New Show - In With A Shout

I’m sure – I hope – that at least one new quiz show will come along in 2023 to be worthy of a LAMMY award. ITV’s new offering – In With A Shout  - fails to live up to its name. By no means is this in with a shout of winning the LAMMY from me.

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to be a little more objective. I watched it today on the ITVX service. I am quite aware that I am not the show’s target audience. I like more serious, thoughtful quizzes. This is a gameshow. Yes, okay, it does count as a quiz, which is the main reason why I’m reviewing it, but it shares more of its values with pure gameshows than pure quiz shows.

How does it work? Well, it’s based on the idea that when people watch quiz shows, or gameshows with quiz questions, they like to shout answers at the telly. At the end of the Hit List, for example, Rochele Humes always signs of with the promise of loads more shouting answers at the telly for the viewers, and she’s right. Well, In With A Shout takes two teams of three members. In the one I watched on ITVX they were two families. The families are faced with 10 television screens. Each shows a category. In turn, each family member picks a category. Then the screen shows examples of things that fall into the category. For every one that they get right they climb the cash ladder, and for every one that they get right they go down a step on the cash ladder. If they reach the top before the time runs out they have to get the next one right which means that they bank all the money from the cash ladder, plus more cash for each correct answer. If time runs out they get the money from whichever step of the ladder they’re on and more cash for each correct answer. Each player adds to their team total. The team with the highest total plays for the money.

In the one I saw, the team captain played one more screen, to decide whether they’d play for half the total banked, or all of the total banked, or a multiple of the total banked. Then the two remaining team members played the final game. To win, they had 60 seconds to identify something on each of the 10 screens. They could pass – so if they didn’t get the animal on the animal screen they could have another animal to identify. However the clock only stops after a correct answer, so the time keeps running down until you get one right. Do all 10 screens, and the money’s yours. Run out of time and you leave with nothing.

Positives. There are some. The game play is pretty simple and easy to follow. I also think that there’s enough in what you see to keep everyone at home going. A lot of the things you see are pretty simple to name, but importantly not all of them are. In every category there were pictures/short films which showed things I would have said were pretty obscure.

Not so positives. Well, in the case of this show I don’t think there’s any great flaws in the game mechanics as such. It does what it does pretty well. The drawback is that I’m not that bothered about what it does. What can I tell you? Well, a lot of the show depends on the family v family dynamic. I’ve come clean about my misanthropy before. For the fact is that I’m really sorry about this, but I’m just not that interested in contestants and contenders. I’m sure that they’re all lovely people. I wish them all well and I honestly hope that they win more money than I ever did and that they enjoy spending it. But it’s not what I’m interested in, sorry.

What about the host? Meh. We all know that Ant and Dec are the biggest beasts in the ITV jungle – well, in the whole of the world of presenting entertainment TV in the UK, but Cheesemeister Joel Dommett has the very bankable success of The Masked Singer behind him. Yes, he’s very good at what he does, but the thing is, I don’t particularly like what he does. I struggle with presenters who find themselves much funnier than I find them, a category into which our Joel fits like a round peg in a round hole.

Nope, not for me, but you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t do badly performing as the lead in to Britain’s Got Talent.