Contrary to what you might have thought, ITV’s “Fastest Finger First” is not actually the first quiz show where the prize is the right to appear on another quiz show. If you cast your minds back into the dim and distant past, some fifteen odd years ago the BBC aired The People’s Quiz in the National Lottery Quiz Slot. It’s not the time or place for me to go on about this show, but it’s of interest mainly because it gave a £200,700 first prize, comfortably the biggest ever on a BBC quiz show, and it brought Mark Labbett to national prominence, even though he was runner up. A sister show – The People’s Quiz Wild Card aired at teatime on BBC2 where the winner would get a place in the Grand Final of the People’s Quiz.
Okay, so “Fastest
Finger First” is not a new idea. But it is, in my opinion, a good one – feel free
to disagree. I knew nothing about it and only found it yesterday when I was
channel hopping. It works like this. The show is presented by Anita Rani – who is
perfect for it. There are five shows in this first series. In each show, five
contestants battle it out. Each round begins with a quickfire general knowledge
round. They have to buzz in to answer a question. Get it right, and then they
will be asked a series of questions, building up a ladder of correct answers.
At any time they can use the safety net. This freezes their score where it is,
and we have another open buzzer question. When the contestant with the frozen
score buzzes in correctly they continue to build their score from where they
got to previously. However if they get any question ladder question wrong they
go back down to zero. Each round has a relatively short duration, the end of
which is announced by the Millionaire Klaxon.
So, at the
end of this round, the two players with the highest score in it play a head to
head. And this is where it really does become a game of fastest finger first. A
set of multiple choice – put these four things in order – questions follow. Same
as on the parent show, whoever gets the answer right in the fastest time wins.
At the end of the round, the one with the most points stays on, the other goes
back to the other contestants. Essentially it means that you only need to play
in one of the head to heads – the last one, and you only have to win one of the
head to heads – the last one – to win your place into the chair on Millionaire.
Looking at
yesterday’s show, where the same contestant won all of the head to heads, I’d
say that the mechanics of the show do a lot to ensure that it’s the contender
with the best combination of speed of recall and breadth of knowledge who wins.
I like that. It’s clever as well in that it will provide contenders for Millionaire who will at least have
a better chance of winning big than the average.
Okay folks,
it’s cards on the table time. I’ve obviously only seen the one show so far –
there’s only been one – and this is not a lot to form hard and fast opinions
on. But I really enjoyed the show yesterday. It has many of the things I like
in a quiz show. I missed the first few minutes, so I don’t know if a huge
amount of time was wasted spent getting to know the contestants at the
start. Crucially, though, it wasn’t once the game got started. From then on it
was as quickfire as the name suggested. There was no over-reliance on popular
culture/entertainment questions either, and that’s something that can be the
curse of a lot of teatime quiz shows. There was a fair range of easy – medium and
quite hard questions, which gave the show a high score on my patented
play-along-at-home-ability-ometer.
Yes, you bet
I’ll be watching it again today – already set a series link on it, thanks very
much. If yesterday’s show is typical, then it’s a series I’d much rather watch
than Millionaire itself.
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