So a new show from our good friends at Talpa debuted on RTL4 in The Netherlands yesterday evening, based on an Israeli format by production company A Capella. The Big Picture is essentially Picture Who Wants to be a Millionaire, hosted by the same guy who hosts Weekend Millionair usually in the slot, Robert ten Brink.
The show’s big USP is that sponsored by the Bankgiro Loterij you can play along at home on the app and win some money yourselves. The show is prerecorded so they put your face and name up using whizzy live post-production.
One person is selected from the audience (photos of everyone up on the walls which spin round until one stops on the big main screen) to play. They are 12 questions away from winning €1m. Each question is based on a picture displayed on the large screen, which might be as simple as just identifying who it is of but might also be a bit more general knowledge, using who or what is in the picture as a theme. Each question has four multiple choice answers. If they are wrong they will leave with nothing. If they don’t know they can use one of their three “escapes” to swap the question but it might force them to share a quarter of their winnings with a Bankgiro Loterij player (also each time this happens one of the live app players is selected to win €5,000). If they get it right they can opt to climb the ladder (€100, €500, €1, 2, 5,000, €10, 20, 50,000, €100, 200, 500,000, €1m) (they do not get to look at the next question before making this gamble, which I dislike as a thing because exciting television requires contestants to be encouraged to take risks and asking people to gamble blind encourages conservative play with the numbers involved, although when they get past €10,000 they can at least look at the picture before deciding to take the question) or get out.
When they choose to get out they see one more picture before deciding if they want to take a question. If they decide to walk away then the money is split with the Escape Loterij players, no harm, no foul. However if they opt to take the question and they get it correct then they get to keep their entire bank and the home players leave with nothing. If he gets it wrong, they split the entire bank between them.
It’s OK. If you stopped watching Millionaire before then there’s no real reason here you’ll go back to something like this, on the other hand if ITV wanted to fill a Millionaire shaped hole in the schedule there are worse things they could use. It debuted to decent viewers last night on RTL4, over a million which everyone seems happy with.
Don’t just take my word for it though, if you can get round the geoblocking you can watch it for yourself.