Just a quick heads up, this is on tonight at 11pm on Five in the much coveted The Beat Goes On slot. It was recorded a few weeks ago, so it will be interesting to see if there have been any modifications to the original format that went out before it was pulled.

What do you get in a Cadbury’s Minute To Win It promo pack?

You get the following:

• 1x Three-Ring paddling pool!
• 36x rubber-tipped HB pencils!
• 1x 30cm wooden ruler!
• 2x Pedometers!
• 1x Flake!
• 2x Straps!
• 1x Stopwatch!
• 1x Dairy Milk!
• 1x 200g tub of petroleum jelly!
• 1x pack of Wilko baby cotton wool balls (approximately 200)!
• 5x Ping Ping balls!
• 1x Twirl!
• 3x Things Which I Don’t Know What They Are, But Look As Though They Would Go On Open Bottles Of Wine! (Edit: A-ha, they are meant to be corks)
• 1x Deck of playing cards!
• 1x Crunchie!
• 3x Rubber ducks!
• 1x box of Silver Spoon sugar cubes (slightly leaking!)
• 1x Wispa!
• 1x Covering letter!
• 1x pack of ten cards with instructions on how to play the games!
• 4x double packs of Oreos!

The games on the large plastic cards are the ones on the internet promotions of the Minute To Win It Decathalon (Bucket for Bucket Head and Watermelon for A Game Of One Half not included). I tried out a few of the games with my six year-old nephew at the weekend, he was rubbish at Triple Pong Plop.

The box looks like this:

Thanks to Cadburys, purveyors of awesome chocolate for sending me this, they’ve asked to mention the following:

Minute To Win It is an eight-part series on ITV2, presented by Cadbury Spots v Stripes,which sees contestants compete in hilarious and bonkers 60-second challenges using everyday household objects. To find out more and play Minute To Win It games, visit the Spots v Stripes website here www.spotsvstripes.com

And obviously that’s on Tuesday night’s on ITV2 at 8pm and is quite good. There’s also a sort-of tie in app for iPhone with various Cadbury’s chocolate related minute based games which is free and has games that work better than the actual Minute to Win It app. One word of warning though, one of the games involves blowing into your iDevice (to raise a balloon). I couldn’t work out how to do this on an iPad, although I did discover just rubbing one of the ends against a surface seemed to do the trick. The iPad 1 doesn’t have a microphone, does it? Anyway.

So here’s a show I watched over the weekend. Currently airing its third season on the History channel in the US, Top Shot is a reality show based around a marksmanship competition.

I’ve watched the whole of the first season. In it, professional and amateur marksman from all over the country (and a Brit, and there’s nothing like putting a Brit in a US show to make their accent sound more ridiculous) come to compete in a competition hosted by Colby Donaldson (off of Survivor 2) for a $100,000 prize and the title of Top Shot.

The first eight episodes all worked the same way – the players are divided into two teams of two and shown a weapon from history – a variety of pistols and rifles and on occasion something a bit more interesting like a longbow or throwing knives. They’re given some time to practice with them, coached by an expert in the field, and the next day they do a challenge. The winning team is safe from elimination, the losing team must nominate two of its own to go into an elimination challenge (by shooting at targets publicly on the Nomination Range), and the loser of that challenge goes home. The final two episodes are all basically elimination challenges with the worst performer going home. In between they all get to live in a pretty house.

It’s pretty by the numbers in terms of structure then but there are a few things that make this stand out a bit. How many different variations on shooting things can there be? It basically boils down to different guns, different targets, different distances. Yet within this fairly limited scope they’ve done quite well to keep the whole thing entertaining – the nature of the challenge is hidden from the players at practice so sometimes they’ll throw in things like memory (there’s usually some spurious reason like in the heat of battle it might mean the difference between hitting friend or foe or something like that) or balance (see picture above – teams must race to stick six targets in relay fashion with throwing knives whilst the ledges get increasingly perilous). One episode has contestants trying to recreate famous trick shots from history.

The elimination challenges tend to twist things up again throwing something a little extra to the mix, like firing at targets whilst on a zipline or having contestants attempt to hit playing cards to create a poker hand. This one shown is a head-to-head challenge where contestants with one minute and forty shots must hit the targets on the post to turn them their own colour adding strategy to the mix.

