New Show: 007: Road to a Million

Did you know that Amazon owns MGM? I didn’t. Still, it also means that they own the James Bond franchise. Which brings me to 007: Road to a Million.

The USP, as I see it, in this show is putting pairs of everyday mops (members of the public) into a location from the movies and giving them Bond-esque challenges to achieve and general knowledge questions to answer.

Which is a tough ask for a production company to achieve. If we take the challenges, you can’t surely ask contestants to do anything that puts their lives at serious risk, and you don’t have all the special effects wizardry of the movies to use. So you are in danger of ending up with challenges which make the viewer think – what has this got to do with James Bond? Or even the Milk Tray man for that matter.

However, if you leave the Bond thing to one side until you get into the show, then there is certainly a level of challenge here. While it never quite matches the physicality of SAS: Who Dares Wins, or the gross out revulsion of some of the challenges on ‘I’m A Sleb Get Me Out of Here’, jumping from a helicopter, and estimating the weight of a tarantula (which involved picking it up) do make me glad to be sitting on the Clark sofa and not taking part.

I mean, if you do actually like taking on these kind of challenges, then I guess it’s an absolute blast, with visits to the Highlands of Scotland, Venice and Brazil amongst others thrown into the bargain.

But what about the questions, Dave? Well, like the first challenges, the first questions each pair get asked aren’t that challenging. Each question has three possible answers, and each is for serious, life changing amounts of money. But a scan among the credits reveals the name of Mr. David Bodycombe, and the questions get more and more difficult, and as a result, more and more interesting. I’m glad to say though that they did pretty much reward a certain amount of logical thinking. If one answer seemed more likely than the others it usually was because it was the correct answer.

I think that it helped me being able to binge watch several episodes one after another on Prime. Because I do think that certainly the first episode or two ask quite a lot of the viewer. There’s minimal explanation of the game play or what the game is really about. If you stick with the show you realise that it’s not a problem because it’s not that difficult to work out. IF you stick with it. Because I found the first episode to be a little disjointed in the way that it would suddenly jump from one contesting pair to another.

Another confusing thing is exactly what Brian Cox is doing. Now, I don’t blame Brian Cox for this. Dundee’s finest is a fantastic actor who always brings great value to anything in which he appears. But, I’m just not sure why he is in this. He plays a shadowy figure, who watches the contestants in a studio and whose voice asks the questions, when the contestants find them. Is he Blofeld? Is he M? It’s not clear, and keeping him apart from the contestants is maybe a bit of an own goal. Think what he would be like interacting with them like the various hosts of the different versions of The Traitors.

I’ve said before that shows that fall between two stools often just fall. As a viewer, it seems to me that you get more time devoted to the action adventure challenges than to the questions, yet it’s the questions that bring the contestants the wedge. But it has something. Hey, I like shows like SAS Who Dares Wins, Survivor and The Traitors so this always had a decent chance of appealing to me. But I’m really watching it as a show of this genre, and not as a quiz. I’d advise you to do the same.

Alan Carr's Picture Slam

Right, I have a problem with this show. Can you guess what it is yet? That’s right. It’s about pictures. That’s not the whole problem. Many quizzes have picture rounds, even University Challenge. Only Connect makes copious and clever use of pictures. The problem with Alan Carr’s Picture Slam is that it’s only about pictures. Yes, Dave – did you not work that out from the title? Well, yes, I did, and only watched it I the interests of writing about it. But I mention all this faff just so I can say that this quiz show is based on the pub quiz round that I like the least – the picture round.

No, sorry, not finished yet. I guess that my issue with picture rounds is that I’m not very good at them. Now, if I was of a mind, I could pick on another weaker area of mine – let’s call this purely hypothetical round food and drink – and work on it, learn stuff, and make myself less weak. In fact I once did with food and drink, but let that go for a minute. Now a picture round doesn’t allow you that luxury. Quizzes call for recall, and sometimes give you the opportunity to work out an answer by using what you do know to help you work out what you don’t know. Picture rounds don’t. They are about recognition, and it pains me to say it but this is a skill I have very little of. And it wouldn’t make a difference how much I worked on it, I still would have difficulty telling my Ryan Goslings from my Ryan Reynolds and my young blond actress from any other young blond actress.

