New Show - A One and Six Zeroes

Another new show which I’ve only managed to see today on catch up is A One and Six Zeroes, currently showing at 6 pm on Sundays on Channel 4. I think I should probably put my cards on the table and say that now that I’ve watched the show, I think it is a lot of the things that I dislike in a quiz game show.

Let’s talk about the mechanics of the show for a moment. It's a non-adversarial quiz. You're not playing to beat anyone else, simply to win a sizeable amount of cash. A team of three plays. With the one I watched it was a perfectly nice father, mother and daughter from Durham. The team are asked a number of questions, and they must answer 7 multiple choice questions correctly. It’s not quite that simple though. So the first question decides what the value of the coins they are playing for are. Huh? Well, suppose you get it right? In that case you’re playing for a million £1 coins. If you decide you can’t answer it and take another question, then you’re playing for a million 50p coins, so £500,000. If you don’t like that, then you can swap, and instead play for 20ps. You can keep swapping all the way down to 1p for £10,000. You can swap any of the questions. Okay, so if you get the first question right you lock in the first 0 of the prize pot, the second for the second zero and so on. Get one wrong, and you lose a zero. So, taking the show that I watched, they swapped out 2 questions, so that by the time they got to the last question, they were playing for £200,000. They got it wrong, so lost a zero, which meant that they walked away with £20,000. Still a very nice wedge for an evening’s work.

There is a little more to it. After a couple of questions 1 member of the team had to go sit out the rest of the show, and then a few questions later a second team member had to do the same.

Basically, that’s it. Now, as I said, this is lots of things I dislike in a game show. I’m afraid that I can be very misanthropic, and I get worse as I get older. The family on the show I watched were, frankly very nice, very bubbly, the sort of people I can imagine would be very easy to be friends with. But . . . I didn’t really care about them. Sorry, but when it comes to a quiz game, that’s just not why I buy the ticket in the first place. Yet with so few questions – and remember that even if the team swapped out all of their questions once you’d only get 13 questions in a show – a lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by the host’s interaction with the team. I like Dara O’Briain very much, but he’s hamstrung on this show. He can poke some gentle fun but he really can’t start ridiculing the team playing. Especially after the Dad revealed that he is a stroke survivor. 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really think that much of the questions either. Yeah, you’d expect a preponderance of entertainment and sport on a prime-time show, fair enough, but I don’t really like multiple choice questions.

And for me this is the real problem with the show. Even if you do like the question format, there are nothing like enough of them to keep interest in a show which is about 45 minutes in length even without the advertising breaks. Maybe you like the conversation and interplay between host and team. I don’t, it’s not my sort of thing, but even with an audience of people who are quite receptive to it, I think the show is taking a hell of a gamble. After all, not all of the teams are going to be interesting enough for you, it stands to reason. Well, are you going to sit around watching when a particular team doesn’t appeal to you, and the conversation falls flat? Maybe some people would, but I’d imagine that a significant amount of your audience wouldn’t.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe a loyal audience will enjoy and stick with this show. But I’d be surprised. The talented Dara is wasted in my opinion, there are too few questions and they’re not all that interesting if truth be told. The only notable thing about the show is the massive prize, and the fact that you can fall quite a long way short of it, and still come away with a very sizeable chunk of cash. And that’s not enough. Sorry, but it’s a no from me.