To Tweak, or not to Tweak

Afternoon. I can't go to the Aberavon home match today because I'm looking after my grandson who's not very well, so I just thought that I’d share some observations about a couple of returning quizzes. I’d like to start off with “The Tournament”, a 2021 newcomer which returned this week. The Beeb often seem to give new quiz shows a couple of series to find an audience, so I don’t know if “The Tournament” was a hit first time round, or merely showed a bit of promise.

So let’s start with a couple of positives. I praised Alex Scott last year for speaking clearly, projecting a little warmth and not getting in the way. She seems to have grown into the role and seems more at ease and confident. That’s a positive. The show still delivers a pretty decent number of questions for your money too. That’s a positive.

Now, I was kind enough in my review last year to point out a number of tweaks the production team could make to ensure that the second series would be even better. I’m sad to see that they haven’t taken any of them on board. This means that the show still suffers from these flaws:-

·       The god-awful, cringe-inducing ‘battle-cries’. At the top end of the show, each contestant is forced to issue a statement of intent along the lines of ‘ I’m a primary school teacher and I’m going to teach the opposition a lesson or two tonight’. Even if these were well done – and they are not – it goes totally against the friendly atmosphere of the show. But as I said, they’re not well done. The contestants aren’t professional actors, and their delivery is more wooden than a walnut kneehole desk. They are obviously scripted and are pure gorgonzola. Please – I beg of you – should you get another series, then DROP IT! It doesn’t matter how many times Alex says ‘Great Battle cries!” I find the whole business buttock- clenchingly cringeworthy.

·       The business of telling us who is ‘favourite’ for which game. It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, and at the end of the day – who cares?

·       The sameiness of each head to head round

·       The lack of a proper endgame in most shows. I didn’t get to watch every episode of the first series, but I have never seen a contestant knock out the other finalist and then get an opportunity to have a go at a gold run to double their money.

As I said last year when the first season aired, the show has potential. Without a few tweaks to sort these flaws out, though, then this potential will stay unfulfilled. Yes, of course that’s just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.

As for the other returning show, Jason Manford’s “Unbeatable” has been running for a couple of weeks now. I’m not in a position to discuss whether any tweaks have been made to the show or not, because I never saw any of the first series. I was just really starting to emerge from my quizzing lost weekend when it aired and wasn’t watching shows just so I could blog about them then.

“Unbeatable” as it is now does several things well, I think. I like Jason Manford – he’s a gifted comedian – and actually a very good singer too, as we saw in the first series of The Masked Singer.  He doesn’t grate on the nerves at all, and he doesn’t try to make the show all about him, which is a lot of what I want from a host. If anything, he’s maybe a little wasted here. He’s very good, but someone without his skills could do just as well with what’s required.

Which probably goes to highlight another thing I like about the show. I actually like that it doesn’t waste a lot of time talking to the contestants. I know many people have the opposite view – to which everyone is entitled. But when you get right down to it I’m not really that interested in anybody who appears. In fact, the only thing I want to know about them is how well do they do with the questions.

I also appreciate that it is not all popular culture. I would dare say that it must be a great temptation to slant a show like this more heavily towards film, TV and music.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward and easy to understand, but just complicated enough to spike a little more interest – yes, you at home may know that one of the two contestants in each round has the unbeatable answer – but do they know? Will they say it is the unbeatable answer?  However, I believe that there is an issue with the gameplay.

It works like this. The how is a series of head to head battles. Each battle consists of 3 boards. So a board will say – for the sake of argument – which of these people was the first to win a series of Mastermind. There will be 6 options – Kevin Ashman – Fred Housego – Nancy Wilkinson – Christopher Hughes – Nancy Dickman – Gary Grant. (Brownie points for modestly not including myself? No, didn’t think so.) So one contestant gets to choose what they think is the correct answer. Then the other gets to choose from the remaining five. Then the two contenders have a few seconds be first to buzz if they think they have the unbeatable correct answer. So let’s say player 1 chooses Nancy Wilkinson and buzzes. The answer is compared with each of the others, and when it turns out to be unbeatable, that player wins the board. First to win 2 boards wins. Lets say player 2 buzzes instead having chosen Fred Housego. That turns out to be beatable, and so the board goes to player 1.

If neither player buzzes, then both players answers are played against each other. Nancy Wilkinson wins. 1 – 0 to player 1. Then player 1 picks again, and so does player 2. Player 1 picks Kevin, and player 2 picks Chris. Chris is the earlier – so it’s one – all. So they pick between the last two. Player 1 picks Nancy, player 2 has Gary, and so player 1 takes the board 2- 1.