So how well does Alan Carr’s Picture Slam do something that I don’t really like? Well, look, it’s basically just about recognising pictures, right? The pictures are linked by category, so we have the flag of Chile, a bottle of Sunny Delight and various other things being connected by types of weather. You see how it works. The show moves quite quickly, which is in its favour. But then it does something a bit odd. The competition is between teams of two. However in one round the individuals within the teams face off against individuals from another team. One of them is shown the pictures and has to name them. Then the opposing player is shown exactly the same pictures. Fair on the players, yes, but not very fair on the poor viewers.

Alan Carr? Look, he’s a funny guy, but on a show like this it’s difficult to let that come out naturally, and he was a bit shouty for my liking. But then this isn’t a show for me anyway, so that doesn’t really matter. It does what it does pretty well, but . . . you know what I’m going to say, I do’t like what it does.  

New Quiz Show: The Finish Line (BBC1 Weekdays)

Yes, there’s a new daytime TV quiz on the block, dearly beloved, ”The Finish Line” that I caught for the first time yesterday. Now I do always try to be fair to new quiz shows, so I think that it is important to judge it for what it is, namely, a daytime TV quiz, airing on BBC1 weekdays at 4:30pm. This is never going to be a high-level quiz that only those with a serious GK pedigree can play along with at home, let alone win. No, this is placed within a relatively crowded market, the best examples of which are (in my opinion and in no particular order) Pointless, Bridge of Lies, The Chase, Tenable and Impossible. Quizzes which, while aimed at the average family at home still offer something for the real quizzers to get their teeth into.

I first knew that this was coming when co-host Sarah Greene appeared on Claudia Winkleman’s Radio 2 show last Saturday to plug it. As all hosts of brand new quiz shows are expected to do she was selling ‘The Finish Line’ as something totally new in the field. – Heard that before – thought I. She was also making a virtue of the fact that a lot of the time when someone comes into the show feeling very confident because they have had a lot of success in pub quizzes over the years, most of the time these are not the people who win. I wasn’t sure that this would be a point in the show’s favour if I’m totally honest.

Well, I caught up with the 2^nd show yesterday. It’s fronted by Roman Kemp, which gives us a hosting team of young – mature – male – female. And he does perfectly well for the kind of show that it is and the timeslot that it occupies. I have to say that for an old Blue Peter watcher such as myself it was nice to see Sarah Greene, although there is an argument that she is a little underused in the PROF seat. (That’s the acronym for Pointless Richard Osman Friend – I just invented it. Good eh? No charge if you want to use it yourself, but a credit would be nice.)

So - what's the big idea of the show? What it says on the tin. Answer enough questions to get across the finish line. Ah, but how do you do that? Well, from what I saw , it seems to work like this. There are five contestants in the show. After the start, Roman introduces the first, has some inconsequential chat (yawn yawn- look, you know from previous reviews that I’m a misanthrope and really don’t care for this sort of thing.) then they get asked a set of quick fire questions of a variety of types, some of which are identificational. They must keep going until they have answered five correctly. Sarah then reveals how quickly they did so.

Now, the speed is important since it determines which lane each of the contestants will occupy on the track. I have to be honest, I was reminded just a little bit of the short lived Ejector Seat from years back. The contestants don’t have chairs, though, but moving podiums. So the contestant who answered five questions in the quickest time is in lane 1. When the track round starts, their podium starts moving towards the finish line. They are given a question and if they answer correctly their podium keeps moving. If they answer wrongly their podium stops. Meanwhile the podium in Lane 2 has started moving. If the contestant in lane 2 answers their question correctly they keep moving. If not, they stop. Whatever happens contestant three is now moving. . . look, you get the point. If your podium is first, second, third or fourth across the finish line, happy days. If it’s fifth, sorry but you leave with nothing. Then we come back off the track for another round to determine the lane order for the next track round.

