TV Experiences

A week ago or so I reviewed the 1 Percent Club, and only earlier today I was reading a post about it on the Contestant Hub on Facebook. Several of the replies from people who have actually participated in editions of the show made the point that they thought that the filming was a less than enjoyable experience. It set me thinking about my own recording experiences over the years. I’m sure that I’ve written about this before, but these are my shows to date: -

Come and Have A Go If You Think You’re Smart Enough – one show – 2004

Eggheads – one show – 2005

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – one show – 2006

Mastermind – one show – 2006

Mastermind – three shows – 2007

Brain of Britain (radio 4) – three shows – 2009

Are You An Egghead – three show - 2009

Only Connect – four shows – 2010

Mastermind Champion of Champions – 2010 – one show

Fifteen to One – one show – 2014

I also appeared on the Antiques Roadshow in 2014 as well. My appearance of that was then ridiculed on Gogglebox later the same week it was shown. That’s TV, folks.

Considering the stories I’ve heard from other people about the way that they’ve been treated on various shows, I count myself lucky that I didn’t have any real complaints about the way that I was treated on all my shows. I remember several friends and acquaintances who appeared on Battle of the Brains in 2009 describing being left standing around in cold corridors for ages, and very inadequate meals for example.

Well, I never really had an experience like that. I was spoilt, if anything, with my first show, “Come and Have A Go. . . “ This was a Saturday Night Lottery show and the Beeb were putting a fair amount of money into the show. We were put up for two nights in a very nice hotel just around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall, and when we got to Television Centre in White City we were given a lovely tour of it, including entry to the Blue Peter Garden. Mind you, it also introduced me to a key principle of recording a TV quiz show – once you’re out, you’re in the way.

Millionaire was another show where I felt very well taken care of. Not a live show like “Come and Have A Go . . . “ but a prime time show, where only one show was made in a day. To be fair everyone was taken into the bar afterwards and bought a drink by Chris Tarrant as well.

Those were probably the biggest budget shows I was ever on, but I have to say that even the TV quizzes where up to 4 shows a day were being made didn’t treat me badly at all. When I appeared on Eggheads we were the first show of the day to be filmed, and even though they must have been on a fairly tight time budget the Eggheads themselves, and Dermot Murnaghan all took time to shake hands, and have a bit of a chat with us.

I only have happy memories of Mastermind, and that includes the 2006 series. I thoroughly enjoyed Only Connect in 2010, although I didn’t request hotel accommodation for the show, bearing in mind it was all shot in Cardiff, about half an hour down the road from home. Champion of Champions was a wonderful experience, - I wouldn’t say that we were treated noticeably any differently from the way that we were treated on regular Mastermind, but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting other champs on the day, and they also sent me a framed photograph as a memento of the show. Nice.

They promised to send us a photograph as a memento when I appeared on Fifteen to One as well, but I never got one. Other than that, though, I cannot complain about the way we were treated on the show. There was a lot of waiting around, because I wasn’t actually on until the last show to be filmed that day. And that is a point worth taking some note of – when you’re a contestant on a TV quiz or game show, there is a lot of waiting around. You usually have to be there hours before you’re due on set, and only so much time can be taken up with briefings from a production assistant or researcher, wardrobe and makeup. If you’ve never taken part in a show like this before, my device would be to take your kindle with you.

If I’m honest, the only negative experience I had, which occurred on “Are You An Egghead?” wasn’t actually anything that happened on the show or in Television Centre. As I recall, the show was filmed right at the end of the month, and it was a month when I was particularly strapped for cash. Allowing for petrol to and from London, I really didn’t have any more at all to spare. The hotel in which we were staying was the Holiday Inn Express in Park Royal. When I got there for the first time I was told that the room had been booked and not paid for. Could I settle the bill now? No, in a word, I could not have, even if I wanted to. In the end, only when I threatened to ring the BBC and tell them the guy on reception was refusing to give me my room, and so I would be off home, did he relent. I spoke at some length to one of the team on the show, and they assured me that for my next appearance, a few days later, this would not happen again. To be fair, it didn’t happen in quite the same way. When I arrived for my next two shows, the receptionist said that, yes, the room had been paid for and could I still pay a £30 deposit, please? In a word, no. He backed down in the end, much as he had the first time.

If you haven’t already worked it out for yourself, I have to tell you that I’m a dedicated cheapskate. There’s a few reasons, all of which are too tedious for me to bore you with right now. But being expected to pay for something which I’d explicitly been told was being taken care of by the production company was just not on in my view.

