: get there for three really. It is very cold, just before four o’ clock we’re led into a waiting area marquee. By about 5:15pm we’re finally let into the studio – so you’ve got there on time and as a reward, you’re punished by an over two-hour wait in the cold. Yeah, thanks for that. Could this set a new benchmark for the worst recording experience ever, set only six months ago by Don’t Scare the HARE? (9th September)
  • Now our opinion of the show is coloured by an episode and various clips of the Spanish show Los Ultimos 20 Metros, which I ultimately thought was a decent idea, but somehow done in the least interesting way possible.
  • The set is large – main stage up one end, audience sitting along the sides with the far end taken up by a large version of the show’s logo. Running round the studio is a rather lively marquee which has some rather cute apposite phrases to display – almost giving its own running commentary, really.
  • Vernon Kay is our rather informal main host and I thought he was very much in his element here, good rapport with crowd and contestants.
  • Four contestants are introduced on the big screen doors on the main stage with a slightly silly voiceover (it took me a little while to place after an initial “THIS isn’t Peter Dickson!” line of thought, during round two I twigged it was Most Important Man In Television 2006 Glenn Hugill). Quick chat, and intro to the first game.
  • The show’s premise is that questions are asked, the buzzer is 19 yards away and between you and it are some crazy obstacles. Each round’s course is introduced by a verbal silly description and physically with a lot of fanfare – the giant logo lifts up to reveal the obstacle course and buzzers on a big moving stage which is winched onto the main set with all the dry ice and steam cannons and music you could hope for. Already, this is tonnes more fun than the Spanish show.
  • At this point roving reporter Caroline Flack is introduced to give the low down on some of the things to watch out for. In this round (Caught in the Net) contestants must clamber up a hill under a net before crossing a canyon in net tunnel filled with bungee wires and (what looks to be) 400 foam-filled balloons. To be honest, the attempt to add a gungy element to the proceedings is a bit half-arsed, but this doesn’t really detract from the proceedings. The buzzers are massive red lighty-up knobs – bigger than the ones Ant and Dec use.
  • In the Spanish show, the contestants line-up at the start and the computer gives them clues to a thing. When they know what the thing is, they run down the course to hit the buzzer. Our version works differently – Vernon reads out a list of questions on a category, one every five seconds (for example, he’ll read out a list of positions in various sports, you have to name the sport). The list starts off with obscure questions and the difficulty gets easier each time. When you know the answer to one, bomb it down the course (Vernon has several variations on this, most of which deliberately designed to use the words “know” and “go” in his patented Boltonian). When you get to the end, you answer the question that has just been asked when you started going for it.
  • I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the Spanish version. It allows for more questions to be asked for sure, although I did get the feeling some of the contestants were finding it a bit hard to hear him – once someone starts running, the music and lights all kick in. Vernon does get a rather nifty well-eighties handheld microphone for this bit.
  • Once everyone’s on their way, the questions stop coming and Vernon runs down the other end to meet and greet the competitors racing for the buzzer. The first person to buzz gets to answer their question, and if they’re right they’re through to the next round. If they’re wrong, the next person who buzzes (the buzzing sound effect is nice and meaty, and usually turns up whilst a different conversation is happening which is always fun) gets to answer and so on and so forth. If nobody gets it right, they’ve all “gotta do it again!” Regardless, the game is repeated until one person hasn’t made it through who is eliminated. In what I think is quite a nice touch, the lanes aren’t reset between questions so if you know you’re not going to make it first time, you could burst a load of balloons to give you an advantage next time. Eliminated contestants are told that “at least they get to go home in a posh taxi,” which I can only assume is a baffling reference to The Apprentice.
  • Game Two this evening is Walk In The Dark, where the remaining contestants (who are blindfold, and in a move that is quite ingenious, never get to see the course) must run through the obstacle course without being able to see any of it. There’s not much to say about this other than it is genuinely hysterical (not in a cruel way, either) and I’m interested to see how it is edited. At various points one contestant tries to leap the side barrier and crawls into another contestant’s lane, whilst another ends the round pretty much back where he started.
  • The ticket suggested the approximate finish time would be 8:15pm. Unfortunately by this point it was half eight. By the time they turned the set around for the third game it was likely to be about 9pm-9:15, and after the “tense end game” where the winner could win up to £100,000 it probably wouldn’t be finishing until ten at least I reckon. Unfortunately I don’t drive for three very good reasons (almost driving into a truck, almost hitting the test centre gate, jumping a red light) and if you do drive then Pinewood’s fine. But if you don’t it’s an absolute nightmare, especially this week when the trains from Kings Cross are a bit funny. So I left.
  • Normally after a long recording session such as this I’m usually one of the last ones standing but my will to live will have left a long time ago. I think it’s a credit to the show that I was a bit disappointed not to be seeing what was coming next. This is a credit to the show, and also a credit to the Dale Winton-esque warm-up man whose name escapes me (he actually did the warm-ups for The Krypton Factor last year as well) who managed to fill at least 90 minutes with a slightly crap quiz and managed to get to members of the audience to strip to their underwear for chocolate. Evidently there is nothing people won’t do for a fun-size packet of Milkyway Magic Stars.
  • I would be intrigued to find out how many people stayed to the bitter end, once again Endemol can’t turn around a TV show within a decent time frame, although at least they don’t seem to act too surprised when everyone buggers off three-quarters of the way through.
  • I’m also intrigued to fiund out what round three and the “tense end game” entailed, so if you were there this evening and saw it, do feel free to let me know.
  • Basically I think they’ve taken the format and ran with it visually to great effect, and I hope it turns out well on the television. They’ve sort-of turned the format into a sort-of grown-ups version of Funhouse, sort-of.

