Format foibles: How long are your contestants going to be on the screen?

A point from a previous blog post (sometimes, inspiration does not strike rather than tap you on the shoulder) has inspired this missive: you’ve got to ensure contestants have a lovely day, whether they’re on Take Your Pick for a few seconds or on Going for Gold for (seemingly) weeks.

Below is a by all means non-exhaustive list which gives an outline as to how much airtime contestants on certain game shows will get and the most disparity between them. (In other words, if, God forbid, you’re looking to take part in a quiz show in an attempt to become famous, the ones towards the end are what you should go for, even if they’ve not been commissioned in years.)

Take Your Pick

Minimum time: 5 seconds. Maximum time: 30 minutes

*Contestant walks on to cheesy music; maybe waves at family in the crowd; palpable excitement*
Hostess: This is Maureen from Darlington.
Host: Ah, hello Maureen, nice to meet you, are you well?
Contestant: Yes…
*Gong sounds, contestant tries not to swear, cheesy music returns, next contestant ferried in*

And off they went: on pretty much every edition of Take Your Pick, a contestant would be eliminated thus on the Yes/No Game (above) achieving only a few seconds of fame (and countless Christmases of infamy assuming family and friends had remembered to record it).

The rest of the show, which was pretty unmemorable in comparison, consisted of opening boxes, avoiding booby prizes, and hopefully winning a holiday.

Fluke

Minimum time: 2 minutes. Maximum time: theoretically one series, but in reality, two episodes

Ah, Fluke. What a wonderful show. Tim Vine was to appear later in 1997 as the first face of Channel 5 and the host of Whittle, but for some, his finest hour was earlier that year in this Channel 4 show.

The clue was in the name. Contestants had to answer impenetrable questions and, basically, be jammy as anything in order to win. The show also threw caution to the wind for traditional formats; rounds would take place whereby if a contestant lost despite being potentially hundreds of points in front, they were out.

Fluke finds a place just after Take Your Pick because of its very first round, where the Bit of a Wasted Journey Pointer would land on one unfortunate contestant and that would be the end of their day barely two minutes into proceedings (well, two minutes into their proceedings; the show would usually start with a two minute gag intro). Winning contestants were invited back to have another go, so theoretically the luckiest person in the world could go through a whole series. Remarkably, two contestants came back a second time and won again.

Fifteen to One

Minimum time: 5 minutes. Maximum time: several years (or approx. 20 programmes)

As Marcus Berkmann once mused in his excellent book Brain Men, why did so many people volunteer to go on Fifteen to One? Of course, there were jokes that it was a refuge for the unemployed and retired – the record Game Show Gallery has seen in one episode is nine out of 15 contestants – but again, the clue was in the name. The chances of winning were minimal, while the chances of making a complete berk of yourself on national TV were relatively odds-on.

Even if you thought you had a good solid general knowledge, you could get two stinkers in the first round, that was that, and you sat in the dark for the remaining 20 minutes knowing your friends had video recorders at the ready.

Conversely, the best performing player in Fifteen to One’s history, in terms of episodes and years spent on the show, was Anthony Martin. He started in 1988’s second series, and was only finally knocked out in series 13, in 1994.

Blockbusters

Minimum time: 10 minutes. Maximum time: several shows

Now we’re getting into different types of well-established formats. This, for those well-versed with this blog, is the ‘fall over’ format; you just keep playing until time runs out, and if a resolution has not been reached, you just carry on again in the next episode.

Normally a practice for five-shows-a-week/five-episodes-a-day programmes – Lucky Ladders was another, and they indulged in the practice of showing all the contestants on Contestants’ Row which meant you knew they were recording episodes in bulk – it was also used by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, although the fastest finger first contestants were replaced each show, those who had failed to make the hot seat cursing their bad luck with their BFH.

As a result, contestants who did well had the chance to appear on several shows back to back. In WWTBAM, this usually meant a maximum of two shows, while Blockbusters and Lucky Ladders could carry on for the better part of a week.