And so it goes on, last across the line goes out. When we get down to two, the first across the line goes through to the final to play for the money, and the other one doesn’t. In the final, the contestant is chased down the rack by advancing arrows. Keep answering correctly and it’s a piece of cake. Start getting stopped by wrong answers and you’ll get caught by the arrows and leave with nowt. The prize? A very respectable five grand.

That’s the show. What’s the verdict, though? Well, there’s nothing in it that made me cringe. If you remember the recent ‘The Tournament’, there was a show that I rather liked, but I found that the battle cries at the start were toe-curlingly embarrassing. There’s nothing like that in “The Finish Line”. That’s good. Both hosts were professional, warm and avoided talking too much. That’s good. The questions? Well, you certainly had a real mix – nothing particularly difficult, but then it’s not that kind of show. As you might expect, being as it’s a daytime show there was just a wee bit too much current entertainment, but that’s just my opinion as a grumpy old git now galloping towards 60.

Unlike a lot of new shows, it seems to me that the gameplay itself has been pretty well worked out. I can’t off the top of my head suggest any tweaks. However, I do think that there is a fundamental issue with the show. This is it. I think that a lot of quiz shows of this sort in this time slot live or die on how much fun they are for viewers to play along with at home. Ok. Now as I said a minute ago, I’m getting on a bit. I’ve no doubt that my recall isn’t quite as quick as it once was, but it’s still pretty fast. And I’m afraid that there were times when I found I wasn’t quite keeping up with one or two of the contestants. Only for parts of a round here and there, but nonetheless it’s true. And I really like quickfire questions. I like getting through so many questions quickly. But even I found it frustrating at times. How well the average viewer can cope, I just don’t know. Now, that’s a tribute to how well the contestants did, but whether that will cut any ice with the casual viewer I just don’t know.

So I find myself sitting on the fence a little. I just don’t know whether this is going to appeal to enough viewers to build an audience that will bring it more than the BBC obligatory couple of series. Time will tell.

New Show - Cheat - (Netflix)

I don’t think that I’ve ever watched a quiz show on Netflix before. I don’t know if Netflix have made a quiz show before. Earlier today I watched an edition of “Cheat”, their new quiz presented by Danny Dyer and Ellie Taylor. I think it’s important to make the point that it is a Netflix show, because that brings certain expectations with it. Let’s be honest, it would be unfair to expect that they are going to make a highbrow, serious quiz show. No, this is entertainment, and it's a game. So I’ll try to judge it as such.

The show works like this. We start with four contestants. They are asked questions in turn, to which they have to give a correct answer. If they don’t know the answer they can push the red button in front of them, cunningly concealed so that the other contestants can’t see them do it. This reveals the correct answer to them. Correct answers add money to the prize fund. However the other contestants can each call out the others for cheating. Got that? Okay. After each has been asked four questions, money is removed for each time a contestant cheated. The complicating factor is that whichever of the four contestants has the best accuracy rate for calling out others automatically goes through to the next round. They can also eliminate another player. If the player cheated, let’s say, three times, then money for each of those three cheats is returned to the prize fund.

The game continues with three players. The second round is much like the first. Four more questions face each contestant. However this time, after the other contestants have either buzzed in to accuse, or not, then it is instantly revealed whether the contestant cheated or not. At the end of the round, then, the viewer has a pretty good idea about who will have been the most accurate cheat spotter. And as before, the most accurate goes through to the next round, the final, and can eliminate either of the other two contestants. Essentially this boils down to a choice between eliminating the biggest cheat and bumping up the prize fund, or eliminating the stronger player and not putting so much back into the prize pot.

For the final then, the gameplay is essentially sudden death. The contestants face questions in turn. If they get the answer wrong, they are out. If they cheat and are challenged correctly, they are out. If they don’t cheat, and are incorrectly challenged, they win. So, basically, it pays to observe the opposition closely so that you have a good idea what your opponent is likely to know. That’s the game, and being on Netflix if you want to watch the next edition straight afterwards, you go for it.

