{"id":1354,"date":"2010-05-24T16:31:41","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T15:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=1354"},"modified":"2010-05-24T23:50:16","modified_gmt":"2010-05-24T22:50:16","slug":"show-discussion-the-million-pound-drop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=1354","title":{"rendered":"Show discussion: The Million Pound Drop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Don&#8217;t forget that lots of idle speculation can be found on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=1347\">this entry here<\/a>, your comments on the reality of the finished product should go here.<\/p>\n<p>Right, watched this, I&#8217;m writing this blind of your comments. Basically, most of the stuff I feared would happen happened, but at the same time I thought it was a better show than I was expecting:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The general\u00a0set is teriffic I thought. I like the fact they&#8217;re playing up a large tower and they can see the money tumbling beneath them. The spotlights work. I even quite like Marc Sylvain&#8217;s mood music, even though it is basically one note with some heartbeats over it.<\/li>\n<li>What&#8217;s the one\u00a0way to PROVE you&#8217;re live? Davina the Talking Clock!<\/li>\n<li>I like Davina, but here she&#8217;s a but more gurn-y <em>Big Brother<\/em> than <em>The Vault<\/em>, unfortunately. But she is good at chatting to the contestants, telling them to hurry up and giving relevant facts at relevant points.<\/li>\n<li>And what of the questions? Fairly interesting, and very up to the moment.<\/li>\n<li>The players (two play as a pair, which I wasn&#8217;t expecting) are given \u00a31m in bundles of \u00a325k. They must answer eight multiple choice questions by placing money on the correct answers, splitting their money across answers if they don&#8217;t know but always leaving one option money-free. The first four questions have four choices, the second three three and the final question is a straight fifty-fifty.<\/li>\n<li>This is where the problems come in a bit &#8211; in the early stages, the contestants take more time putting money on the trapdoors (the set designer obviously didn&#8217;t consider how big forty wodges of cash were) than they do on thinking about the question. When a quiz becomes more about stacking and co-ordination than answering questions, you have a problem. I thought this might be a problem. It is.<\/li>\n<li>Each question is timed, the contestants have just over one minute to come to a decision and move the money. What happens if they run out of time before putting all the money on? I don&#8217;t know. Perhaps Davina will look at them a bit angrily. I&#8217;d have a hole to chuck the money down.<\/li>\n<li>If they&#8217;ve not put it all on one answer, and if time pressure causes them to pile it on a trapdoor without due care, Davina&#8217;s got to count it all. Which isn&#8217;t very elegant.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Wrong answers are then &#8220;dropped&#8221; one by one\u00a0in time honoured quite tedious\u00a0slowly-as-anything fashion. I thought they were always going to drop the wrong answers without any money on first, quickly guaranteeing success,\u00a0but to their credit they mixed it up later on.<\/li>\n<li>Are the questions difficult? Yes and no. I think they&#8217;re quite well pitched in terms of trying to find the correct answer &#8211; the problem is, there&#8217;s usually one &#8220;gimme&#8221; wrong answer, so it&#8217;s much more difficult to get knocked out of the game. As such, more people might get through to Question eight than I first thought, but as I first thought it probably won&#8217;t be with much cash.<\/li>\n<li>And what of that cash? Well, in most other circumstances, \u00a3125k (for example) is and feels like a life-changing sum of money. But it&#8217;s difficult to feel that way about it, as until the final question the money in front of them is basically abstract. If we&#8217;re meant to be feeling shock and upset when a couple drop half a million&#8230; well I&#8217;m not. And I suspect most people playing won&#8217;t either, as they&#8217;re mainly concentrating on survival. As such, I think it&#8217;s quite a decent <em>game<\/em>, but I&#8217;m not entirely sure it makes for a great <em>show<\/em>. The emotional attachment to the cash isn&#8217;t there.<\/li>\n<li>And as predicted, eight whole questions in one hour. I think it needs to be faster.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So after a pretty poor start I grew to <em>quite<\/em> enjoy it, but let&#8217;s be honest, you&#8217;re not getting the same feeling of excitement like the first time you saw <strong>Millionaire<\/strong>, are you? Well I&#8217;m not.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow I should be able to play along on the internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don&#8217;t forget that lots of idle speculation can be found on this entry here, your comments on the reality of the finished product should go here. Right, watched this, I&#8217;m writing this blind of your comments. Basically, most of the stuff I feared would happen happened, but at the same time I thought it was\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=1354\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-show-discussion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pLcmt-lQ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}