The Great British Bake Off

Minimum time: 60 minutes. Maximum time: 14 weeks

Yes, it’s an example of the ‘balloon debate mechanism’ theory, so essentially this is just one of many such shows that could have been chosen. This blog has already covered the format, and how some influential figures in TV think it’s on its last legs, but as a reminder, you have x contestants at the beginning of a show, then lose one every week until you get a winner. Apprentice, X Factor, Big Brother…you get the idea.

In terms of what you see on screen, it’s almost antithetical in terms of distance and time. Those who get booted off on show one will usually get a lot of screen time in that one show – usually showing how rubbish they are – while the quieter ‘blimey, I didn’t even know they were in it’ types progress further.

Despite this, there can be exceptions. Many I’m A Celebrity… viewers from the most recent series – which had Gogglebox’s Scarlett Moffat declared the winner – were incensed at how much screen time she got and whether that may have subconsciously influenced the voting from the producers’ side. Mind you, the Digital Spy forum seems to have that conversation every year anyway.

Going for Gold

Daphne Fowler (nee Hudson, as was) collects her prize for winning the first series of Going for Gold

Minimum time: 1 week. Maximum time: 24 weeks (or approx. several programmes)

“What am I? I am a late 80s and 90s kitschy pan-European game show which seemed to go on forever and was hosted by an Irishman with an accent as thick as clotted cream…”

Correct, Going for Gold – and you answered that in the four point zone so now your opponent is playing catch up. With Brexit looming on the horizon, could a show which brought Europe together like nothing else since Eurovision – and usually confirmed our continental cousins were light years smarter than ourselves – be the boon that we all need?

Probably not, considering it was brought back in 2008 and felt outdated then. But the original Going for Gold meant you were guaranteed a solid amount of time on the show whether you did well or badly, but not necessarily a huge amount of screen time. If you fell at the first round, where your opponent only needed to get two questions correct to advance, your show ended after about five minutes. Multiply that by four and that was the lowest amount of time you got. If you won in the first week and then went on to win the whole series, for instance, your first and last appearances would be somewhere in the region of six months apart.

A couple of bits and bobs on moving the goalposts in game shows

If you are fortunate enough to appear on a TV game show, whether it’s for several weeks on Going for Gold or two minutes on Take Your Pick, you win or you lose. Either way, you’ve had a lovely day. Sometimes however, it isn’t quite as clear cut as that.

As this blog has examined on various occasions, the problem with humans is that they will insist on being human – in other words, making mistakes. Apart from the time Metal Mickey briefly hosted Runaround, game show hosts, executives and production staff are human. Therefore, contestants who should have lost will slip through the net and win, while contestants who should have gotten a second chance get bundled off with their BFH.

Marcus Berkmann wrote in his excellent book Brain Men (1999), with regard to a spectacularly duff pub quiz question one week, that contestants were expected to get “the right wrong answer, as opposed to the wrong right one.” With this in mind, here are a few examples of rule changes and errors, from the subtle to the unsubtle, that went out to millions on national television as opposed to one man and his dog down the local.

Fifteen to One

This blog usually takes most of its sources from Fifteen to One, and this post is no different. In 1989, a subtle rule change allowed no fewer than three future champions who had theoretically ‘lost’ to come back and win the series. The specific rule change was that if a losing contestant had attained a score which would have made that year’s Grand Final, even if they were standing at the end or had been knocked out, they were allowed another go.

The classic example was three time champion Anthony Martin. Already a finalist in series 2, he was knocked out in series 4 on a score of 203 taking one question too many. Between series, the new rule was introduced, and Martin went on to win series 5, 8, and 11.

Glen Binnie, the champion of series 12 in 1993, was in deep trouble in a heat back in series 8. Clawing back five consecutive questions with one life left, he scored 141. It wasn’t enough to defeat Mike Watson, who with 141 and two lives left went through to the Grand Final, but given the par score for that series’ showpiece was 132, Binnie was invited back and the rest is history. Watson, who finished third in series 8, fell at the first round in his next appearance.

