Channel Hopping

This is not about quizzes. Or maybe it is just a little bit, but only tangentially so. I don’t know if you know The Contestant Hub on Facebook. If you don’t then it’s something you should definitely check out. If you like LAM then it’s probably your kind of thing. I was on there the other day, and saw that the BBC are reviving Gladiators and Survivor.

Now, I’m not surprised that someone might want to roll the dice with these two shows, make a new version, throw ‘em at the wall and see if anything sticks. After all, there’s nothing new under the sun, and hey, these things worked once so maybe they’re less of a gamble than a totally new concept. What I am surprised at is that it’s the BBC who are doing it. Because, and I don’t mean this in a perjorative way, but because these are not typical BBC shows.

Gladiators, as more senior readers may recall, was the archetypal big, brash ITV Saturday evening show of the 90s. And I do mean brash. It was in some ways a little like the illegitimate child resulting from a one night stand between the assault course from The Krypton Factor, and WWF (as it was called at the time) American wrestling. For much of the 90s it ruled the Saturday evening roost, although by the end it was tired and becoming a caricature of itself – just my opinion and feel free to disagree.

Survivor is a show that has been a hit in many, many countries, but although ITV made two series in the early noughties it never really took off here. Which is a little bit of a surprise considering that in many ways that hardy perennial ratings winner “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” uses many of the same or similar elements . The biggest difference is the lack of celebrities, of course, and the team against team element. You can argue about why it didn’t come off in the UK, but it’s a little immaterial, because the fact is that the viewing public weren’t buying it and that’s that. A more pertinent question is why the BBC are bringing it back.

There’s always been some kind of channel hopping between BBC and ITV, but I tend to think that in the fifties, right through the sixties and seventies it was individual performers who did it rather than whole productions. After all, the BBC were not going to sell shows to ITV, and they weren’t going to buy shows from independent production companies. So while Morecambe and Wise, say, got big on ITV, then hopped and got bigger on BBC, then hopped back to ITV until Eric Morecambe passed away, you didn’t get whole shows being transferred.

I’m not saying for one minute that this is the first ever example of a whole show hopping between BBC and ITV, but the first one that I can clearly remember was the curious case of the Goodies. If you don’t know about the Goodies there’s probably a good reason namely, that the BBC didn’t seem to want to know about the Goodies after they hopped off to ITV. The Goodies themselves were the late Tim Brooke-Taylor, Dr. Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie. The three of them all met in Cambridge University in the same Footlights gang as John Cleese, Graham Chapmen and Eric Idle. In 1970 they started “The Goodies” on BBC2. It differed from Monty Python in as much as each show was a consistent narrative rather than individual sketches, and the three men played the same characters in each show  a fictionalised version of themselves. The idea behind the series was this group of three men who would do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere – although this concept receded in later series. The shows relied heavily on special effects to achieve its live action cartoon quality. In 1980, the Beeb blew the Light Entertainment special effects budget on the TV version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and the Goodies, who amazingly had no formal contract with the BBC, upped sticks and went to London Weekend Television. One Christmas special and one short series later, ITV pulled the plug.

Now, I did say the ‘curious case’ of The Goodies. You see, compared with similarly successful comedy shows from the 70s, the BBC hardly ever repeated any of the shows, and showed no interest in putting them out on VHS or DVD. So much so that the Goodies themselves had to do a deal with an independent company to get a Best Of collection released in the early noughties. The inescapable conclusion was that the BBC never forgave them for ‘defecting’.

All of which is interesting to an old codger like me who loved The Goodies, but barely relevant to the topic in hand.

Neither Survivor or Gladiators strike me as particularly BBC shows. Which is where the very tenuous link to quizzes comes in. You see, I could understand the BBC reviving the formerly ITV show University Challenge in 1994. It may be possible to think of a more ‘BBC-type’ show that was actually on ITV, but I can’t. Not off the top of my head. Square peg put into square hole – result = 28 years of excellence and still going strong.