Edit:

  • “The endgame works thus: Vernon and the buzzer are on a moving platform. You face questions and, instead of being against the clock, the platform moves away from you as you answer – taking buzzer and host with them. Hopefully it’s a witty and yet dramatic way to end things.”

Round-up 3/3/10

By | March 2, 2010
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I think it is worthwhile to have a new post for new things as the last one was getting quite full.

Look out for a recording review of The Whole 19 Yards very late this evening. I’ve wondered about that as a title, because it’s only really a play on something native to the English language. Is there a Spanish equivilent of ‘the whole nine yards’ that was played off to get Los Ultimos 20 Metros?

Outing yourself in non-linear fashion

By | February 28, 2010
23 Comments

Thanks to an anonymous tip-off:

I did a run-through for Push the Button last year which involved being locked in a coffin and pretending to be a soap character who had died a tragic death in their soap. Hope this game is kept for one of the shows this series – expect us stand-ins to be replaced by the real soap actors, and the contestants to have to learn a list of around 100 soap characters so as to be able to identify the name and cause of death of any given 5 of these who appear from their coffins on that particular show. Which actors will appear? My bet: Dirty Den is a dead-cert(forgive the pun)…

Incidentally, I’ve looked into the It’ll All End In Tiers edit from this week’s show, in actual fact at no point do the clocks behind the families differ by several thousand to what’s shown on screen as claimed (although if you were really looking, sometimes it doesn’t match up by a couple of hundred). Once one team push the button, the money drops at about £150 – £170 a second (it’s actually quite difficult to tell unless you’re doing frame by frame analysis, which I can’t be bothered to do, although my rudimentry timing makes it £1k in 6.25 seconds, or £160 a second which is nice and “round”), whereas the rate of change early on is about £1k in 4.5 seconds. I would be very surprised if the actual rate was not consistant across the entire game – indeed, I wonder if contestants are furnished with the details beforehand?. But yes, an edited show is edited (certainly not the first time an edit has fit the result), but certainly no genuine evidence of impropriety.

However the unbroadcast lifeline element is still baffling.

Board of Excitement 28th Feb – 6th March 2010

By | February 27, 2010
9 Comments

Christ, it’s almost Christmas ALREADY.