The other champion who benefitted from some rather judicious officiating was series 18 winner Arnold O’Hara. His first appearance, towards the back end of series 15, saw him up against Lesley Webster, who scored 262 in the previous series to notch the finals board trophy, and was a multiple winner in her own right. Despite only getting one question wrong in the entire show, O’Hara finished second with 133 (2) after Webster’s five consecutive questions saw her finish on 141 (1). Even though neither score was enough for that year’s Grand Final, O’Hara was allowed back.

It’s fascinating to see two great players compete in the same show – arguably signalling the end of one era and the beginning of another. One other example of this was serial Grand Finalist Simon Holmes, who in series 16 had the misfortune of being up against Leslie Booth, the two time defending champion. Holmes defied the odds to win that show, and would notch up 11 appearances himself. Daphne Fowler’s run at the end of the regular Fifteen to One series came about because her previous appearance, in series 4 in 1989, saw her come up against multiple winner and series 7 champion Thomas Dyer.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

At the end of it all, with Fifteen to One, Mastermind and the like, the prestige is important but at heart, they are just games – and the appeal is to play the game for its own sake. Why would anyone else go on Fifteen to One with the odds of winning so much more remote than getting both first round questions wrong and looking a pillock on national television, for instance? But with Millionaire, it’s all about the money. Does it magnify errors?

The classic example, when Millionaire could still make front page news, was when Tony Kennedy won £125,000 by answering that the minimum strokes with which a tennis player could win a set was 24. This answer was adjudged as correct, however the actual correct answer is 12 – a player could theoretically win games one, three and five (or two, four and six naturally) with 12 strokes by serving aces, and then not face a stroke in the other games with 12 double faults from their opponent. Two wrongs normally don’t make a right, but in this instance Kennedy was allowed to keep his money, clarified here by Chris Tarrant.

The other incident which made serious headlines – partly because it involved celebrities rather than Joe Bloggs – was when Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen and his wife Jackie got the £1,000,000 question wrong. The question, “Translated from the Latin, what is the official motto of the United States?”, was answered with ‘In God We Trust’. The horror as the ‘correct’ answer, ‘One Out of Many’, flashed up, was a picture. However, it was later argued that the question was too ambiguous – ‘In God We Trust’ is certainly known as a US motto, and the Latin the question referred to, ‘E Pluribus Unum’, was never codified by law. The explanation from Tarrant this time (at 36:41 in the below video) was a little less convincing – and it does make you wonder whether the same thing would have occurred had it been on the civvies version – while the Llewellyn Bowens took all of about three seconds before deciding to walk with the money the second time around.

Are there any other famous cases of quiz shows getting questions particularly wrong or changing the rules? Let us know in the comments.

The Krypton Factor and general knowledge: Analysing changes over the years

Back in 2010, when The Krypton Factor comeback was well and truly swinging, the good people at Bother’s Bar did a superb analysis of the general knowledge round, the climax of television’s toughest quiz show. Its conclusion, with one point on offer for correct answers and one point deducted for wrong answers, was that far from being too heavily weighted as a final round, it was not weighted enough.

The debate over the general knowledge round, and whether it is fairly weighted, is a subject close to Game Show Gallery’s heart; and as this publication has previously explored, it’s a key part of analysing the ‘over before it’s over’ rule. You have to ensure your format remains competitive until the end to stop viewers from switching off early, but equally you have to make sure there is enough interest in the opening half, so not everything rests on the end game.

The Krypton Factor, with 22 points (10/6/4/2) on offer for five rounds before the finale in its later series, is a perfect case study. Take the 1991 series for instance; both Tony Hetherington and Paul Evans won all five opening rounds of their respective heats, and Hetherington would win that year’s Grand Final. With perfect Krypton Factors of 50, and the nearest contestant only on a theoretical 30, if the general knowledge round was decided by the same metric, then it was game over, switch over to something else and see you again next week. Not dissimilar to A Question of Sport replacing the classic one minute round with a more generic ‘on the buzzer’ finale, by weighting general knowledge as two points per correct answer, two points deducted per incorrect answer over 90/105/120 seconds (whichever was in vogue), more than 10 points could be – and occasionally was – scored.