Which actually reminds me about one of the problems with the 1 percent club. According to what I’ve been told, no travel expenses were offered. With 100 contestants to deal with I kind of understand the stinginess, but nonetheless I wouldn’t apply to the show myself considering this. By all means feel free to disagree, but I do think that you have a right as a contender to travel expenses, to overnight accommodation in a hotel if necessary, and if filming continued for most of the say, a bite to eat is always appreciated. To be honest, I didn’t like it that in many cases you had to provide receipts for train tickets or petrol in order to claim back your travel expenses, and these would be paid in the fullness of time, rather than on the day of the show. Especially considering that in most cases you were going to be walking away with nothing, and you certainly won’t going to receive anything just for appearing on the show.

I did say in most cases, because, as I recall, I did receive a one off payment for appearing in Brain of Britain in 2009/10. I found this radio experience to be a thoroughly enjoyable one, and very different from TV. We only needed to be in Broadcasting House about an hour before the show was due to be recorded. About 20 minutes or so before kick off a member of the team came down to the lobby to fetch us up to the radio theatre. Two shows were recorded in the same evening. You had a little practice, met Russell Davies, and then, off we go. It was really refreshing after all the faffing about which has to go into making a TV show. The whole thing was so much more relaxed and less fraught.

So, bearing in mind the mostly very positive nature of my TV and radio quiz experiences, would I do it again? Yes, I would. I have put in a number of applications since my last TV quiz appearance on Fifteen to One in 2014. Two of them resulted in auditions – one for Nick Hancock’s Breakaway, and one for a show you might recall called 500 Questions. You don’t get paid travel expenses for auditions, and you don’t expect to, but I rather like auditions, being something of a show off myself. So who knows?

Winning Combination

You know, time was when I would seek out any new TV quiz show, watch it carefully, analyse it and then offer my opinion in this very blog. Well, that practice went the way of all flesh some time ago. Had it not been for the fact that this is the half term break from school, then I might never have seen ITV’s Winning Combination, which I watched for the first time earlier this week. Apparently this is the second series – I didn’t know there had ever been a first.

The show is presented by Omid Djalili. My first thought was that he might actually be too good for the show. I’ve enjoyed his stand up in the past and I was afraid his talents might have been wasted here but to be honest I thought he just about managed to stay on the right side of irritating in this show. In some of the very best TV quiz shows, a strong format means that you really don’t need a presenter whose personality fills the screen, but I don’t think that this is one of those. I think that a bland, generic presenter would be detrimental in this case.

As for the format, well it’s not without interest, but on the same hand, not without problems. There are three types of round. The first type sees a question being asked, and a range of possible answers start to pop up on the screen. Once two correct answers have popped up, you can buzz in and identify them. Get it right you go through to the next battle round. Once 5 players have progressed to the battle round, then we play said round. In the battle round each of the  players starts with 5 points. They must buzz in to answer a question. Get it right and not only do they get another point, they also get to take one away from another player. Get it wrong and they lose one of their own. The player with the most points after 2 minutes and a tie break if necessary goes through to sit in the final combination. Each player has their own number. So if you had 9, for example, it would make more sense to sit in the thousands column. The other 4 players go back and join the rest. This continues until there are 4 players sitting in the final combination. The other 5 leave with nothing.

In the final, then, the team have 30 seconds to answer questions. So let us say that the final combination is 4321. The first player has to answer 1 question correctly, then it immediately passes to the second who must answer 2 correctly, then the third with 3, and the last player with 4. To make it possible, for every correct answer the team are given  extra seconds. If they complete the combination, then each one receives an equal share of the £4321 jackpot. If they fail, then they don’t even get their bus fare home.

You might be surprised by what I’m going to say now, but there’s actually quite a bit that I liked about Winning Combination. I liked the finding the correct two questions in the selection rounds. That takes a bit of knowledge (or a lot of luck). I like a quickfire quiz, so I enjoyed the battle rounds as well. I wouldn’t mind playing in either of these rounds. I will be honest, when I watch a TV quiz I am rather misanthropic, inasmuch as I am not the least bit interested in the life stories of any of the players, and don’t care to be told any funny little facts about them. One odd thing about the show is that every now and then Omid stops the proceedings to ask one of them “Tell us something we don’t already know about you?” Well, frankly, we don’t know anything about them other than their name anyway, Omid, and what’s more, it’s totally irrelevant to the game. Omid is a little more acerbic than your typical host, and this makes this aspect of the show just a little more bearable.

