Nobody's Fool - The Landing

So I suppose the question I need to consider is this – did the final of “Nobody’s Fool” stick the landing?

Well, in one way at least, it did. In the previous couple of shows I had started to feel that events on the show were being manipulated in favour of one particular contestant. The shock of one player being eliminated through breaking rules about revealing cards in the elimination vote, which meant that the two players up for elimination were saved, initially made me feel that special efforts were being made to get the weakest player in terms of General Knowledge through to win the jackpot. But then in last night’s final, she was happy to accept the offer to take a couple of grand and leave. Sensible person. It’s more than 3 of the other finalists got.

Then we saw the final four playing for an advantage. They had to listen to a small chamber orchestra playing versions of well-known popular tunes, ( I wonder if they ‘stole’ the idea from my son-in-law, Dan) accompanied by an operatic tenor singing the lyrics via the medium of another language. You got one point if you could buzz in and identify the song and artist (the most famous version, I guess). Then the music began again. When it stopped, you had to buzz in and sing the next line. The prize for the contestant with most points? To pick the next player to be eliminated.

From this it was straight to the quiz pods. Isolated from each other, the three had to pick which one of the other two to eliminate. The person with two votes would have to leave. Now, you have to consider that at this point the three did not know what the final game would be like.

As for the final game, well, the two players sat on opposite sides of the elimination table. On the desk were a set of cards. Each card had a category on the back. The other side of the cards had two statements. One of them was true, and the other false. Each contestant had to take turns to pick one statement and read it to the other. The recipient then had to say whether the statement was true of false. Get it right, you win a point. Most points won the moolah.

How do I feel about it then? Actually, fairly satisfied as it happens. While the pure quizzer in me might think that it should all have been settled by a strenuous two minute round of hard general knowledge questions against the clock, the show was never really about the quiz aspects. Not really. For me, the quiz rounds were not about showing the opposition how smart you were, as much as they were a way of generating a cash total that could be admitted or lied about. And that’s okay.

You know, when you get right down to it, making a show to appeal to fans of The Traitors – and I’m sorry, but you will not convince me that this is not what Nobody’s Fool set out to do – isn’t easy. After all, you can’t just remake The Traitors. You have to change the ingredients, or mix the same ingredients in a different way, or both. And of course, if you do that you can end up with something that just doesn’t quite work. I do think that the show avoided some of the pitfalls that can mar a show like this. Personally I think that there’s no need for a presenter tag team and one person can do it just as well, but the key thing is that neither of them grated on the nerves. A little of Danny Dyer can go a long way and the fact that he was pretty restrained throughout proceedings helped the show. The dilemma faced by the contestants was interesting. For all they knew they would have to face the most knowledgeable and/or intelligent member(s) of the opposition in the final. So the incentive was there to vote them out. However, if they didn’t vote out the person who had contributed least to the pot in the previous quiz, then the prize money would be halved. So the incentive was there to keep the strongest players in. That dichotomy made it interesting.

One of the things which helped Destination X work last summer was that I genuinely liked some of the contestants – Jackie P’s husband, I’m looking at you. And I found that I rather liked most of the Nobody’s Fool contestants too. Because, I think, that the makers realised that if they kept the amount of quizzing shown in each programme to a minimum, there would be more time for personalities to come through. If you compare it with Channe 4’s disappointing “The Inheritance” I couldn’t help disliking many of the participants while not really caring one way or another about the rest.

Summing up then I enjoyed “Nobody’s Fool”. It isn’t “The Traitors” (although one suspects that it rather wishes that it was) but I watched the first two shows on demand then made a point of being around to watch each show of the rest of the series as it aired. The big question, though, is whether enough viewers felt the same. I hope so. If it comes back, I will watch it.