Now, my issue with this is that there is a distinct advantage to being picked to go first on the first board. Let us suppose that we have two equally good players. Player 1 gets the unbeatable answer on the first board, player 2 on the second, and player 1 wins by getting the 3^rd board. I’m not sure what the production team could do about this, but it is a slight weakness in the format.

Well, a new era began this week for a show with a very tried and tested format, Pointless. Richard Osman – I feel I should write ‘The Great Richard Osman’ because he’s funny, smart, successful and on the back of his excellent novels, rich. I should hate him for these very reasons, yet he’s never come across to me as smug, and I’d like to think we’d get on if we ever met. Which rather brings me to the point that anyone having to follow Richard as the pointless friend on “Pointless” would surely be raising a poisoned chalice to their lips. Don’t get me wrong, Pointless has a very good, strong format anyway, but let’s be honest, it was the relationship between genuine old friends Zander and Richard that cemented the popularity of the show. Yeah, quite often their spontaneous banter didn’t quite hit the mark as it went galloping up a comedic blind alley, but what the hell, that was all part of the fun. So I think that it’s a smart move to have guest friends doing stints. It was Sally Lindsay last week, and Alex Brooker, Lauren Laverne, Steven Mangan, Konnie Huq and Ed Gamble are all lined up to have a go. I don’t know whether they’re going to keep this ‘this week in dictionary corner’ format, or whether they intend to judge audience reaction and then pick the best fit. As for who this would be, it all depends on whether the producers take an ‘and now for something completely different ‘ approach. If not, then although it’s not exactly a like for like replacement, I can see the lad Mangan doing well, although I’ll be watching Alex Brooker with interest. Sally Lindsay did a perfectly decent job, for what it’s worth. 

New Show - A One and Six Zeroes

Another new show which I’ve only managed to see today on catch up is A One and Six Zeroes, currently showing at 6 pm on Sundays on Channel 4. I think I should probably put my cards on the table and say that now that I’ve watched the show, I think it is a lot of the things that I dislike in a quiz game show.

Let’s talk about the mechanics of the show for a moment. It's a non-adversarial quiz. You're not playing to beat anyone else, simply to win a sizeable amount of cash. A team of three plays. With the one I watched it was a perfectly nice father, mother and daughter from Durham. The team are asked a number of questions, and they must answer 7 multiple choice questions correctly. It’s not quite that simple though. So the first question decides what the value of the coins they are playing for are. Huh? Well, suppose you get it right? In that case you’re playing for a million £1 coins. If you decide you can’t answer it and take another question, then you’re playing for a million 50p coins, so £500,000. If you don’t like that, then you can swap, and instead play for 20ps. You can keep swapping all the way down to 1p for £10,000. You can swap any of the questions. Okay, so if you get the first question right you lock in the first 0 of the prize pot, the second for the second zero and so on. Get one wrong, and you lose a zero. So, taking the show that I watched, they swapped out 2 questions, so that by the time they got to the last question, they were playing for £200,000. They got it wrong, so lost a zero, which meant that they walked away with £20,000. Still a very nice wedge for an evening’s work.

There is a little more to it. After a couple of questions 1 member of the team had to go sit out the rest of the show, and then a few questions later a second team member had to do the same.

Basically, that’s it. Now, as I said, this is lots of things I dislike in a game show. I’m afraid that I can be very misanthropic, and I get worse as I get older. The family on the show I watched were, frankly very nice, very bubbly, the sort of people I can imagine would be very easy to be friends with. But . . . I didn’t really care about them. Sorry, but when it comes to a quiz game, that’s just not why I buy the ticket in the first place. Yet with so few questions – and remember that even if the team swapped out all of their questions once you’d only get 13 questions in a show – a lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by the host’s interaction with the team. I like Dara O’Briain very much, but he’s hamstrung on this show. He can poke some gentle fun but he really can’t start ridiculing the team playing. Especially after the Dad revealed that he is a stroke survivor. 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really think that much of the questions either. Yeah, you’d expect a preponderance of entertainment and sport on a prime-time show, fair enough, but I don’t really like multiple choice questions.

