Picture credit: iStock.com/pat138241
It’s official. Man the lifeboats, women and children first: the UK game show, and television industry in general, is running out of new show ideas.
Don’t believe this publication? If you’re a regular listener to the TV Podcast – and if not, why not? – you will notice a general theme of the two presenters, Chuck Thomas and Greg Scott, with years of TV experience between them, metaphorically banging their heads in frustration at the dearth of ideas from tellyland.
Still not convinced? No less an authority than Sir Peter Bazalgette, former creative director of Endemol Group worldwide and the man responsible for making shows such as Big Brother and Deal or No Deal huge hits, recently bemoaned recent shows as “predictable” and told the Independent: “In the past 10 years there have been fewer blockbuster hits than in the previous 10 years.”
The key to this decline, Bazalgette argues, is the slow death of what he calls the ‘balloon debate mechanism’ format. It’s simply ubiquitous; the concept of having x contestants, then eliminating one each week until a winner emerges, can be found from The X Factor, to The Apprentice, Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother…the list goes on.
And it’s safe to say things didn’t go swimmingly with the BBC and ITV’s flagship hits over the past year. The X Factor got fewer ratings for one of its Sunday show than the Antiques Roadshow on BBC1. TV critics were falling over themselves to stick the boot in. Stephen Kelly, in the Radio Times, decided to let off a bit of steam in a preview. “Who will make Olly Murs say ‘wow!’ the loudest?” he mused. “Who will sing a song that has a completely tenuous link to this week’s theme? Who will remember who left last week? Will someone wear a cap? How about a backwards cap? What’s Louis Walsh up to these days? I hope he’s well,” and so on. Despite rumours to the contrary, The X Factor will be returning this year, although it was not a seamless process.
As for The Apprentice, Stuart Heritage, writing for the Guardian, argued it was time to let the axe fall. “I’m sick of the contestants; of their witless self belief and their sweatflop desperation and the way they truly believe that participating in what basically amounts to a succession of dismal Generation Game sausage-making skits demonstrates their unknowable business acumen,” he argued.
Has the tide turned, with lots of head scratching to come? Not entirely – in the same breath as slagging off The Apprentice, Heritage is effusive with his praise for The Great British Bake Off, which also follows the ‘balloon debate mechanism’ theme.
But we’re getting there.
Jordan Hass, a friend of Game Show Gallery and a fellow observer of game show trends, argues: “We don’t need a Generation Game knockoff, we don’t need a Millionaire clone. What is around you, and can you make a decent show based on it?”
Over the past two years, this blog has covered various themes which, generally speaking, mark a sea change from the traditional game show to the modern equivalent. The increasing use of padding and contestant sob stories to fill up time; the prevalence of shows which require a gambling element as opposed to general knowledge alone (or at all); the move to lengthen shows from 30 minutes to 45, and 45 to 60, and so on. Many of these, like the balloon debate mechanism, are trends indicative of a television industry moving forward. But is the industry becoming reliant on it?
Take Flockstars, a show which – for some reason – paired celebrities with sheepdogs and, as de rigeur, eliminated one contestant per week for six weeks until the final. The Telegraph described it as “embarrassing” and argued it would “be more interesting to stare at the stains on an old padded tea cosy for 27 minutes than to be trapped into viewing the ovine F-word of all reality TV flops.” The viewing figures for the first show were a “below slot average” 2.5 million. Surely this sends a message to the industry that this style is rapidly losing ground?
One solution is to have these shows as one off specials. Of course, it doesn’t provide the security of six weeks in the calendar – not to mention the money side, as well as the reduced exposure for the celebrities if they’re only doing a one-off show – but it stops things from becoming stale. Hass argues you need to go a step further, and truly bring back ‘event’ television, almost harking back to a bygone era. “The last one that might have worked [is] Deal or No Deal in the US, but they usually don’t work because it’s overkill to strip the show for the entire week,” he explains.
“For a game show to be an event, it needs to be something different that’s genre breaking. Deal was a strict luck show, Millionaire was the scenery…I feel if you need an ‘event’ you’ll need to make it a show that only aired once, that is so unpredictable that nobody would know.”
This makes sense; ramp up the marketing, get the buzz around a one off show – which of course makes the balloon mechanism impossible – and leave the audience wanting more. Pragmatism does naturally kick in – and the likes of Netflix giving audiences the flexibility to binge watch shows at will means it is a risk – but the question has to be asked: if a one off piece is still valid for drama, why not for game shows?
500 Questions debuted on the US in May 2015, and was promoted as an ‘event’, similar to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? The gist is simple; contestants have to answer 500 questions without getting three wrong in a row. It ran for only seven episodes, but across a whole week. Hass argues the show did not ‘flop’, rather ‘it was just overkilled by having it on every day, and making it a serious show.’ “The reason was because of the returning champion and they probably wanted audiences to be reminded of them.” The show has been picked up by ITV for the UK – although the page on ITV’s website leads to a worrying 404 – for four episodes later this year. Perhaps this indicates a better trend.
Another example of a programme in this ballpark over recent years was Red or Black, a show which Hass argues ‘screams’ a VIP format. The show, which only ran 14 episodes across a year through two series in the UK, is a natural fit for the ‘less is more’ mentality because of the scope of the top prize – £1 million on a 50/50 gamble. “A show like Red or Black would have been better if the show only showed up monthly or only four times a year,” he says.
Perhaps this is being too ambitious. But these are worrying times for the traditional TV industry. Technology entrepreneur James McNab recently examined the content of streaming providers Netflix and Amazon and concluded: “The real billion dollar question is how long can the traditional TV industry survive while Netflix and Amazon continue to plunder and pillage every genre of TV and film?”
There is an opportunity afoot, and with great opportunity comes great responsibility. But it will take something a little braver than Flockstars et al for the traditional TV industry to achieve it.
Game Show Gallery // "Have you had a lovely day?" 
Interestingly, Miljoenenjacht – the show that begat DoND, though purely as a revised endgame to an existing massive audience participation event quiz complete with enormous prizes (the old jackpot was 10m guilder, I think its one winner is technically *still* the biggest game show winner in the world, ever) – airs in two annual batches of about five Sunday night shows.
Still going in 2016, as far as I know not under threat.