You know, there’s quiz shows I’d like to play in, and there’s quiz shows I like to watch. There’s a lot of shows which are both, but there are also a few that I’d watch, but I wouldn’t want to play in. This isn’t one of those. I wouldn’t like to play in it, and I don’t see myself wanting to watch it again. In any quiz show it is not guaranteed that the person with the best general knowledge will win. That’s fair enough, but in “Cheat” it seems that your level of general knowledge is somewhat incidental. It’s all about how well you can spot other people cheating. And I don’t kid myself that my ability to judge people is anything out of the ordinary. It’s a valid game but it’s not a game that I really want to play.

There’s something I’m not clear about either, and that’s the whole concept of the most accurate cheat spotter. It isn’t explained just what measure they use to determine this. I know that it isn’t just about the number of correct buzzes – in the second round Danny Dyer gleefully tells contestants who’ve made an incorrect accusation ‘you’ve ‘armed yer accuracy rate there, mate’  or words to that effect. But is it simply a case of using the percentage of accusations that you make that are correct? But if it is, then the thing would be that if your first buzz in round two is correct, then just stick. Don’t buzz again and you’ve got a 100 percent accuracy rate. It would just be interesting to know exactly how they work it out, bearing in mind that accuracy in accusations is such a crucial part of the game mechanics.

There’s another thing I find a bit strange about this show. Make no mistake, this is Danny Dyer’s show. I’m not going to say anything critical about Danny Dyer – he is what he is, he knows his own brand and he knows his own appeal. If he’s not your cup of tea then don’t watch the show because you won’t like it. But . . . why have Ellie Taylor on the show as well if all you’re going to ask her to do is read out the questions? She’s a fine presenter in her own right and I’m sorry, but her talents seem almost totally wasted in this. It’s not as if she gets any meaningful opportunity to indulge in any useful presenter & sidekick banter of the kind we’ve seen in a number of shows across the years. I don’t get it.

To use a familiar refrain, I do think that “Cheat” does what it does pretty well. There’s a decent amount of cash to be won, the presentation is fairly slick, and it doesn’t drag. But at the end of the day, I don’t like what it does that much. The questions are too simple to interest me much, and the cheat/no cheat aspect doesn’t interest me. You may feel differently.

New Show - In With A Shout

I’m sure – I hope – that at least one new quiz show will come along in 2023 to be worthy of a LAMMY award. ITV’s new offering – In With A Shout  - fails to live up to its name. By no means is this in with a shout of winning the LAMMY from me.

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to be a little more objective. I watched it today on the ITVX service. I am quite aware that I am not the show’s target audience. I like more serious, thoughtful quizzes. This is a gameshow. Yes, okay, it does count as a quiz, which is the main reason why I’m reviewing it, but it shares more of its values with pure gameshows than pure quiz shows.

How does it work? Well, it’s based on the idea that when people watch quiz shows, or gameshows with quiz questions, they like to shout answers at the telly. At the end of the Hit List, for example, Rochele Humes always signs of with the promise of loads more shouting answers at the telly for the viewers, and she’s right. Well, In With A Shout takes two teams of three members. In the one I watched on ITVX they were two families. The families are faced with 10 television screens. Each shows a category. In turn, each family member picks a category. Then the screen shows examples of things that fall into the category. For every one that they get right they climb the cash ladder, and for every one that they get right they go down a step on the cash ladder. If they reach the top before the time runs out they have to get the next one right which means that they bank all the money from the cash ladder, plus more cash for each correct answer. If time runs out they get the money from whichever step of the ladder they’re on and more cash for each correct answer. Each player adds to their team total. The team with the highest total plays for the money.

In the one I saw, the team captain played one more screen, to decide whether they’d play for half the total banked, or all of the total banked, or a multiple of the total banked. Then the two remaining team members played the final game. To win, they had 60 seconds to identify something on each of the 10 screens. They could pass – so if they didn’t get the animal on the animal screen they could have another animal to identify. However the clock only stops after a correct answer, so the time keeps running down until you get one right. Do all 10 screens, and the money’s yours. Run out of time and you leave with nothing.