Is there interpersonal drama? There is, but for the most part everyone seems to get on quite well and everyone’s got loads of respect for each other and so on – most of the time, with a few surprises, the weakest people at the team challenge tend to get voted for (there was a bit of “send me in, I must prove myself!!!” rubbish strategy at the start although that seemed to disappate). Most of the post-challenge analysis is exactly that with people being honest about their shortcomings.

Colby has a certain charm (even if he doesn’t really say or do anything outside of host mode) and he is believeable as someone who can probably handle a gun. His mannerisms and commentary have been very clearly influenced by Jeff Probst.

So season one nicely entertaining. It’s interesting that the first episode of season two suggests quite a different direction with people seemingly encouraged to bitch about each other more, but it did feature this challenge which looked like it took a while to set up – eight targets on ropes moving towards the shooter at different speeds. But also on each rope is a red “stopper”, and when the target reaches it it will drop out of play. The idea, obviously, it sot hit as many of the targets as possible before they all go. Not only a test of accuracy, but also of judgement.

So we’ll have to see if season two continues its different feel to season one. I think it’s worth a watch, and there’s just no way this would work in the UK with our different attitudes to guns. It’s already on its third season in the US though, so eprhaps there would be some scope for showing it on the History Channel in the UK.

That’s right! And after threatening to do some sort of retrospective for a while, I think it’s time to take a bit of stock.

It’s always fun to go back to when shows first started and look at our reaction to them.

Our first foray into the world of Pointless was friend of the Bar Martyn went and saw an episode being filmed in series one. This was written up on July 31st 2009. “It’s actually what would happen if Who Dares Wins and Family Fortunes mated – and it sort of works… Alexander is a affable chap and if the edit allows him to be  quickwitted and doesn’t cut out the post question banter with Richard then it  will be a welcome addition to the land of quizzes… in the right timeslot (i.e not up against Edmonds or O’Grady) it may just become the sleeper gameshow of the year.” Bang on there, Martyn. And look! My addenum (“It’s unfortunate then than at 45 minutes, I suspect it’s going in Weakest Link‘s slot…”) turned out to be correct in the end so rerally, well done me.

(Although I think it would be prudent to ignore the final message in the comment box, “I wouldn’t get too excited just yet, I think the game sounds basically solid but I don’t think it’s going to excite too many people when it finally gets broadcast.” Or at least include this hilarious comment about Panic Attack (“In conclusion: Irish.”))

So what about Episode 1, eh? Well the video on Youtube doesn’t work very well. So here’s episode two (despite what the title says):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKx2kD94AzA

Look how young Xander and Richard look! Clearly Pointless is the most challenging show in television to make. Also that swooshy graphics thing the first time a contestant gives an answer – good job they got rid of that I think.

Anyway that went out on August 24th at 4:30pm on BBC2, I wrote about it on August 25th (funny grammatical joke regarding would have/would of, surprise that Richard Osman would be involved, good use of the word ‘pizzicato’, “He’s very likable and quick witted, he just has some irritating habits,” and finally concluded that “yeah it’s just a list quiz, but the second guessing the public’s knowledge element so that all answers are not equal is an entertaining twist. Possibly surprisingly, because I’m unsure it will be a hit, we’d place it in the upper quartile of daytime quizzes in the last five years.).

Comments are fun – is Alexander Armstrong scathing enough? The set is horrible! It should give away more money! “Most of the banter between Alexander and Richard has been left on the edit room floor.” – the bang on Mart S again, although of course they corrected that for series two by dropping a pair of contestants to fit more banter in. What show other than Michael Barrymore’s Strike It Lucky could succeed in such in thing! David B was hilariously uncomplimentary.

Fast forward to a bitter day in January this year where we go and see it live and end up overestimating Richard Osman’s height and compare watching it live to a Jane Austen novel, betraying the fact I have an English A-Level. For me it remains one of the shows you absolutely should go and try and see being recorded live – no matter how funny it comes across on screen, the reality is much more fun.

And that’s how The Bar has covered the first 200 episodes of Pointless! Pity about the French version though.