Saturday, 6pm,
ITV
The double for Whisper/Sony.
And I’m afraid I think this is another one of those “shows too prosaic to work here in 2024” and it is at least fun to see the hypothesis tested, it’s not really all that interesting a game and now there’s an hour of it.
I am a little less down on this than with Jeopardy! though, it sounds like we’re getting about 15 puzzles across the hour, although many of those form part of regular triple toss-ups. For the first time we’re playing for actual money, and it sounds like there might be a very reasonable amounts flying about (and the losers get to take theirs home, I understand), £500 for all the toss-ups, the money on the Wheel increasing to a top whack of a possible £2,000 in the final bit, a prize puzzle bonus round halfway through and up to £50,000 in the endgame if they get lucky, they have at least put some thought into this. The set looks terrific and Graham Norton’s a very surprising choice of host, although what a comic is going to be able to make jokes about (“sorry, there’s no D”) I don’t know. Ultimately it is just Wheel of Fortune. Perhaps interestingly, perhaps not, there’s no co-host/letter turner. Is this the first version without one?
6pm makes it quite difficult to criticise whatever ratings it gets really, but what’s of note is that it’s pushing ratings banker Celebrity Catchphrase – usually good for the best part of 3.5m-4m overnight leading into The Masked Singer (for ref, it was doing 4.2m in +7 last January) back to 5pm. I guess the best way to work out if ITV are happy with it or not is that it lasts all six weeks at 6pm and they don’t swap them around. And of course from week 2 there’s the Ultimate 90s Off as it competes against Gladiators on BBC1.
Let us know what you think in the comments.