Well I’ve just ran from deepest darkest Elstree to Westfield White City to write this up, as I’ve got some time to kill before the off peak trains start:

• This is not a show for audience members with a fear of heights, as you’re situated on gantries 20-25 ft in the air. In fact to be honest it’s not really a show for audience members at all, as you can’t actually see very much of the action from where you are situated. It’s filmed in Elstree’s George Lucas Stage.
• The set is split into two parts – the host’s platform up with the audience, which has an elevator down into the Memory Maze beneath. As is the standard, it all looks a bit like Tron. There are three screens around the studio – two behind the audience which are parallogram shape and mainly show the host, the third one is a large one above the Memory Maze for the audience to look at, showing all the action.
• The host is Matt Allwright off of Rogue Traders and I thought he was quite good – certainly not the sort who needs to rely on an autocue, and in fact there were very few stopdowns throughout the whole recording.
• The game then. There is a pyramid of rooms called the “Memory Maze”, beginning with one room in the first row, three in the second, three in the third, five, seven and finally seven in the back row.
• The contestants enter the maze by elevator (COOL SET BIT) and they enter the first room.
• In each room is a “vault” – a large box with screens and money locked away in a draw. In each room the contestants get a question with four possible answers and they get 30 seconds to lock in an answer. If they are right, they take the money in the vault and put it into a large perspex suitcase they carry around with them. They can then progress into the maze, but it’s important they remember the correct answer, as one of them will need to recite all the correct answers at the end to escape with the money. Questions get more challenging the further in you get.
• If they get the question wrong then all four answers are added to The Exit List. They win no money, and the way forward is blocked, so they must make a sidewards step. The Memory Maze has a voice of a woman, who recites the entire list after each room. Sort a bit like a female Cube (and actually there’s every chance they could overdub it with a different voice for telly, like they do with Colin McFarlane)
• The vault in first row contains £1,000. Second row £2k, third row £3k, £4, £5k and in the back row each vault has £10k, except for one which has £100k in it.
• Matt will tell the contestants the category of question that will come up in each of the adjacent avaliable rooms.
• If the contestants block themselves in (by sidestepping to one end of the maze and getting a question wrong) then the contestants have the option to sacrifice all the money they’ve collected so far and take a forward step, or take the opportunity to leave.
• Panic rooms. Five of the rooms selected before the game are “panic rooms”. There is no money to be won in these rooms, but there is pain for the contestants – they are shown a list of ten things to remember and associated information (like X Factor groups from pictures, middle names of US presidents, that sort of thing). They then have 30 seconds to recall them as the computer flashes things up (such as pictures of the groups). For each match the contestants DON’T get, they are given an increasingly lengthy Panic Room sequence to add to the Exit List, featuring the first letters or digits of each answer they couldn’t match (FWRGHJ, for example).
• To make the most money, the best strategy therefore is to work into one of the back corners and then sweep  the back row, presumably exiting if you find the £100k. If you block yourself in in the back row then you have to exit.
• After each question, The Exit List is shown to the players and read out. When the contestants think it’s time to go, one of them is selected to play the end game by choosing a glass cylinder atop each vault, the short straw plays. Their partner exits the maze by following the lights out back to the elevator. At that point, the person still in the maze has to put a pair of headphones on.
• The person on the hosts platform is now made an offer. Based on the amount of money being carried and the amount of answers he needs to give, they’re offered an amount of money to bail. The contestant locks in their choice to bail or not secretly. If they choose to bail then they will only win the offer regardless as to whether their partner remembers the exit list or not.
• Escaping the maze. The player still in the room has 10 seconds for every room they entered. They must retrace their steps, and in each room they must recite one of the entries on The Exit List – that’s one of the correct answers, all the four options of a room in the case of a wrong answer or a Panic Code. The contestant can recite the list in any order, but can’t move on to a different room until something off the list has been given. If they step into an incorrect room, a loud horn goes off and they have to try a different route (although there does not appear to be any other penalty). If they don’t make it back to the lift in time then they’re forced to leave the briefcase where it is and return to the host’s platform, where it may transpire they’ve won some money anyway if the partner took the deal.
• The game is actually fairly sound. However the two lads playing today basically didn’t do very well and had an exit list that had over 20 items on it. Not in itself a problem, but when this list gets repeated over and over after every question it begins to get rather tedious.
• The end game is also not really that spectacularly exciting. Visually the rooms are sparse (they’re basically 5’x5′ boxes) and the only shot we get on the audience screen is the one head-on to the contestants. I fully expect there won’t be very much in the way of close finishes – I think you’ll be able to predict 90% of the time whether they will succeed or not.
• Something that gets more difficult to get out of the further you go in is one of the all time great mechanics and as such here we’ve actually got a fairly decent game. It’d make a brilliant end game if they had to do everything in three minutes. But as is the usual there’s a lot of filler chat here, which in a game of short term memory might be actually a little unfair. This said it’s going to be difficult to judge how it will come across on screen from today’s recording, they’re almost certainly going for two or three games on an episode, these guys were going for over 90 minutes (so long, in fact, they didn’t try and film a second game in the recording session) basically non-stop.

Alright, I’ll take questions when I get home.