Happy Easter!

By | April 14, 2022

If you’re bored on Saturday night, come and join us as we watchalong the last in the first series of Joko & Klaas vs Pro7 from 9pm in the Discord, ahead of the first of the brand new series on Tuesday night which sounds like it’s going to be hilarious.

If you want some Live Quizzing, AshTheBash should be streaming on Friday night from 8pm, it looks like Royal Flush is off this week, returning for the new series of quizzing sensation Face/Off and friends from next Saturday – the first series was great fun to be a part of during lockdown, unfortunately now we’re out of lockdown my evenings are a bit busier otherwise I’d have probably have had another go.

The new series of Taskmaster starts tonight (and the next series films in a few weeks – tickets SRO) – no point setting up a Show Discussion post as there’s a Discord channel for it these days.

Belgian Mole‘s been good, hasn’t it? In unrelated related fun news, here’s a story that suggests there’s a UK version of surprise hit De Alleskunner (The Allrounder) incoming. In it, 100 people play 99 different games in a warehouse, the loser in each game going home. The last one left wins a year off work. Not sure I like 99 To Beat as a title, but there we are.

Happy Easter!

Watertight

By | April 12, 2022

Thankfully as it gives me something to write, I got home this evening and some family friends had come to visit and they recommended The 1% Club to people in the room, which I concurred with, and so I put it on over dinner after they’d left and fun was had by all.

But my brother (younger than me, a fair bit more creative) came up with an answer to a question and I’m trying to work out why the logic is wrong. Forgive the crap screenshot:

Now the correct answer is 4 – when watching it live on Saturday night I spotted that immediately thanks to pattern recognition – it’s the amount of times the lines cross (intersections if you like).

My brother looks at it and goes “8”. What an idiot! But his logic was quite interesting – if you take the first shape and take away the second shape that lies within it you get the third shape – 9-1=8. And I wracked my brains and couldn’t really find a fault. What’s the leap in logic I’m missing that makes it definitively incorrect?

Who is going to be the next richardosman?

By | April 8, 2022

The Sun had it this morning and now he’s confirmed it:

Rotating co-hosts for the forseeable, the jostling to become the show that inevitably replaces it is going to be a lot of fun – it’s been on a slow decline for a fair while but it’s still pulling in very respectable numbers, I can’t help but think that with one of the key reasons departing that decline is going to speed up. Perhaps they’ll find their Johnny and Denise though.

Show Discussion: The 1% Club

By | April 8, 2022

Saturdays, 8:30 (ep 1), 9:30 (subsequent),
ITV

It’s one-half Test The Nation: The National IQ Test and one-half Everybody’s Equal, Lee Mack gives 100 people £1,000 each and challenges them to hold on to it by answering multiple choice logic questions that have been tested by a sample of the public. The questions get harder as the game progresses representing fewer of the sample that got the question right in testing. Getting a question wrong means forfeiting your money to the pot and elimination. Answering the final 1% question correctly wins a share of the pot. And there’s a bit towards the end of the game where you can take your money and run if you want.

It is the sort of thing we quite like – always enjoyed both of the elements it seems to be made from and I’m a big Lee Mack fan. Tainting it a bit are the stories we’ve heard about loooooooong recording sessions and the audience/contestants not being treated very well, frankly. It sounds like a second series has been commissioned before the first one has gone out, I understand, so let’s hope everyone is a bit better second time around.

That presumably won’t be coming out in the broadcast episodes though, let us know what you think of the finished product in the comments.

The TV quiz is probably dead in ten years so enjoy this golden age whilst you can

By | April 5, 2022

So I realised when playing Netflix’s Trivia Quest yesterday that although none of the questions relate to US minutiae, I hope you’re geared up for US history, US geography, US entertainment and crucially US sports. No real attempt to localise for local culture.

This is always going to be a problem for streaming services. You can’t just “do” a quiz with US contestants based on US mores and assume the rest of the world is going to give a damn, and you probably aren’t going to make a whole load of different versions for a whole load of different territories.

The appeal of quizzes during the day is a) they’re cheap to make, b) you can knock them out quickly, c) they fill time and d) some of them are even quite popular. But in ten years time where everything will be streamed this is just not going to hold value, there will be no need to “just fill time”, the question will be “how much new stuff do we need to be worthwhile” – and that is all likely to be in competition entertainment series (you won’t eliminate gaming), drama and documentary.

The current Channel 4 hoo-ha is fun but largely irrelevant – by 2035 (maybe earlier) I reckon broadcast television will be all but finished – some of the big US streamers will consolidate and each territory will have one, maybe two local offerings. We can fight this if you want but looking at the numbers it feels increasingly inevitable.

Is it the new Bamboozle?

By | April 1, 2022

A new “thing” dropped on Netflix today hot on the heels of interactive quiz cartoon, a quizoon if you will, Cat Burglar, is a new daily trivia quiz Trivia Quest based on the app of the same different name (Trivia Crack).

Each day you can face 12 (or if you want to have a crack at the hard mode, an additional 12 to make 24) multiple-choice questions loosely based around a theme based around categories that are basically the same as Trivial Pursuit‘s. Each question you get right you earn coins, earn enough coins (and it keeps track day to day) and you get to release one of your ten friends from captivity as part of the thrilling ongoing storyline (sort of, the story bits are incredibly short and you don’t get it between quiz questions). You can replay each episode to get a better score if it bothers you that much.

Each set of twelve is done and dusted in about four minutes. In theory there are new questions every day in April. I didn’t think the harder questions were that much harder than the standard ones – certainly workoutable in the main, but your mileage may vary.

It’s not bad, in the Interactive Netflix Is A Step Higher Than Interactive DVDs sort of way. The question is: is this going to become your teatime fix (and if you liked Bamboozle on Teletext it’s really not much different except you don’t have to wait for the page numbers to tick round and you don’t get sent back to an earlier question when you get one wrong. Oh and Voice Acting.), or like a lot of this sort of thing, is it going to become work and you end up resenting it? I’d be really interested to see what sort of numbers it does throughout the month – sadly it’s unlikely we’ll ever be privy to them.