The reviewer at UKGameshows.com clearly sets their stall out on the issue. “One problem…was that, all too often, a contestant who was considerably behind could win if he/she was exceptionally good at general knowledge,” it reads. “This always seemed unfair on those contestants who had shown more all-round abilities…only to be pipped at the last minute if their general knowledge was not so good.”

Bother’s Bar remarked in 2010: “If anyone wants to compile statistics from older series…go on right ahead.” It’s worth noting at the start that it’s difficult to do a forensic analysis because of variables at play – being able to interrupt, and so on – but without further ado, here we go with some of the more interesting examples from the classic series.

1978

Exhibit A: only the second ever series of Krypton, and the rules here were two points correct, two points deducted incorrect, but with a pedestrian 165 seconds (2:45) to play with:

Number of missed questions: 6

Yep, a whopping 23 questions were asked in that final round, meaning a potential 46 points on offer. In mitigation, the round was nowhere near as quick fire as in later series – Gordon Burns’ insistence on saying players’ full names when they buzz, as well as preceding early buzzes with ‘interrupted by…’ is rather quaint – but it’s still an awful lot of points to play for. It’s also interesting to note how the rather nice element of Krypton general knowledge questions linking to each other through a common word was in play pretty much from the show’s beginning.

One minor thing to note with the early editions; contestants would in an earlier round be given three questions which could not be passed over, from which they could gain a maximum of six points. It could be argued their general knowledge had already been tested going into the final round, so contestants far behind by the time of round six could not particularly complain if they were out of contention.

Here’s another example from the same series, but bizarrely with 210 seconds (3:30) to play with.

Update: As the good people at Bother’s Bar pointed out, the time limit for the general knowledge round probably depended on how much time there was to run in the show. It’s also worth noting that until the mid 80s, the format we know of 10/6/4/2 was not sacrosanct. The clue is that in the first two examples, the total scores do not add up to 110 (i.e 22 x 5).

Number of missed questions: 1

Despite the extra 45 seconds, only one more question is asked, therefore making 48 points to go at. In both cases, however, the leading contestant won the contest. Ken Wilmshurst, the runner up in clip one (two contestants going through from the semi finals back then), would eventually win the 1978 title.

1987

Exhibit B: an episode featuring the famous Marian Chanter. Here, it’s 100 seconds, at a quicker pace, but answers only get 1 point added or deducted either way.

Number of missed questions: 0

17 questions get asked, meaning, well, 17 points to play for. Again, the leading contestant going into the round wins the contest, and if the scores were two points either way instead of one, the winner would not have changed although the positions would have (Chanter 34, Bruno 32, Laverty 30, Wallace 24). It’s worth noting that no missed questions and plenty of interruptions mean more questions get asked in this instance, but was this a step too far in the other direction?

1991

Exhibit C. Another thing to note with the General Knowledge round was that, not only was it a chance for contestants significantly behind to overhaul their deficit and win, it was also a chance for players even further behind to stake their place for the highest scoring runner up position.

Number of missed questions: 1

The Group B final featured the aforementioned Evans and Hetherington, two contestants who blitzed their respective heats. Evans blitzed the group final with an 18 point lead going into the final round, but Hetherington scored enough to claim his place in the Grand Final as runner up, and would of course go on to win the final – with Evans in second. Is this fair – or is this fairer than the 1987 alternative?

1992

Exhibit D, and possibly the greatest exponent of the general knowledge round in Krypton’s history. Before that however, a 1992 group B heat, with 90 seconds and two points for right or wrong.

In this instance the leading contestant, Janet Morris, was 24 points ahead so it was all over bar the shouting anyway – and impossible if the one point rule was still enforced. In the end, Morris won by 16 points after Jackie Harte scored 10 points (seven right answers, two wrong) in 90 seconds. With three misses and 16 questions being asked in the round, it was technically possible to overhaul the lead. Again, is this fair?

