"Moneyball"

I will admit the truth. Having reviewed “Moneybags” and “Sitting on a Fortune” and earlier in the week, “The Tournament”  I couldn’t help wondering if there are any other quiz games that have started over the last couple of weeks. This is why I came to watch “Moneyball” on the ITV Player a little while ago. So earlier on Saturday evening we had Gary Lineker presenting “Sitting on a Fortune”. Now we’re going to have a look at  “Moneyball” presented by Ian Wright. What's next – “Pets Win Prizes” presented by Alan Shearer and Wayne Rooney’s “Supermarket Sweep”?

“Moneyball” faces a difficult task. If we take last night, it was up against the first hour of BBC’s powerhouse “Strictly Come Dancing”. Now, you might like Strictly Come Dancing, you might not like it. But it can pull in in audiences of some 10 million viewers, and there’s precious few shows that can do that in this day and age.  For what it’s worth I rather like Strictly, although that’s not really germane to he issue.

ITV have a problem. For the best part of 20 years ITV’s Autumn Saturday night schedule was built around music based reality/talent shows, from 2001’s Pop Stars, through Pop Idol, and then the different versions of the X Factor, which seem finally to have died the death a year or two ago. An ITV gameshow on an Autumn Saturday evening therefore always either served as an hors d’oeuvres, a lead in to the X Factor, or tried to hang onto as much of the X Factor audience as possible after the show.  At the moment, though, ITV seem to be between ideas. Something similar happened at the turn of the Milennium. Gladiators, the archetypal 1990s Autumn Saturday evening show came to its end, after several tweaks, and outstaying its welcome by at least a couple of years. It was another couple of years before Pop Stars came along.

So, presumably still looking for their next big thing, what does an ITV Autumn Saturday evening actually look like at the moment? Well, starting at 5pm yesterday’s schedule consisted of, “Sitting on a Fortune”, a quiz game show, then the ITV news, then“Moneyball”, a quiz game show, then a Catchphrase Celebrity Special , a game show. That’s 4 and a half consecutive hours of quiz/gameshows with just the news break after the first hour. And the problem with this is, I would argue, that all 3 of these shows are fine for the lead in to a big entertainment show, but none of them are strong enough to have a schedule built around them. This is certainly true of Moneyball in my opinion.

Let’s talk about the mechanics of the show, then. This is one of those shows in which a contestant comes on, and it’s not about beating other contestants, just about winning as much money as possible. In order to do this the contestants work their way through a series of questions. The questions themselves are the best thing about the show. So the contestant is given three things – for example – King Candy – Scar and Lord Farquaad – and then has to work out which one was in The Lion King, which one in Shrek and which one in Wreck-It-Ralph. Then the moneyball equipment is used to work out how much the correct answer is work. The moneyball of the title runs up and down a rather flattened and lengthened  U shaped piece of track. The contestant pushes a button – similar to the one used in Tipping Point – to determine how high up the track the ball will be released. The board above the bottom of the track is lit up in sections. Wherever the ball stops running determines the fate of the contestant. If you get the question wrong, then you have to play the ball to determine if you continue playing or if you leave with nowt. After a successful roll of the bal following a correct answer, then the contestant can either take another question, or play the moneyball to take the cash. If the ball lands in one of the right sections, you get to take the money and another contestant starts the game again.

Coming back to my original point, it is pretty ironic that two consecutive new ITV quiz games should both be presented by former England international star strikers, But as with Gary Lineker, Ian Wright has years of TV presenting under his belt, but unlike Gary Lineker he’s even presented Saturday evening Gameshows before – Friends Like These being one from a few years ago. So he’s a perfectly safe pair of hands. And “Moneyball” is a perfectly inoffensive little quiz game. Yes, I did say little. Because although the show at several times trumpets the potential jackpot of £100,000, the fact is that you’re unlikely to see any contender get close to £100,000. With the randomising factor of the ball, you’d have to be reckless in the extreme to pass up £20,000 to keep going, for example. Also, the nature of the show whereby there’s no building towards a Final, and there’s no endgame, means that it feels rather too long at an hour. If it was a 45 minute show leading into, well, into a Saturday evening spectacular like Strictly, I think it would work very well. But in a straight fist fight against Strictly, Moneyball has 2 chances - slim chance and no chance. And slim chance just left town.