And for me this is the real problem with the show. Even if you do like the question format, there are nothing like enough of them to keep interest in a show which is about 45 minutes in length even without the advertising breaks. Maybe you like the conversation and interplay between host and team. I don’t, it’s not my sort of thing, but even with an audience of people who are quite receptive to it, I think the show is taking a hell of a gamble. After all, not all of the teams are going to be interesting enough for you, it stands to reason. Well, are you going to sit around watching when a particular team doesn’t appeal to you, and the conversation falls flat? Maybe some people would, but I’d imagine that a significant amount of your audience wouldn’t.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe a loyal audience will enjoy and stick with this show. But I’d be surprised. The talented Dara is wasted in my opinion, there are too few questions and they’re not all that interesting if truth be told. The only notable thing about the show is the massive prize, and the fact that you can fall quite a long way short of it, and still come away with a very sizeable chunk of cash. And that’s not enough. Sorry, but it’s a no from me. 

New Show - The 1 Percent Club

Saturday evening saw the debut of ITV’s new quiz show, “The 1 Percent Club”. In the interests of the blog, I watched the show on the ITV player this morning. I’ll be honest, it didn’t take me long to come to a couple of conclusions. Before a question was asked, we saw host Lee Mack encouraging one of the 100 contestants to tell us that she thought she was a good singer, but everyone else didn’t, then to sing to prove it. I’ll be honest, that’s the sort of thing which really brings out my misanthropic qualities. – Not going to like this – thought I.Then as the mechanics of the show became apparent, I realised that we were only going to get 15 questions in a whole 45 minute show. Definitely not going to like this – thought I.

This might be an appropriate moment to look at the mechanics of the game. 100 people face a range of questions that have been asked to a large number of people throughout the country. The first question will have been answered correctly by 90% of the people asked, the second 80, the third 70 and so on. After the 50% question, it goes down in fives rather than tens. At some point the players remaining were given one pass, worth £1000, and if they hadn’t used it by a certain point they could leave the show, taking the £1000 with them. Okay. So, when you get a question wrong, then you’re out, unless you play your pass. For every player who is out, £1000 is added to the prize pot. If you manage to last until the 5% question and you get it right, hey, congratulations. However many of you get through can choose to take an equal share of £10,000.If by any chance you’ve got this far without using your pass, then that £1000 goes into your back pocket whatever happens. However you can ignore the £10,000 and attempt the 1 question. If you do, and you get it right, you share whatever is in the prize pot, which is going to be close to 100 grand. Get that wrong though, and it’s all over and you leave with nowt – unless you’ve got the 1 grand for not using your pass.

That’s the mechanics. And maybe if you haven’t seen the show you’ll be thinking, OK, I’ve heard worse. But what that summary of the mechanics doesn’t do is show you the importance of Lee Mack to the show. And make no bones about it, he is very important. I’m not going to make nasty or sarcastic comments about him as a performer. Lee Mack is a highly experienced and successful comedian, and a proven panel game performer. I dare say how much you’ll enjoy the show depends heavily on how much you like Lee Mack. Mind you, I like Lee Mack, but I can’t say that I particularly liked this show.

Why not? Well, I’ve already mentioned its glacial slowness as a quiz. 15 questions in a 45 minute show works out at one question every three minutes. Which might leave you to ask, what the hell does it do for the rest of the time? Well, Lee Mack interacts with the contestants and, er, that’s about it. Now, as I said, I’m not going to criticise Lee Mack – he does his bit very well. It’s easy enough to take the pee out of someone who has just given a wrong answer and humiliate them, and not so easy to extract some humour from the situation without ridiculing and belittling them – and Lee Mack manages to do this, fair play. But at the end of the day, I’m just not interested in this. I’m sorry, but I just don’t care about any of the contestants’ lives off of my screen. I’m not that bothered about them on the screen either, at least, not until the last question anyway.

What about the questions, then? Well, they’re not straight general knowledge, but each requires some logic and some working out. Now, I noticed that the QuizQuizQuiz organisation are involved in setting the questions, and they certainly have a great quiz background and know what they’re doing. But the format of the show means, I’m afraid, that many of the questions, until you really get into the business end, seem blindingly obvious. Which kind of puts this show into a genre I like to think of as ‘Ooh, aren’t you thick?!” This is most noticeable in the earlier rounds, where we saw the spotlight focus on the poor lady who failed to pick out a photograph of a polar bear by a palm tree as the odd one out. I’ve no doubt that she is a perfectly normal person of at least average intelligence, but when you’re taking part in a telly quiz it can do strange things to you.