Positives. There are some. The game play is pretty simple and easy to follow. I also think that there’s enough in what you see to keep everyone at home going. A lot of the things you see are pretty simple to name, but importantly not all of them are. In every category there were pictures/short films which showed things I would have said were pretty obscure.

Not so positives. Well, in the case of this show I don’t think there’s any great flaws in the game mechanics as such. It does what it does pretty well. The drawback is that I’m not that bothered about what it does. What can I tell you? Well, a lot of the show depends on the family v family dynamic. I’ve come clean about my misanthropy before. For the fact is that I’m really sorry about this, but I’m just not that interested in contestants and contenders. I’m sure that they’re all lovely people. I wish them all well and I honestly hope that they win more money than I ever did and that they enjoy spending it. But it’s not what I’m interested in, sorry.

What about the host? Meh. We all know that Ant and Dec are the biggest beasts in the ITV jungle – well, in the whole of the world of presenting entertainment TV in the UK, but Cheesemeister Joel Dommett has the very bankable success of The Masked Singer behind him. Yes, he’s very good at what he does, but the thing is, I don’t particularly like what he does. I struggle with presenters who find themselves much funnier than I find them, a category into which our Joel fits like a round peg in a round hole.

Nope, not for me, but you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t do badly performing as the lead in to Britain’s Got Talent.

Rise and Fall - not a quiz, but

I think that I should warn you that this post doesn’t actually have a great deal to do with quizzes. Well, come to think of it, it doesn’t really have anything to do with quizzes.

You may recall that a few months ago I reviewed BBC’s The Traitors, a non-quiz reality/game show. It’s the first time I’ve reviewed a show which has nothing whatsoever to do with quizzes. Well, last week on Channel Four another show made by the same production company that gave us The Traitors was trailed across Sunday to Friday evening. It’s called “Rise and Fall” and I thought I’d like to share my views about it with you.

The first thing that struck me in the first minutes of Sunday’s show was that it all takes place in 55 Broadway. I recognised the building immediately. I knew that this building was built as the headquarters for the Underground electric Railways of London group, the predecessors of Transport for London and London Transport. It was completed in 1931. Frank Pick (the Great Frank Pick – trust me, he was) commissioned the building from one of my favourite architects, Charles Holden, designer of many of the finest London Underground stations built in the inter-war years. When it was completed in 1931 it was the tallest office building in London. I didn’t know that TfL had moved out, but they did a few years ago.

Once I got over that revelation, though, I started concentrating on the show. Now, the fact that I’ve watched every episode so far shows that it is not totally lacking in interest. Add to this the fact that 10 o’clock on a school night is too late for me to start watching an hour long show, so I’ve been watching it the next evening. But I can’t say it’s a comfortable watch.

Like “The Traitors” this show divides contestants into two groups. 6 become Rulers, and all of the rest become Grafters. Only Rulers can win the prize pot. Only Grafters can work to put money into the prize pot. Compare this with The Traitors in which both Faithfuls and Traitors worked together to put money into the pot in the challenges. The Rulers go to the Penthouse to live in the lap of luxury, while the Grafters get sent to the cold, dirty squalor of the basement, where they get a basic meal always consisting of tasteless broth, bread and water for breakfast, dinner and tea. The Grafters are given a range of work tasks to achieve which range from the relatively pointless, like blowing up balloons to the frankly distressing and cruel. The Rulers have to set targets of what the Grafters must achieve. So let me summarise the first challenge. The Grafters had to hold cables into electric sockets to complete a circuit for a given amount of time. All the while they were being zapped with electric shocks. The Rulers had to decide how many rounds of this they had to endure. The more rounds they completed, the more money they banked. If they failed in a round, though,  they would have lost all the money. I was uncomfortable watching this, and my daughter, who has a degree in Sociology said it was like watching a version of the Milgram Experiment. I know what she meant. In another challenge the poor starving grafters had to eat several extremely unpalatable things, including dog food.