But Gladiators and Survivor? Well, let’s play Devil’s advocate for a moment. Why shouldn’t the BBC put out shows that don’t conform to  their own traditional image? We’ve seen surveys in the last few years that suggest the viewing habits of younger people (and when you get to my age that includes a hell of a lot of the population) have greatly changed since Gladiators first went off our screens – or even since the short lived noughties revival. Netflix now has something like an 8 percent share of all TV viewing in the UK. Yes, that’s a long way behind BBC and ITV, but it’s more than Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky. It’s just one streaming platform as well. I suspect that if you took old crusties who were already adults when there were still just 3 channels out of the equation then their audience share would be quite a bit higher.

And there’s the rub. Because shows like Gladiators and Survivor are exactly the sort of things that would be popular on a streaming platform. I make no bones about it – I watched a recent series of Australian Survivor on Netflix (and bloody enjoyed it too.).

I’ve realised that I’m not really trying to make a point here. I think that it’s odd for the BBC to do this, but hey, why shouldn’t they if they think that it’s what viewers want?

Which brings me to The Traitors. Now, BBC’s new show, fronted by Claudia Winkelman is not Netflix’s “The Mole”. But it is a show that says to it’s audience – ‘you like stuff like ‘The Mole’? Then you’ll love this. Won’t you? Please?’ See what you think.

Both shows have a group of individuals who have to work together to build up a prize pot of money. In “The Mole”, one person is the eponymous Mole. The Mole’s job is to try to sabotage the group’s efforts, reduce the amount in the prize pot and not get caught. If they are not caught by the end of the final show, they get the moolah. In “The Traitors” three people are the eponymous traitors. They do not sabotage the team. However, they get to ‘murder’ one of the others – called the Faithful – each night. The eliminations in the two shows are different, but similar. In “The Mole” each elimination challenge sees the contestants facing an online quiz about who they think is the mole. The one with the fewest correct answers is eliminated. So, the Mole is definitely there until the last show. In the last show the three remaining people have to vote out the mole – and one of them is the Mole. If the other two vote the mole out, they share the cash. If not, it goes in the mole’s back pocket. In The Traitors, the contestants gather round the Round Table every evening, accuse each other, and then vote out one of their number whom the majority feel is a traitor. Then later that night, the traitors 'murder' one of the faithful and put him/her out of contention. If the faithful suss out the traitors by the end of the last show, happy days and the remaining contestants share the wedge. Any traitors left and they share the wedge instead.

Often, when the BBC try to do a show which is, shall we say, in a similar style to a popular show on a commercial, satellite or streamed channel, then it doesn’t tend to quite come off. But judging from the first three episodes of "The Traitors" on the iplayer, I’d say that being halfhearted and not having the courage of its convictions is not a criticism I’d lay at “The Traitors” door. The first inkling I had that this might be the case was when the 22 contestants arrived outside of Balmoral Castle where the action happens. (Okay, I admit it’s probably NOT Balmoral, but it looked a bit like it.) Claudia ordered them to line up in the order in which they though their chances of winning were - most confident of winning at one end, least confident of winning at the other. The two who self-effacingly took the last 2 positions (who surely didn’t really think their chances were that bad) were then told they were out. Just like that. Okay, it would be a twist to bring them back, but it hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t look very likely now.

I watched a whole series of The Mole on Netflix a while ago, and I think that The Traitors holds up well against it. I felt that the Mole’s computerised test elimination process is weak, and The Traitors’ double pronged elimination – ‘murder’ and round table vote – is far more dramatic and interesting. However I would say that I’m not sure that revealing the identity of the traitors as soon as they have been selected is the best idea either. In The Mole you don’t learn the identity of the mole until the end, so at least you get the pleasure of working it out for yourself. I’d be interested to see how The Traitors played if we didn’t know their identities but had to work it out for ourselves, like the contestants.

I don’t kid myself that I’m part of the BBC’s target audience for this show, but I have to say that I’m often a sucker for this sort of thing. It’s not my stated aim in the blog to say much about non-quiz shows, but what the hell. I shall be watching the next episode.