As I said, I know that QuizQuizQuiz are a very reputable organisation, so if the show says that these questions have been asked to a significant number of people, and this percentage got them right, while that percentage got them wrong, then it’s true. But I have to say that even after 27 years as a question master in the club, and 35 years of teaching, I still found it surprising just how many people seemed to struggle on some of these questions. Case in point. The 1 question, the ‘answer this and you get a share in over 90 grand’ question was this. Which two letters come next in this sequence T N E C R E P E ? Bear in mind the name of the show. Maybe you’d be as surprised as I was when I tell you that only one of three contestants, each of whom had turned down a share in £10,000, got it right. OK, adrenaline and greed are a potent mixture – I threw away £32,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire once because of it – and they make you do strange things. But when you get right down to it, there’s an awful lot of stuff I had to sit through to get to the point in the show where this happened.

A show based on working logically to work out answers to puzzle questions is not intrinsically a bad idea. Theoretically it might be possible to make a quiz game based on this type of questioning which could work well for a wide raging audience at prime time. In my opinion, and by all means feel free to disagree, “The 1 Percent Club’ isn’t it. Which is a bit of a shame, since there is the germ of a halfway decent quiz game here. If you cut out much of the chat and the faffing about it might make a quite diverting daytime show. Of course this is not feasible bearing in mind that you have 100 contestants to deal with. Which is why you put it on prime time, and give it a big name host to justify the time slot, throw it at the wall and hope that most of it sticks. And maybe you will find that works for you. For me, not so much.

New Show- Bridge of Lies

 It isn’t really that difficult to make a decent, quite watchable quiz game show. However, making a good quiz game show, well, that’s a different story. I’m delighted to say that, in BBC1’s new “Bridge of Lies”, I think that they’ve done just that.

I saw the contestant calls for this one on the Contestant Hub on Facebook, but never thought about applying myself. So I did know a tiny bit about it before I watched it for the first time. Like many good quiz games show, the mechanics of “Bridge of Lies”are relatively simple. Like ITV’s Tenable, this is a non-adversarial show, whereby a team competes to try to win cash, and then earn the right to take it away with them. In order to do this they have to cross a giant board. The board is filled with circles. The aim of the game is to cross the circles, building up a bridge of them across to the other end. So our host, Ross Kemp, announces a category. The team consists of  people, one of whom they must nominate to try to cross the board. Then Ross explains the specifics of the round. So, for example, the general category might be Harry Potter, while the specific requirement is to find the names of actors who have appeared in at least one of the Harry Potter films. The two nearest circles to the bottom of the board light up with actors names. At least 1 will be true, the other might be true or might be a lie. The contestant must step onto a true circle. This then reveals more circles, and basically, the idea is to keep stepping on true circles. Once the contestant has stepped on 3 lies in the game, then he or she is out. Making things a little harder is the fact that a contestant only has five minutes in which to cross the board.

The team does have one lifeline. If they think one of the first three of them is not going to cross the board successfully, they can push their panic button. This means that team member goes into the final, with the amount of money they have won at that point the button is pushed. The team member doesn’t know if the button has been pushed until they complete their bridge, or until they step on their third lie.

Those who complete their bridge go on to play in the final. This time the board consist of lines of circles with ‘facts’ – only one of which is correct. The first team member steps forward. If they step on the only true fact, they play on to the next line. The moment they step on a wrong’un, they’re out and the next player takes over. Run out of players and you leave with nothing, and I’m afraid that’s what has happened on every show I’ve seen so far.

One of the strengths of Bridge of Lies is hat the game play and questions are strong enough that you don’t need the host to over-egg the pudding. Ross Kemp gets it pretty much spot on, I’d say. I did worry that we were going to get another cockney-geezer-fest along the lines of Danny Dyer’s The Wawl, but no. And the choices aren’t all easy either. There’s certainly enough to keep you going if you like playing along at home, which is one of my two main reasons for watching a TV quiz game. (The other, I’m sorry to admit, is shouting “NO! Not that one, you numpty!”) In fact the only real criticism I have of the game is that although the title is a nice pun on the film “Bridge of Spies”, and on Venice's Bridge of Sighs, strictly speaking it’s just plain wrong, since the point of the game is to AVOID the lies, and build a bridge of trues. Build a bridge of lies and you’ll be out in three steps. You’d think someone would have noticed!

Unlimited Win

Look, I have nothing against Ant and Dec. I think that they are very talented presenters. I have never tried to present a TV show myself, but I am pretty certain that it is a very difficult job to do. When you see just how long they have been at the top of the tree, and look at the wide range of very different shows they have presented then it all goes to show, they are very, very good at the job they do. But there’s the rub. Ant and Dec, with their collective metaphorical cupboard bulging with best awards for being the best hosts on the box, are very much ITV’s A Team. So, when I saw that they were presenting ‘Unlimited Win’ my thoughts were – ITV must have high hopes for this if they’re presenting it. Which means it will be big, bold and spectacular, and trying to appeal to a mass, lowest common denominator audience, which really isn’t my cup of tea at all.