  • The Amazing Race (Sunday, CBS): Well last week’s saw some teams take some excellent transportation gambles, only for the Race organizers to screw over the clever ones with a bunch point. Go go Team Cowboy!
  • Only Connect (8:30pm, Monday, BBC4): it’s the first quarter final so the questions are set to be a little harder than usual (although it was nice to see two teams get lots of big point questions last week, good AGGRESSIVE play as we say in poker), this week it’s the housewives favourites the Exeter Alumini vs the Archers Admirers.
  • The Krypton Factor (7:30pm, Tuesday, ITV1): the second semi this week, and goodness, how much did those audience shots add to the show? Well worth dropping the intelligence test for, that’s what I say. Don’t know if the audience coloured lighting was in effect, it didn’t look very obvious on screen.
  • The Whole 19 Yards (Wednesday, Pinewood Studios) – look out an audience report on Wednesday. Why not try and predict a) how many references to Vernon Kay’s saucy text scandal the warm-up man will make and b) how far over the predicted 8:15pm approximate finish time the recording will overrun to? If you’re reading from Endemol – get your old Total Wipeout episodes on standby, it genuinely worked brilliantly last time. Actually give us new ones!
  • Survivor (Thursday, CBS): I haven’t watched episode three yet but I intend to after I’ve written this. Bother’s Bar: reliably mediocre.
  • Ant and Dec’s Push the Button (8pm, Saturday, ITV1): Already went on about this in the previous post. This probably won’t get another billing here, but I liked the show enough that I’ll watch it if I’m in.
  • Who Dares Wins (8:30pm, BBC1, Saturday): Nicky Nacky Knowles is back for another series of the mildly entertaining list quiz that’s popular here and basically nowhere else.
  • Solitary 4.0 (Saturday, Fox Reality): well after the brilliance of the last few weeks, circuit training in a gorilla suit is a bit of a let down. Still though. I confidently predict this episode to be like the last, but with one fewer person in it. 
  • The Bother Series of Poker Game 3: Actually next Sunday. If you missed it last time, you missed an amusing conversation about the Austrian version of You’ve Been Framed. You don’t get THAT on Channel 5’s Party Poker coverage.

Ant and Dec’s Push the Button

By | February 27, 2010
53 Comments

Well hello there.

Seemingly no audience members wanting to write up the PtB recording, which is fair enough, but tonight we see the thing as intended. ITV1, 7:45pm.

I predict it will be fun albeit not terribly groundbreaking. I’ll edit some opinions in here later.

Alright then, foir me this a firmly 7/10 show, which if you read the internet is about five more than the average person would have given it. But:

  • Those bits where Ant and Dec surprised the families was a lot of fun. Yes it was a little bit like The Moment of Truth, or at least the ones when Cilla could be bothered to see the families at any rate.
  • It’ll All End In Tiers was absolutely epic. More shows should have quite tense timed skill games with the theme from Please Sir! in the background.
  • The sorting the post and Simon Cowell’s teeth games were perfectly adequate, although the games with the cash clock are more fun than games with a fixed penalty.
  • Yes the yodelling thing (and indeed the entire show’s set-up) was a bit naff and straight from The Generation Game. But The Generation Game hasn’t been on for years and apparently people are clamouring for phamily phun, so why not? I am definitely not of the persuasion that old things are better because they are old. Also I am intrigued by the idea of “non-viewer involving pap” – the idea that successful gameshows have to have great playalongathome value is one of the greatest fallacies of the last twenty years or possibly more.
  • It did seem there were a lot of adverts towards the end, that is because there was almost twenty minutes before the first one.
  • Originally I thought the endgame was unbelievably cheap – five-player Simon paying out the first digit for three notes, first two for five all the way to all five digits for 11. I didn’t think this was going to pay-out very big very often (when was the last time you tried memorising an 11 note tune?). One mistake allowed. However, @ThatBenBaker on Twitter suggested to me that if everyone just concentrates on their own notes and the positions of those notes then it should be possible. I was quite surprised to see the jackpot won this evening.
  • And thanks to someone who was at the recording for pointing out that apparently the winning family were given an extra lifeline where they could listen to any one tune again. Why did they edit that out?
  • I quite liked the disclaimer gags on the voting audience and salt and pepper shakers.
  • Ronnie Corbett’s voiceover in post didn’t work at all, if I’m being honest.

Basically it’s fine and I hope it does OK for them.

In other news, I’m told a question was edited out of Innit this evening. Does anyone know why? A question about Chile or earthquakes perhaps? Edit: Alexander MacQueen apparently, thanks Gary.