I caught two more new shows in the last few days. Let’s start
with ITV’s “Sitting on A Fortune”. I saw this yesterday evening. Early Saturday
evening? – I mused – Maybe ITV have hopes of this one catching on. So what have
they got for their money? Well, it boils down to a big name presenter, Gary
Lineker (don’t worry, I’ll get to him) some relatively easy questions, and some
very big, neon lit chairs. Shall we have a look at the mechanics of the game?
We begin with 6 players. We continue playing until three of
these players have been eliminated. There is a row of 6 chairs. The one at the back
(red lit for danger) is the elimination chair. The one at the front (yellow lit
for . . . custard?) is the question chair. The 6 players have drawn lots prior
to the show to determine the order in which they choose which chair to sit in.
Whoever is sitting in the question chair has to answer a question. If they get
it right, they stay in the chair. If they get it wrong, then they move into the
red chair and everyone else moves forward 1 chair. Whoever is in the question
chair and gives the third correct answer – they go through to the final.
Whoever is in the red chair when the third correct answer is given is
eliminated. As for the final, well it works in a similar way. 1st
person through gets to choose first which of the 3 chairs to sit in and so on.
Whoever is at the back gets to choose between two categories for each question
asked. There are 7 questions. The prize pot starts on £100,000. For each wrong
answer, £10,000 is removed from the prize fund. Get a question wrong and you
got to the back, and the other two move forward. So you can have a situation
where the person who starts in the money seat can answer the first 6 correctly,
then get the last wrong, allowing the next person to come in. Having removed one
wrong answer from the board, the next player has a one in three chance of
guessing correctly, does so, and walks away with £90,000. Which is exactly what
happened last night.
There are some things I really rather like about this.
Because there must be a fair bit of tactical thinking that goes not deciding
where you want to sit along the line, especially when there are 6 chairs. Then
in the final, there is the opportunity to ‘shaft’ the person in front. The person
in the question seat can ask for help from those behind, who may well want to
get the first couple of questions out of the way before they want to get into
the question seat.
The questions themselves – well there was nothing asked last
night that I think a decent pub quizzer wouldn’t have been able to have a good
guess at. So I would guess that none of the players we saw last night are
regular pub quizzers at all. Fair enough, that’s the production team’s choice
and it kept the game of musical chairs going, but one of my failings is I do
get frustrated sometimes seeing perfectly nice, normal people struggling and
bluffing their way through some rather gentle questions.
I’ll be honest, I was a little surprised to see Gary Lineker
hosting. I shouldn’t have been, he’s been a television presenter and host for
far longer than he was an international footballer and spent a lot of time presenting
some pretty big events on live television, so I’m guessing that this must have
been a bit of a doddle for him. I suppose it’s just that I associate him with
the BBC, and with sport. He does a perfectly professional job with this – he seems
warm enough towards the contestants, and has a little gentle dig now and then,
and certainly has an appropriately relaxed screen presence. If you’ve been with
me for any length of time you’ll know that I have a misanthropic dislike of any
amount of time being wasted chatting to contestants about their hobbies or jobs
– I just don’t care, when you get right down to it, but this was all at least
relatively painless.
So when you get right down to it, how good is “Sitting on a
Fortune?” Well, I wouldn’t have been watching it yesterday evening, but for the
fact that BBC were offering us “Mary Poppins” – normally at this time on a
Saturday evening I settle down with several of my daughters and my son in law
to watch the shouting at the TV fest that is “The Hit List”. And if The Hit
List were to be on next Saturday, then I wouldn’t be watching “Sitting on a
Fortune” again. It’s fine for what it is, but for me there’s better elsewhere.
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If I was surprised to see Gary Lineker hosting “Sitting on a
Fortune” – and I was – then I was even more surprised to see Craig Charles
hosting “Moneybags” on Friday afternoon on Channel 4. Now, I like Craig
Charles. I remember his early TV appearances in the mid-late 80s, popping up
performing his humorous poems on such shows as “Pebble Mill”, and I loved the
first half dozen or so series of “Red Dwarf”. You don’t get a career as long as
Craig Charles, doing the variety of things that he’s done, without talent. In
fact it’s worth arguing about whether he’s too versatile and too talented for
something like “Moneybags”.
Which brings me to the game itself. If I understood the start
of the show correctly, a sum of £1 million has been divided into various
amounts and put into 100 bags. Twenty of these bags are in play during an
individual show. Two contestants play a head to head to win through to the next
stage. Craig announces a category – for example, cities that are north of
London. A series of bags will pass in front of the two contestants. Each bag
will have the name of a city on it. The player sitting in pole position gets
first chance to grab. So if they grab a bag with a correct answer, they can
reveal the amount they have won, and they may also get a bonus, like being able
to steal a bag from their opponent. If they grab a bag with a wrong answer,
then there will be a forfeit f some kind – eg becoming bankrupt. If the player
in pole passes on the bag, then the second player can grab it if they wish. If
they grab a correct bag, then they also move into pole position. Whoever has
most at the end of the round moves through to the next round.
You get how it goes. I’m sorry to say that I had lost a bit
of interest by the round of three, but the mechanics were pretty much the same.
The winner, in the final, had to decide to take or leave again, and in my view
sensibly stopped after grabbing one bag correctly, and took the money.
Look, despite what I said about losing interest, there is
something at the heart of this show. For me, I like shows to have a bit of
working out involved. It never did Pointless any harm, and I quite like Tenable
as well. But, I don’t know, it somehow never felt quite as satisfying as either
of those two shows. At the end of the day it was just people grabbing bags and
ripping off bits of paper to reveal whether they were right or wrong and what
the consequences were.
Coming back to Craig Charles, I‘m not sure that this is the
best vehicle for him if he wants to conquer new territory in the field of
quiz/game show presenting. Maybe I’m being unfair, but a lot of the host’s job
on this show seemed limited to stating the bleeding obvious. I’m not saying
that anyone could chat to a contestant about the boring and inconsequential
details of their lives, and I’m not saying that anybody could remind
contestants that if they make a wrong choice they could go bankrupt. But if the
host’s job doesn’t involve a great deal more than this, well, you’re just wasting
someone like Craig Charles by putting them in that role.
Like “Sitting on a Fortune”, “Moneybags” in my opinion is not
a bad show. Both are professionally made, both have a clear concept and both are
professionally presented. Yet neither, in my opinion, has that indefinable
quality, that ‘x’ factor, to lift them above the common herd, and guarantee
them a long run. But hey, what do I know? Yes, I liked both “The Chase” and “Pointless”
the first time that I saw them, and thought that they would run and run. On the
other hand, though, I disliked “Tipping Point” the first time that I saw it and
thought sure it wouldn’t be back. I rather like it now and often watch it with
my grandson, who loves it. So who knows? In the words of the great William
Goldman, when it comes to working out the ingredients of what will make a movie
successful, nobody knows, and the same holds good for quiz shows as well.
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