Ah, but this is a game, isn’t it? So where’s the incentive for the Grafters? Where’s the jeopardy for the Rulers? Well, it works like this. Every so often the Rulers must vote out one of their number. This is when the show becomes Big Brother. Rulers make alliances with other Rulers and conspire against other Rulers and one is kicked out. I’ve never been a huge fan of Big Brother.

Which brings me to a point. The game mechanics mean that the Rulers are going to be forced to display their most unlikeable traits. Judging by the comments that many of the Digital Spies who commented on the show made, we were all disappointed when the first Ruler to be kicked out was not sent down to join the Grafters, but allowed to go home scot free as it were. Then, on Friday’s show it was announced that the Grafters are going to be choosing two of the Rulers to become Grafters. You’d almost think that the producers were responding to the criticisms. Well, actually this is possible. Greg James – and there’s a reason why I haven’t mentioned him yet – the presenter, allegedly, was on Claudia Winkleman’s Radio 2 show yesterday morning and he revealed that he is still filming the series. So maybe the producers DID see the criticism and made the format change on the hoof. Then again, maybe not.

Thus far, a Ruler expulsion is followed by a vote among the Grafters. The two Grafters with the highest votes are sent to the Penthouse. After a champagne reception, the Rulers choose one to become the next Ruler. I can’t say that these sequences have been particularly enjoyable. I don’t need a ‘secret’ piece to camera from one of the Grafters telling me hat he or she really wants to go to the Penthouse and become a Ruler. You’d be daft to want to stay in the basement. Likewise, I don’t want to see a Ruler doing a piece to camera telling me ‘I DON’T trust Tiffany (name changed to protect the guilty) she is NOT a strong ruler!’ They can cut those down as soon as they like.

I’ve already mentioned the nagging feeling the show gives me that either the show hasn’t really been completely worked out before the start, or the producers are changing the gameplay on the hoof. The arbitrary way the original Rulers were selected was strange. Told by the rather anonymous Greg James to sort it out amongst themselves, basically it came down to who had the gall to just walk into the lift at the end. From the few words that Greg James said I had the impression that they all had to agree. Likewise when Grafters were given the opportunity to make requests for items from the Rulers, the items they asked for really were small potatoes – well they didn’t actually ask for potatoes, large or small but you know what I mean. Were the Grafters told – these are the items you can ask for and nothing bigger? Who knows? We weren’t told. Here’s another thing. How is the end game going to work? So we’re told, only one Ruler can win. So how will this work? I mean, keep something back, by all means but give us an idea, producers.

Were the Producers unsure of whether they wanted to use Greg James or not? I ask because the poor devil is seen so little on screen or heard so little in voice over. I’m guessing Claudia wasn’t available for this one.

Yes, and that’s another thing. I must admit that I was not previously aware of Sophie Corcoran’s work as an internet pundit. I am now. It’s safe to say that she has her views and I have mine and never the twain shall meet. Still, bearing in mind her media profile I think the very least that Channel Four might have done is list her as Politics student AND Political Pundit on Twitter. Maybe I’m influenced by memories of the Traitors where so many of the contestants turned out to have acting or performance experience despite this not being their primary occupation or career.

For all I know “Rise and Fall” may yet come galloping home in the ratings. A lot will depend on the endgame, I think. I mean, if you watched the British version of “The Traitors” and then a few weeks later the American version of “The Traitors” which was also shown on the BBC, then that was a good demonstration. In the British version the last Traitor was expelled at the fifty ninth minute of the eleventh hour and the money was shared between those nice last three Faithfuls. A successful conclusion that left simple hearted me satisfied with the outcome. In the US version, the Traitor won. Granted, as a person she had come across no worse than the Faithfuls had, but nonetheless it was a moment that I found surprisingly deflating.

But as I say, for all the flaws I have highlighted, I will probably continue to watch it. I won’t necessarily like myself very much for doing so, though.