It’s not as bad as I feared. The gimmick behind the show is that there is no final jackpot. Players can keep building the jackpot, well into the tens of millions. If they’re good enough. Of course, that just isn’t going to happen in a month of Sundays. Or Saturdays.

It does seem to me that all of ITV’s eggs are in the basket marked ‘potential prize beyond the dreams of avarice’. Don’t knock it. You could argue that this was what made “Millionaire” an overnight smash, all those years ago. But Millionaire had other things going for it, not the least of which was the fact that if you rang in and answered a question correctly, you could soon be on the show yourself. There was also the lifelines too, which added interest. But that was then. This is now.

The game play is, to be honest, pretty simple. It’s one of those shows where contestants not playing against each other. A pair comes on – they may be friends, or sisters, or whatever. Our hosts ask them a timed set of questions to determine how many lives they start with. Okay. Then they are asked the first question. These always have a numerical answer If they get the answer spot on they win the first amount of cash - £2500 I think. If their answer is less than the correct answer, then they can play on but they lose lives, to the tune of the number out they are. So if the answer is 10 and you answer 7, you lose three lives. Once the lives run out, it’s game over. If the answer they give is greater than the correct answer, then they also leave with nothing. Once they are past the first amount of money, they start to play for the second. It really is that simple.

On the show I watched, the first question is a gimme – for example, how many words are in the version of Humpty Dumpty in the show I watched. Yeah, you probably don’t know it – I didn’t, but you can work it out. Just count them up, and that’s what the contestants did. After that, though, it gets harder. I’m trying to remember some of them, but they weren’t the sort of thing you are going to necessarily know. For example, how many years is it since Take That had their first hit single. Early 90s, yes, but oh, so easy to go over. Which means you deliberately underestimate in the hope of getting one you can answer spot on. And it’s on this level that the show works, and has a level of interest.

I watched it with my oldest daughter. The first couple on our show were friends, I think, and with a large total in the bank, instead of cashing in they locked in an answer with only a very small number of lives left. They lost and left with nowt. My daughter shouted at the telly how stup0id they were to do so, totally ignoring the fact that I threw away £15,000 on Millionaire once. The lure of all that cash does strange things to you. Which is, I suppose, another appeal.

Will it catch on. Look, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. We’ve done the mind-bogglingly awesome amounts of cash thing before. And with “Millionaire” although it took years for anyone to win a million, it always looked possible. Because the questions, while you might not know the answers, were fair GK questions. Just look at the questions that Judith had to answer for a million and you’ll see what I mean. With the game mechanics of this show, I can’t see anyone winning a truly awesome amount of cash. But then, what do I know? Not enough to win more than £1000 on Millionaire, that’s for pretty damn sure.

Quizness

I finally watched my first edition of “Quizness” last night, having recorded the celebrity edition from the night before. Granted, this was a celebrity edition, and I will take this into consideration in this review, but I think it was certainly enough to give me a flavour of the show.

The idea behind the quiz is that it’s not a general knowledge quiz. Or rather, that it IS a general knowledge quiz, but it’s more than a general knowledge quiz, as it is also a test of mental agility. This became obvious from the first round onwards.

I don’t know if they play different rounds in different shows a la ‘House of Games’ – and yes, I shall be returning to this particular comparison –but I think that the rounds stay the same in the same order each show. On the show I watched the slebs started off with a game called Subbly Jubbly. This was a seemingly straightforward buzzer round with a twist. 3 letters were selected by the computer, and assigned a word which began with each – for example – sickie for s, picky for p and tricky for t. Any word beginning with any of these letters would have to be replaced by the appropriate word, so for example – if the question was ‘Which Western film was based on the Japanese film “The Seven Samurai”’ the answer would be ‘The Magnificent Sickie”. You get the point. The round was replayed as round five, Doubly Jubbly, with three different words, and double points for some of the answers. It was also replayed as the final round, but we’ll come to that in a while.

Round 2 was called Brain Chain. A straightforward round of GK, but with the twist that the contestant had to say the answers to all the previous questions – so you might get a chain like –‘ Adverts – according to an old TV advert, which deodorant ‘won’t let you down’?’ – SURE – which is the 18^th letter of the alphabet – SURE R – She sells seashells on the sea what? – SURE – R – SHORE – On a football pools coupon what could be score or no score? -SURE R SHORE DRAWERS (show us your drawers). Yes, there’s a vein of schoolboy humour which runs throughout the show like the words running through a little stick of Blackpool rock.