I’ll be honest though, I do find the -selection round, then battle round, then selection round, then battle round and so on format to be rather repetitive. You get something similar in ‘Impossible’, but at least you only have 3 finalists in this show. By the time we got round to our 4^th selection round in Winning Combination, then I was a little bored with it. Then there’s the final round. On the one hand it looks relatively fiendish. It makes sense that the player with the highest number sits in the thousands, and so he or she has the largest number of questions to answer, with the least amount of time. Fiendish. Except it isn’t really. If you combine 9 + 8 + 7 + 6 it comes to 30. Which is exactly the same as if you combine 6 + 7 + 8 + 9. So it doesn’t really matter what order you have to answer the questions in, your team still has to answer the same number of questions. What struck me, as I watched, was that the level of knowledge we’d seen from the contestants during the show meant that it looked extremely unlikely that they’d win, and indeed they didn’t. I’ve only watched one edition of the show, so I could be wrong on this, but I would have thought a team actually managing to win would be very much the exception rather than the normal outcome. It left me feeling a little flat, if I’m honest. I made a comparison with Impossible earlier. At least on Impossible you still have the possibility of taking home the daily prize pot, even if you don’t win the jackpot.

Did I like it enough to want to watch it again? Fair question, and all I can tell you is this. I watched the show on Monday. I haven’t watched it since. At no point have I said to myself – well, I won’t be watching that again – but also at no point in the last couple of days have I made the conscious choice to watch it, in the way that I make a conscious choice to watch Pointless and House of Games every day.

A Question of A Question of Sport

Suppose I had put a less obvious title to this post, and I asked you the question – which TV quiz show began in 1970, and has run for 51 series? What would you have answered? In some ways Mastermind would be the closest fitting wrong answer – having begun in 1972, and run for 45 series – 3 of which were broadcast on Radio4, and one of which was broadcast on the Discovery Channel.  But, not, it’s A Question of Sport.

Cards on the table, I’ve rarely written about Question of Sport in the past on the blog because , well, certainly since I started the blog in 2008 QOS has been as much an entertainment show as anything else. And if you take it as that, then it’s worked pretty well. I’m fortunate enough to have played in charity quizzes against both Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell, and what you saw on TV seemed to me what you got in real life. Now, the thing about the Barker – Dawson – Tuffers set up was so much of your enjoyment depended on how much you liked the three of them. If, say, you found Tuffers got on your nerves – I didn’t, but I know people who did – then there was progressively less and less pure quiz content for you to get your teeth into as the years went on.

The new series kicked off this week, and so I decided to give it a go. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too hopeful when I saw that Paddy McGuinness was presenting. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Paddy is an assured and comfortable broadcaster, whose manner would be at home on the show. However, the show has always been presented by either someone respected within the sporting community like David Coleman, or a former sportsperson like Sue Barker. Paddy’s presence made me wonder if we were going to be moving even closer to Sky TV’s “A League of Their Own”. Like the BBC’s own “They Think It’s All Over” of a couple of decades ago, there are occasionally sports questions in the show, but it’s far more interested in extracting comedy and entertainment from the captains and the guests.  Which is great, and it’s an entertaining show. A sports quiz though?

If you haven’t watched the show for about 20 years, well, it’s quite a bit different from how you remember it. Still, what I did like was that the two team captains, Sam Quek and Ugo Monye, don’t yet have the kind of relationship between them that Daws and Tuffers had. The show had become very much about the banter between the two of them, and so at least this has freed up some more space for sports questions.

However, that having been said, I really don’t like the section where the two captains have to try out a sport and compete to win a couple of points. This is the sort of thing they do in “A League of their Own”. The thing is, though, in that show they do it for laughs, to make the captains/participants look a bit ridiculous. And this is the sort of thing you can’t afford to do by halves. So when you have the two team captains who were both sportspeople who reached the top of their game, doing a sport which is unfamiliar to them quite well, but obviously nowhere near as well as people who actually do the sport, then it just doesn’t work. In a quiz show, this sort of thing is just pointless padding. I’d

I’ll be honest, I only tuned in after seeing a couple of extremely negative reviews in a couple of the national papers. Well, to be honest, I think this was a little unfair. It’s still pretty watchable – although purely as a matter of personal taste I’d like to see still more genuine quiz content. The Home and Away round went the way of all flesh some time ago, and that’s a shame. Surely there must be enough clips available to start doing the What Happened Next as well. There you go, though, If you haven’t watched the new series yet, I’d give it a try and make your own mind up.