Prompted by recent posts about shows being revived, and shows being ended before their time, I was moved by curiosity, and having just a little Christmas school holiday time on my hands, to look back at the new shows that I’ve written about in one form or another since I started LAM in 2008. My good ness, but there’s been a lot of them. I make it 60. And of those 60, 39 were in the first five years of LAM – I went off the boil after that, and embarked upon my quizzing lost weekend from 2016, when I really wasn’t posting a great amount of stuff at all for a good 5 years or so. There’s tons of quizzes I missed in that period.
Still, if it
shows anything, it shows that television is a voracious consumer of new shows
and formats. It also shows that the vast majority of quiz shows never stand the
test of time. Only one of the new shows I reviewed in 2008 is still being made –
Only Connect, in case you’re wondering. Not including the new shows that I’ve
reviewed since I started regular blogging again in September, there are just 6
more of these shows still in production. The Chase – Pointless – Tipping Point –
Richard Osman’s House of Games – Tenable and possibly Impossible. All of these shows have proven viewer
appeal and staying power.
One thing
which occurred to me as I was compiling the list was that most of these really
aren’t what you would actually call ‘bad’ shows. For the most part they were
shows that had been made with some time and care, but which just didn’t catch the
audience they needed. For example, I wouldn’t say that “Million Pound Drop” and
“Five Minutes To A Fortune” were intrinsically bad – I was biased against them
in the same way that I am biased against anything presented by Davina McCall.
No doubt she is a perfectly nice person and a wonderful friend, but her TV
persona has always set my teeth on edge. And indeed, one or two on the list
surely weren’t helped by the rather strange choice of host. I think in particular of Jeremy
Kyle’s “High Stakes”, and Andrew ‘Mahogany’ Castle’s “Divided”. In some of them
the format just hadn’t been worked out well enough – we’ve all seen new quiz
shows that are too difficult – I don’t know if you remember Break the Safe
(probably not) the show in which the rules had to be changed and the endgame of
several shows reshot because in its original format nobody could win it. In
some cases you couldn’t maybe put it down to anything other than being the
right show at the wrong time. After all, if you’re a teatime show and you have to
take on Pointless and the Chase, for example, you might just as well not bother
turning up at the ground, let alone getting changed to use a sporting analogy.
For what it’s
worth, looking at the 55 or so shows that came and went, these are the ones I
wouldn’t have minded seeing a longer run of:-
Perfection
Breakaway
The Common
Denominator
The Link
The Code
A purely
personal choice, and I don’t for one minute expect everyone – or indeed anyone –
to agree with me. Oh, and if Impossible has been axed the BBC, that would also
definitely be on my list.
1 comment:
Although I was quite disappointed to see Perfection go, to be fair it did run for five series and 240 episodes, which is substantially longer than most new shows these days. Did you know that the second half of Series 5 was first broadcast two episodes per day from 6am? That really says to me that the BBC were trying to kill the show.
Which brings me to my second point. Obviously, if something just isn't working out it's foolish to keep making it, but I can't help thinking that a lot of the time these days, they just aren't putting much very effort into new quiz and game show formats to help them find their feet. Even if Perfection was doomed, it's ridiculous to broadcast it at that time. And I think this is a recent thing - I think in the 2000s, far more quiz shows were allowed to stand the test of time. Of course, I could be wrong as I was a child in the 2000s (and I'm sure there are plenty of long-forgotten formats from then as well), but if you think of Weakest Link, BrainTeaser, the Mastermind revival, In It to Win It, Eggheads, Who Dares Wins, Only Connect, Pointless and The Chase - that's nine things from that decade already, that I haven't even done any online research to confirm. Even some short-lived things made quite a lot of content - the Kaye Adams era of The People Versus was only on for about a year and a half, but made more than 100 episodes in that time. Whereas in the 2010s, I can only think of three new formats that anyone has really put energy into developing and making work - Perfection, Impossible and the revival of Fifteen to One, and even they are all gone now if we're to assume that Impossible is indeed not returning.
That's a massive shift, and I don't think that it's necessarily to do with less interesting formats - just my humble opinion, but I've enjoyed some new formats in the last ten years more than I enjoyed some classic old ones. You can put some of it down to the shifts in the ways people consume television these days, with on-demand services enjoying a lot of attention - but that can't completely account for it, because I think there's still been roughly the same amount of quiz and game show CONTENT produced, it's just been to experiment with new formats. I think the problem is more that production teams are under pressure to create things that will be incredibly successful straight away... there's not much time given to these things to find their feet anymore.
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