I will admit that I haven’t seen a round like the third, Risky Quizness, before. Again, it’s like a straight buzzer round, but there’s a twist. Most of the answers are the same. But some of them aren’t. So for example, the first four answers might all be ‘love’, and then the fifth ‘hate’.

The last round before the first elimination was called Double Trouble. Here some real mental agility was called for. Now, what happens here is a little complicated to explain. The contestants see three questions. Above each one is an answer. The answers do not actually relate to the question. So let us say that the question is ‘Where was Donald Trump born?’. The contestants have to find the correct answer – in this case New York. Then they have to read the question below the answer – let us say it’s ‘In the Lord of the Rings, where does Sauron live?’. So, then the contestant has to buzz in and say that Donald Trump was born in the Land of Mordor. It’s after this round that the lowest scoring contestant is eliminated.

I’ve already explained that Doubly Jubbly is round five. Round six was Pundreds and Thousands. As the name suggests, this is a round of questions whose answers are rather groan inducing puns. For example ‘which circus performer exercises bleached hawsers?’ – answer – a Whiterope walker. Lowest scoring contestant after this round is eliminated.

The round which sorted out who would play for the cash was called Dental Mexterity. This is a round in which ordinary questions had to be answered in Spoonerisms – so for example ‘Which TV show was named after the flag shown by a ship which is ready to leave port?’ would have to be answered with ‘Poo Bleater’. You get the point. The celebrity with the most points went through to the final, and the other didn’t.

So, I did say that the final round is Super Subbly Jubbly. All six words from the previous jubbly rounds are in play, together with three more to make 9 in total. The winning sleb, then, had to answer 7 questions correctly, substituting words where necessary. They didn’t have to be consecutive correct answers, but when the time was up, that was it. Essentially it’s 8 quickfire rounds for your money, each of which has a significant mental agility challenge as well as a general knowledge challenge.

Even if you haven’t yet seen ‘Quizness’ for yourself, you might well, having read the above, be able to see why I drew the comparison with ‘House of Games’ earlier. There’s the inherent silliness of the twists in many of the rounds – that’s not a criticism, by the way. Yet a lot of what is being asked isn’t silly at all. The level of questions may not be of Mastermind or University Challenge level, but it’s solidly mid-level, and noticeably higher than on ‘Tipping Point’ for the sake of argument. The amount of mental agility required is not of the level of ‘Only Connect’ for example, but it certainly demands as much as ‘House of Games’.

Of course, ‘House of Games’ has a trump card in the shape of the host, the great Richard Osman. ‘Quizness’ has Tom Allen. Now, I first became aware of Tom Allen through ‘The Great British Bakeoff – An Extra Slice’ and I wasn’t impressed. However, I was a lot more impressed when he took over ‘The Apprentice – You’re Fired’. Maybe this is because the former is essentially a Jo Brand vehicle, and Tom is left with the scraps – making waspish comments to the audience about the bakes they’ve brought in, and a monologue of a couple of minutes. Whereas in the latter he’s in charge and can impose his own style on proceedings. I felt he did a good job on ‘Quizness’ too, where his delivery and style were a pretty good fit for the fast and furious nature of the rounds.

Granted, this was a celebrity version of the show which I’m sure served to highlight the similarities with ‘House of Games’. This meant that the contestants were all experienced and confident telly performers which made for exactly the kind of atmosphere you’d want in a show which is essentially an entertainment vehicle. Unlike ‘House of Games’ though the series which went out earlier in 2021 was for members of the public. I’d want to see how well this worked, and what sort of atmosphere was created in the majority of the shows.

Is it coming back in 2022? I don’t know. I rather hope so. There’s plenty of room in the schedules for this kind of show. If we think back to a previous BBC teatime favourite ‘Eggheads’ was the first real ‘pro-am’ quiz show and became very popular and successful with it. ‘The Chase’ also took the idea of quiz pros v. amateurs, and did something different with it, becoming extremely popular and successful in its own right in the process. ‘House of Games’ took a basic quiz format and turned the games into something different and very entertaining. I think ‘Quizness’ does the same in a different way. It’s a breath of fresh air, and I hope it gets a chance again.

