Friend of The Bar Royal Flush is having his 500th Game Night on Twitch on Saturday from 3pm until about midnight which you can join for live interactive quizzy fun. Tomorrow it’s an an exciting sort of tournament format, people earning points throughout the afternoon to make it to the finals, here’s a run down of attempted timings:
Games DangerZone (3pm-4pm) Cryptex (4pm-5pm) Distinction! (5pm-6pm) Bamboozle! (6pm – 6:30pm) The Abyss (6:30pm-7:30pm) The Pyramid (7:30pm-8:30pm)
6-1 points for 1st-6th, top three performances plus the Battlefront wild card winner go into a pair of Face/Offs, with the winner of each playing a final Buzz Off!
Although it’s going on all afternoon, feel free to dip in and out as and when – I’m busy tomorrow night but hope to drop in variously. Join in on Royal Flush’s Twitch channel.
What an fun choice! You can give Rob Brydon any old rubbish and people will still go “oh, but that Rob Brydon’s good isn’t he?” Are there enough characters for a Gavin and Stacey round?
Trying to figure out the last thing Brydon did for ITV – there’s Director’s Commentary and Annually Retentive, but those were years ago. Actually I’ve just remembered it’s voiceovering that Noelumentary, so perhaps this isn’t the big poaching of BBC talent it initially looks like.
Oh this is an interesting thing to have land on your doorstep (Discord) on a Thursday evening. Iain Lee has uploaded the pilot for a UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and it’s extremely interesting – it was made before the US one went out and it’s much closer to the computer game. But is it more successful?
“Not sure” is my answer to be honest, there’s a lot here that doesn’t quite work – evidently half the questions if the scores jumping about were anything to go by. Early 2000s Iain Lee was extremely punchable. The flow isn’t quite there, the humour is very of it’s time i.e. isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly which I don’t remember the games really going into, and the answer explanations don’t feel very convincing, probably because this was probably designed for Friday nights and they’d expect lots of “isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly”. The players either didn’t understand the Jack Attack or were completely useless. But if you want the computer game in TV form, well it hits a lot of the feature points, but I’m not sure this would have been a great TV show. still, an early writing credit for Victoria Coren which I’m sure she remembers fondly.
The timeline is quite interesting, YDKJ UK came out in 1997 (it’s interesting seeing who did the writing on that, people like Mel and Sue, who aren’t involved in this), Princess Productions piloted this in 2001 but even though it didn’t make it to air they evidently liked it enough to take the same sort of high-culture-meets-pop-culture ideas that underpinned it but without the license and came up with The Deadly Knowledge Show (which I believe somehow came under the schools/education remit) in 2005 with Dave Berry. I remember quite liking it at the time, although that was twenty years ago now. It’s got Not-Screw-Your-Neighbour and Not-Dis-Or-Dat, jokes which may or may not land after some questions, although they haven’t quite merged both cultures into questions so much as gone “here’s a reference, now here’s a sort of connected reference”.
In other news I’m off to see The Long Walk at the cinema tomorrow (which is when it comes out), the film of the Stephen King novella based on a deadly dystopian endurance event, likely to be The Sort Of Thing we’ll enjoy.
The last fortnight has been CHOCKA, so here’s some “things”:
BARB has a new way of displaying audiences – the As Viewed Top 50. This aggregates all the repeats a show has had along with the pre-broadcast and catch-up and can be set to either +7 or, the first time in years +28 days, and this goes back to January 2024 – I’m referring to it as the Kitchen Sink number, because it’s everything but the kitchen sink (and various PRs have been doing things like this for a while anyway). In some ways this is good, we’re aware that some catch-up of shows gets allocated to the repeats rather than the first run, it does not account for desireability of slot, it just lumps everything in together. What I was hoping for was sorting out the streaming numbers, it seems baffling that under the old system a popular episode of a show on streaming could be in the BARB 50 for multiple weeks, apparently counting as a repeat showing in the following weeks. It looks like the +7s of the original release date seem to work pretty well. However the +28s look like a mess – early episodes of Clarkson’s Farm (for example) are still showing up on the chart weeks later. Also I wonder if its in commercial channel’s interests to have the list extended to a Top 100, under the new metric it might show some shows not being quite as much of a flop as originally thought, but most pundits can only know things through inferral from Thinkbox (which still seems to be using its old TV only system) and overnights. Also why don’t overnights include pre-broadcast so those shows that use it have less sad looking numbers? You can still save linear (with streaming)! Also now we’ve got no idea when BARB is going to update, it used be pretty regularly around 4:15pm on a Monday, it looks like we might be about two weeks behind in future.
