New Show - The Wisdom of the Crowd

I have mentioned in the past that I like Strictly Come Dancing. Sue me. It was the second of the live shows this evening and I have to be honest, I do find the earlier shows in each series can be a little bit of a trial of endurance. In this ‘phoney war’ phase of each series it takes quite a few weeks to weed out the no-hopers and the unpopulars to whittle the number of couples taking part down to a reasonable amount. So tonight I was reeling a bit after the 2+ hours long show and did not find the energy or interest to go searching for something else to watch, which is how I came to catch John Bishop’s “The Wisdom of the Crowd” for the first time.

The show takes its title and central idea from the theory that the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals will result in the best judgement. It was supposedly first noted by Francis Galton – more about him in a minute. While attending a fair in Plymouth in 1906 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of an ox. Galton added together the sum of all 800 guesses, then divided by 800 to find the mean guess. He was amazed to find that this was within 1% of the correct answer.

Galton was a very interesting, if somewhat eccentric man. He’s possibly best known for his method of classifying fingerprints. A first cousin of Charles Darwin of Charles Darwin, he has been criticised for his views on eugenics. But let’s get back to the show.

So, true to its title, on tonight’s show we saw three contestants each take on the crowd, that is the live audience of the show, on three questions, for lessening amounts of money. Each question required an estimate of a given quantity – say, the number of billionaires in the UK in 2024. If the contestant’s estimate was closer than the mean guess of the audience to the actual number, then they would take the cash. If not, it would get added to the prize pot. On their third question, each contestant was given the ‘wimp out’ option of taking a seat in the audience, but that would only happen if their guess was closer than 100 members of the audience. Not one question was one by the contestants. £30,000 went to the audience prize pot.

For the end game, the audience were invited to put themselves forward to try to take a go at winning the prize pot. If they won it, then they would take it all home. If they didn’t, then they had to leave the audience and the show. If more than one player put themselves forward then the player who had been statistically the best player out of the audience members who had put themselves forward would be chosen.

It’s the first time I’ve watched so I don’t know if this is always the case, but tonight, the contestant and the audience were asked a set of five true or false questions – contestant v. the majority answer of the audience. The contestant got 3/5 while the audience had a full house. That was it, that was the game.

I will be honest, I wasn’t really expecting to like this very much. Yet, maybe because it was such a contrast to the slightly ponderous Strictly marathon show that preceded it I found it fresh and rather interesting. These were real ‘guessing’ questions and I found it really quite remarkable just how close the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ was to the actual answer on almost every occasion. I don’t think I would have beaten them on any of them. John Bishop works very well as host for me too. His blokeish good humour notwithstanding he’s a highly intelligent man and he kept the show moving along at a fair old clip. In fact, the only maybe slightly negative thought that occurs to me is this. At the start of the show I’m sure that John said that in the two previous show the audience had won all of the questions, although the money had been won by the individual in the endgame. If the audience keeps on winning every time – if nobody can beat them on an individual question at all, then I can see the show starting to lose its appeal. This is just my opinion and feel free to disagree, but I do think that the great British Public do have a certain sense of fair play. We don’t mind something being hard for a contestant, but we don’t like it to be practically impossible.

Well the jury is out. But I certainly enjoyed it for one show.