"Moneyball"

I will admit the truth. Having reviewed “Moneybags” and “Sitting on a Fortune” and earlier in the week, “The Tournament”  I couldn’t help wondering if there are any other quiz games that have started over the last couple of weeks. This is why I came to watch “Moneyball” on the ITV Player a little while ago. So earlier on Saturday evening we had Gary Lineker presenting “Sitting on a Fortune”. Now we’re going to have a look at  “Moneyball” presented by Ian Wright. What's next – “Pets Win Prizes” presented by Alan Shearer and Wayne Rooney’s “Supermarket Sweep”?

“Moneyball” faces a difficult task. If we take last night, it was up against the first hour of BBC’s powerhouse “Strictly Come Dancing”. Now, you might like Strictly Come Dancing, you might not like it. But it can pull in in audiences of some 10 million viewers, and there’s precious few shows that can do that in this day and age.  For what it’s worth I rather like Strictly, although that’s not really germane to he issue.

ITV have a problem. For the best part of 20 years ITV’s Autumn Saturday night schedule was built around music based reality/talent shows, from 2001’s Pop Stars, through Pop Idol, and then the different versions of the X Factor, which seem finally to have died the death a year or two ago. An ITV gameshow on an Autumn Saturday evening therefore always either served as an hors d’oeuvres, a lead in to the X Factor, or tried to hang onto as much of the X Factor audience as possible after the show.  At the moment, though, ITV seem to be between ideas. Something similar happened at the turn of the Milennium. Gladiators, the archetypal 1990s Autumn Saturday evening show came to its end, after several tweaks, and outstaying its welcome by at least a couple of years. It was another couple of years before Pop Stars came along.

So, presumably still looking for their next big thing, what does an ITV Autumn Saturday evening actually look like at the moment? Well, starting at 5pm yesterday’s schedule consisted of, “Sitting on a Fortune”, a quiz game show, then the ITV news, then“Moneyball”, a quiz game show, then a Catchphrase Celebrity Special , a game show. That’s 4 and a half consecutive hours of quiz/gameshows with just the news break after the first hour. And the problem with this is, I would argue, that all 3 of these shows are fine for the lead in to a big entertainment show, but none of them are strong enough to have a schedule built around them. This is certainly true of Moneyball in my opinion.

Let’s talk about the mechanics of the show, then. This is one of those shows in which a contestant comes on, and it’s not about beating other contestants, just about winning as much money as possible. In order to do this the contestants work their way through a series of questions. The questions themselves are the best thing about the show. So the contestant is given three things – for example – King Candy – Scar and Lord Farquaad – and then has to work out which one was in The Lion King, which one in Shrek and which one in Wreck-It-Ralph. Then the moneyball equipment is used to work out how much the correct answer is work. The moneyball of the title runs up and down a rather flattened and lengthened  U shaped piece of track. The contestant pushes a button – similar to the one used in Tipping Point – to determine how high up the track the ball will be released. The board above the bottom of the track is lit up in sections. Wherever the ball stops running determines the fate of the contestant. If you get the question wrong, then you have to play the ball to determine if you continue playing or if you leave with nowt. After a successful roll of the bal following a correct answer, then the contestant can either take another question, or play the moneyball to take the cash. If the ball lands in one of the right sections, you get to take the money and another contestant starts the game again.

Coming back to my original point, it is pretty ironic that two consecutive new ITV quiz games should both be presented by former England international star strikers, But as with Gary Lineker, Ian Wright has years of TV presenting under his belt, but unlike Gary Lineker he’s even presented Saturday evening Gameshows before – Friends Like These being one from a few years ago. So he’s a perfectly safe pair of hands. And “Moneyball” is a perfectly inoffensive little quiz game. Yes, I did say little. Because although the show at several times trumpets the potential jackpot of £100,000, the fact is that you’re unlikely to see any contender get close to £100,000. With the randomising factor of the ball, you’d have to be reckless in the extreme to pass up £20,000 to keep going, for example. Also, the nature of the show whereby there’s no building towards a Final, and there’s no endgame, means that it feels rather too long at an hour. If it was a 45 minute show leading into, well, into a Saturday evening spectacular like Strictly, I think it would work very well. But in a straight fist fight against Strictly, Moneyball has 2 chances - slim chance and no chance. And slim chance just left town.

"Sitting on a Fortune" and "Moneybags"

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. 1^st 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.

New Daytime Quiz Show - The Tournament

Look, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m in the habit of sitting on my backside watching BBC daytime quiz shows on a Wednesday afternoon during term time. The fact is, though, that Covid hasn’t left me with a great deal of other options for the next few days.