On Friday night we went and saw Knightmare Live, which you’d assume we’d have probably have done before since it’s ten years old now. It’s good fun! Good jokes, a loving homage to how silly the idea of the show was really. Well worth a look if it comes near you, there’s one set to involve the actual real Hugo Myatt and Mark Knight at Leicester Square Theatre November 15th.
Something I’m not sure I can recommend is game.city’s Jackbox style interpretation of Deal or No Deal for £15. It’s got (the voice of) Noel. You can play on your phone, but it’s pretty slow, when I was playtesting it when £20,000 was the top box and I knocked out Noel said “that’s OK!” But what makes it really annoying to play is that apparently it has a Banker even more generous than the ITV one. £30k in Round one! Also it might be quite fun if there was an option if you play multiple games to keep everyone’s scores and decisions a secret but have a ranking, to encourage a bit of bluff.
Their version of Catchphrase is a bit more successful, but it’s got an American doing all of Stephen Mulhern’s catchphrases which feels wrong. Basically three quick rounds with animations seemingly taken from the show – the bonus board has only four squares on it, you buzz in on your phone and type to fill in blank letter boxes so there’s not much wiggle room for being close. You can play as individuals or in teams. For me £15 feels like a lot, but your mileage may vary.
This has all the makings of something that might be quite fun, extremely dire or anything in between really. Channel Five will be showing two live NFL games on Sunday nights over the next six months (or however long the season is), and wrapped around the first one will be a gameshow/entertainment show/whatever. Basically it’s a way to fill in the moments where the US goes to its many ad breaks they won’t be able to do in the UK. It’s all live – the game element will depend on what’s just happened in the sports action – teams compete to win trips to the USA.
Will this work? Will this pique the interest of casual viewers? Will it annoy the sorts of people who would happily tune into an NFL match? Will there still be room for analysis of the game itself? At the very least Dermot O’ Leary is probably one of the best hosts they can have for what could be an extremely messy live format. Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora are on hand as well as a celebrity guest, and comic Troy Hawke will be acting as some kind of US correspondent.
Certainly there’s enough people intrigued by the prospect of this that the first one might be quite an appealing four-hour watch, but it will be really interesting to see how long they keep up the formatted aspect for, and how much it changes across the run. It’s certainly a big swing and I kind of love it for that, but it could also end up being quite a long six months for everyone involved. Five will be showing two games a night, the first one starts at 6pm and a second one on 5ACTION from 9pm but without the light entertainment surrounding it, although Big Game Night isn’t due to finish until half nine so no idea how that will work out.
Or to give it its full name Win Win With People’s Postcode Lottery, this is certainly quite interesting from a broadcast perspective. They’ve mainly funded it. It’s claiming to be the Most Interactive (pre-recorded) Show Ever, and it’s guaranteeing to give away £1,000,000 to a player at the end of the series (against Strictly)… and it could be you!
A lot to unpack. Let’s start with Mel and Sue who are lovely but fronting a big shiny floor Saturday night show feels like a bit of a choice. The game is based around survey questions which I’ve always found a bit irritating. And the INTERACTIVITY involves logging into the Win Win website and having done this Friday morning it involves work (Put your mobile number in, wait for a PIN code, wait to press a button to have it resent as the first one hadn’t arrived ten minutes later, input PIN code, select a new or same PIN code, re-enter new PIN code, decide whether to take the People’s Postcode Lottery’s offer of free entry into October draws, decide on which marketing things you want one of Mel and Sue always tells the truth the other always lies style, fill out all your registration details that may or may not include your blood type and how many cousins you’ve got and then finally, FINALLY you’re ready to play). I’ll be fascinated to find out how many people coming to the first episode cold will actually bother to finish, and how much downtime they’ll be wasting at the top of the show for people to do this before getting into any meat. And God help them if there are tech issues.
However Hello Dolly might be many things but they’re not idiots, and the Postcode Lottery has been highly successful in sponsoring shows across Europe – probably most notably the Netherlands where it’s been sponsoring big primetime gameshows like Miljoenenjacht (Hunt the Millions – the original Deal or No Deal) and Een Tegen 100 for two decades now. Seeing as they’ve largely funded this it will be interesting to see how much they get out of it, You Bet didn’t do great numbers last week and in a few weeks it’ll be on directly against Strictly. If 50-, 100-thousand new players sign up is that good? I don’t know. 5-10% audience conversion rate feels quite high.
We’ll see! Anyway let us know what you think in the comments.
