A recommendation of The Sort Of Thing Of Interest for you this afternoon, Beat the Lotto on Netflix, a documentary film released a few months ago about the compelling story of Stefan Klincewicz and a group of unlikely lads who tried to win the Irish lottery by covering all 1.9m combinations during a rollover week, whilst head of the lottery Ray Bates tries everything in his power to stop them once he realises what’s going on.
It’s Challenge Anneka by way of a legal heist, and features lots of sidebars with lottery history, social commentary and early 1990s Irish media and ends up being greatly entertaining – it’s an-hour-and-a-half and it absolutely flies by. Absolutely teriffic stuff.
Do you remember TV’s Next Big Format Destination X? It actually finished six weeks ago, but BARB have just put out the final +28s so that gives us an excuse to do a lovely graph. And here it is!
What have we learned from this? Well mainly it’s eeriely consistent, in +28 aggregated viewing it stuck resolutely around 4.5m from episode four, but the gap between +7 and +28 narrows as the show progresses, so if you liked it you made more of an effort to catch-up sooner. Also helping that red line there is the way BARB has started aggregating showings (As Viewed) – the +7 figures also include the repeats added into the same figure – there are arguments for and against this, I’m broadly for it, if only because some catch-up figures in the past have been added to repeat numbers and not the original broadcast which doesn’t seem quite right – and PR has been doing this for a while anyway. Interestingly the consistent +28s suggests no traditional bump for the finale, but if you were watching it before you probably chose to watch the final live.
Now the next question which is how does it compare to series one of megahit The Traitors? The Traitors got off to a mediocre start but has become a massive word of mouth success. Do the numbers project that Destination X could do the same thing? And my answer is: probably not, but it’s complicated.
Some reasons for this: firstly the different episode orders – 10 vs 12, but you’ll also notice that this graph stops at episode 8, por quoi? Because up until the end of August BARB had a different format which conveniently changed from As Broadcast (which assigned a rating and its catch up to a specific showing, leading to some repeat catch-up anomalies as suggested above) to As Viewed before the final figures came out and this is how we can do like-for-like. We can speculate given the differences in the previous weeks were converging around 0.5m in aggregation that you can mentally put 3.4-3.5m for the final pair of episodes (but that’s only a guess). It’s certainly something, but whereas The Traitors really takes off in that final week as everyone starts catching up with it, Destination X… doesn’t really, it climbs, but it doesn’t take-off. Although we also must remember that Destination X was put out in the late Summer this year and the first series of The Traitors went out December 2022, but that shouldn’t really effect the trend.
What does this all mean? It’s fair to suggest Desty X isn’t a flop and that it’s certainly overperformed compared to how it has done internationally – it can probably justify a second go on all sorts of metrics if they want to. The question is was it worth the apparent outlay? It was a £20m tender with NBC and if we presume a 50/50 split it’s a million quid an episode, really high-end for reality and there are plenty of shows that do a lot better for a lot less money (including The Great British Sewing Bee which was on at the same time, and is some people sewing). Whereas The Traitors was the show everybody was talking about (eventually), people were talking about Destination X only to say “I wish this was better. Rob Brydon’s good though.” And what happens if NBC don’t want to have a second series? The point of the co-production is that it’s cheaper sharing teams and resources (economies of scale), but the numbers weren’t incredible for NBC, if they don’t add up then can the BBC justify the extra cost going it alone? How much would those extra costs be?
Speaking of Traitors, I note Werewolves has been picked up by Banijay for international use at MIPCOM. This is interesting, I haven’t watched it but my French and German correspondents really enjoyed it – it gets around a lot of the more “broken” format points from The Traitors with its use of roles and different winning conditions despite being basically the same idea. Interestingly Traitors is successful in France and Germany, which have had Werewolves adaptations, but it’s not the phenomenon it is in the UK. If Channel 4 wanted a smarter, “better” version of the idea it would probably fit quite well for them, but I wonder if it would invite blowback in the UK in a way it probably wouldn’t elsewhere.
Six youths who haven’t travelled are paired up with six elderly people who want to prove that age is but a number for a treasure hunt around Japan, where the pairs must look at things closely to answer observational questions to stay in the competition and hopefully win a £50,000 prize. Will our unlikely pairs get on or will we find they’re… not?
Alright, the premise gives quite big “we’ve got Race Across the World at home” energy but Japan’s a great location for this sort of thing and as Race Across the World regularly proves, watching inexperienced and older travellers can both be a great source of entertainment. Let us know what you think in the comments.
New quiz with everybody’s favourite Eurovision jury returns officer Amanda Holden.
We’ve got a decent amount of intel on this, basically contestants are randomly allocated a secret cash amount from very small to £4,000 (£5,000 in the celebrity one). Through a number of quiz rounds and vote offs (“I’m worth £4,000!” “No I’m worth £4,000!” etc) contestants are whittled down to two, who will do another quiz to add a little bit more money to their combined totals. Then they’ll do split or steal, the BBC hoping for viral moments of people stealing £60 no doubt. Presumably the reason the celebs have civilians to partner with is because the prospect of stealing small amounts of money for charity would feel a bit rum.
I feel like I’m a little bit prejudiced towards this already – likely not quizzy enough so it annoys quiz fans, not high stakes enough so it will annoy drama fans. Except for one round where you may be able to swap your value, the level of money you could walk home with is determined entirely by what you were allocated at the very start. We might get some between question stand-up from Holden. It’s Goldenballs except everyone’s only got one data point that sticks with them throughout.
But we’ve gone into things thinking it’d be a bit rubbish and changed our minds before so who knows? What we do know is that it’s not really worth analysing the numbers for the Celebrity Inner Circle as it’s before Strictly so there’ll be 4-5 million people tuning in early that will bring its number way up (this is different to shows that are on after Strictly where there’s no such guarantee as people are quick to switch off). The weekdaily show will be telling.
But next week might be quite fun. The [Celebrity] Inner Circle starts on Saturday night with weekdaily episodes minus the celebrities (and some of the prizemoney) starting next Monday – bafflingly they’ve put it on the same night as Weakest Link, either side of Strictly, which for reasons that may become apparent is a choice, but it’s great news for fans of two-to-two-minute-thirty rounds of general knowledge questions and voting. And then next Tuesday young/old travel competition Worlds Apart begins on Channel 4 after Bake Off (and wisely not clashing with Celeb Traitors starting next Wednesday). Both of these will have Show Discussion posts in due course.
We have almost finished watching Alice in Borderland series three on Netflix, the first four episodes were great but episode five is a rather stodgy, albeit with an interesting idea, and I shall look forward to seeing how it ends tonight probably.
Also Big Brother started last night and it’s great to see the return of Big Brother having to get narky with the contestants because they’ve just entered the house and are overexcited and there’s a complex set-piece twist (this one involving a live vote and some plastic eyes podiums lighting different colours) to be getting on with on live television, which is usually the best bit of any launch night.
This week’s excitement is a reboot of a Korean show we quite enjoyed over a decade ago and seems to have spawned an entire real-life entertainment genre in China, Crime Scene Zero. In the original, six celebs went to fictionalised crime scenes, they were each randomly assigned a character (and briefed as such), and then they had to solve the crime – the twist being that one of them was the murderer and had to try and deflect and throw everyone else off the scent. Players earned gold bars if they guessed correctly (or, indeed, got away with it) so there was an end of series champion.
I don’t know if this series will have a similar set-up, not least because it sounds like there are five regular guests and a rotating guest spot. Still though.