That’s how I came to be watching The Tournament this afternoon. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know anything about it until it actually came on. So, what can we say. Well, it’s a daytime quiz show, so there’s no point judging it against my favourite quizzes like Mastermind, University Challenge and Only Connect. That’s not to do down daytime quizzes. There’s an awful lot of care and skill that needs to go into even bringing a daytime quiz show to the screen at all, let alone a show capable of entertaining its viewers, or at the very least sustaining audience interest for 45 minutes. If we think of the twin teatime behemoths of the genre, Pointless and The Chase, they’ve both sustained high audiences and become required viewing for large swathes of the population over more than a decade. How many other daytime/teatime shows have come and gone in that time? Haven’t counted, but I bet the number is larger than you think.

I’m not going to start with my first impressions of The Tournament, but rather with a look at its game mechanics. 8 contenders face a first round in which host Alex Scott asks 8 questions, with 4 multiple choice answers. Players cannot lock in their answer until all four answers have been read out. At the end of the round, the players are ranked according to the number of questions they answered correctly, and then how quickly they locked in their answers. Each player is then assigned a pot of money, with the number1 player getting most, and the number 8 player getting least.

The 8 players then take part in a set of 4 head to head matches. So player 1 gets to choose which player they take on, and also which category of questions they both answer. The incentive to take on a higher ranked player is that the winners adds the loser’s money to their own. The incentive to take the lower player on is that if you win in under the 2 minute time limit, then you get a large cash bonus. Game play is basically a buzzer quiz. Both contenders face each other on a light bridge made of steps, not a million miles away from the sort of thing you see on The Chase. Buzz in and get the question right and you take away an opponent's step and add one to your own – until you’re full anyway. Once you’ve knocked away all of your opponent’s steps you’ve won. Game play automatically stops after 2 mins – the one with the most steps still intact wins. Then the next best player picks opponent and category, and this repeats until 4 of the 8 have been eliminated.

This is also repeated in the next round, with two head to heads. This time the player with the most cash makes the choices. Finally, the last two contenders standing face each other, this time on General Knowledge. If the winner knocks out the loser within 2 minutes, they get the chance to play a gold round. Don’t know how that works because it didn’t happen in today’s show. If they don’t, then they walk away with the cash amount they took into the final.

If you’re as long in the tooth as I am, then the first time you watch The Tournament you may well find yourself feeling a little déjà vu, as there’s bits of The Tournament which are at least slightly reminiscent of other shows. But then, quizzes are that sort of genre, and I don’t really mind that. I enjoyed the head to heads, even if they were rather slated towards popular culture and entertainment. That often goes with the territory in daytime quizzes. I didn’t mind Alex Scott in the host’s role either. She’s still a relative newbie to TV presentation, and she’s not a comedian so she’s not going to have the same style as Zander and Richard Osman for example. But she spoke clearly, projected some warmth, and didn’t get in the way, which is pretty much what I want from a host.

So I enjoyed it? Pretty much. Nothing much wrong with it? Well. . . Okay, this is not a HUGE thing, but the show does have a problem with the liberal slices of cheese it serves up at the start. At the start, each of the contestants has to issue their own ‘battle cry’ that is introduce themselves and make a boast about what they are going to do to the opposition. I don’t know how embarrassed the contestants were at having to issue these obviously scripted offerings, but I was cringing for them. There was more wood in their delivery than an Oak Furnitureland advert. Unless your contestants are all ringers and members of Equity, don't script things for them to say, for heaven's sake. Then to add insult to injury, Alex would then remind them of what they'd been told to say during the show. “Well Sue,” she said at one point, “Yesterday you said you were going to boss the rest of them.” Or words to that effect, Sue being a businesswoman. Sadly Sue did not reply, “Well I had to bloody read that out or you wouldn’t have let me on the show.” It’s just something that really grates on me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the kind of show that halts the action to ask the contender about their prize wining collection of egg cosies knitted from their own nostril hair either. But this aspect of the show is just so false that it not only adds nothing to the show, it takes away from it. Also that end game needs work. Not having the gold round felt like an anti climax to me, and I'd definitely want to tweak this.

So, for all that, will it catch on? For me the coin is in the air on this one. It might well find an audience. However my big concern is that as much as I like the 2 minute head to head format, 7 of them in succession is really a bit repetitive. If I were asked to make suggestions to make the show more viewer friendly, first change would be to get rid of the scripted introductions, and the second would be at least a slight change of game play for the second round, and then again for the final. If we look at the Chase, for example, there are three clearly different types of round in the show. Even in Pointless, while the point of the game doesn’t change they very cleverly vary the types of question to provide variety in any single show.

Well, if the producers of the show want the benefit of my suggestions, you know where to find me.