Number of missed questions: 2

Now this is what you call dominating a round, going from 12 points behind to being a 10 point victor. Andrew Craig, who perhaps unsurprisingly won the Grand Final after winning the Group C final in such spectacular fashion, answered the first seven questions of the round correctly, meaning he had clawed himself in front before anybody else got a look in. It’s worth noting that, unlike his heat and group final, Craig led going into the final of the Grand Final, but is gaining 24 points in a single round when 22 are on offer in total for other rounds unfair, or just excellent play?

1993

One year on, and again another change has been made to the General Knowledge round, moving from 90 seconds to 75. Was Craig’s dominance the previous year a factor? It’s a possibility, although other issues – such as the implementation of a commercial break for the first time leading to a shorter show – are at play.

Number of missed questions: 2

In the Group A final, only 13 questions were asked, meaning 26 points on offer, but with three wrong answers and two misses, only 10 points were scored in the round. Is this redressing the balance, or are there not enough points to play for?

The Grand Final of 1993 was a fascinating situation, with three contenders six points behind the leader. Alex Mowat and Norman Kenvyn both came from behind in their group finals to secure their Grand Final berths, while Eddie Jackson performed superbly in general knowledge in the group C final (behind the overall winner, Tim Richardson) to grab his place. Here, 15 questions (including one miss) were asked in 75 seconds – one every five seconds, for those whose maths is not so sharp – but Richardson’s nerve held to win.

Conclusion

As befitting a show which ran for 18 years, The Krypton Factor did subtly change, or at least it did until 1995 where it revamped completely before succumbing. The General Knowledge round, whilst always the climax, had arguably the most changes over the years.

Assuming all being fair, the maximum a contestant should be able to gain in the final round over an opponent is eight points – but enacting the over before it’s over rule means this can be extended so long as a contestant performs exceptionally in the round. Tony Hetherington’s performance in the 1991 group B final is a case in point, gaining 12 points over other competitors albeit in 90 seconds. Similarly, should dominating one of the six rounds – as would usually be the case in the late 80s editions – score only five or six points?

From this reviewer’s perspective, one point for correct answers in the general knowledge round does seem too difficult to claw back a lead. With this in mind, we argue Krypton got it right towards the end, with the 1993 series of two points and 75 seconds seeming the fairest solution. Either way, hopefully this shines some light on a fascinating issue, and how important specific mechanisms are within game show formats.

Is it time for traditional TV to abandon the balloon? Exploring fresh game show ideas

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.

Remembering…Defectors

Game shows, in nostalgia terms, fall into four categories:

– The widely remembered because they were great
– The widely remembered because they were a bit rubbish
– The unjustly long forgotten because they were great
– The justly long forgotten because they were a bit rubbish

Examples above. Zillions of shows fall into the top category, and just as many fall into the bottom category, but it’s best to leave it there to save dredging up the recesses of our minds to remember them. But the third bucket, ‘unjustly long forgotten’, is a different thing altogether.

These are the shows which either had great formats, great presentation, great hosting, or a mix of all three, but fell at an unfortunate hurdle never to be seen again. Take Duel, a fascinating format on ITV, well hosted by Nick Hancock, but only lasting for 12 episodes in 2008. Or Liar, an excellent idea, again well hosted by Paul Kaye, but lasting just eight episodes in 2002.

Another show which falls into this category is Defectors, which ran on Challenge between 2001 and 2002. What made it a cut above the rest, and could it be brought back today?

A glint of potential?

It’s worth noting immediately that Challenge’s original content has rarely been a field of gold. Back in the 90s we had reasonable remakes of classic shows, such as Winner Takes All and Sale of the Century, reasonable original formats, such as Say the Word and Roll With It, and then the likes of Karaoke Challenge…you get the idea.

Thus, when something of promise arrives, one feels duty bound to give it a fair crack of the whip. When Defectors arrived, eyebrows were raised and eyes were taken off pints in the community because it was a very interesting format. Four contestants lined up to answer general knowledge questions, but with a twist: the points they scored were dependent on the audience members who backed them to get the answers right. The winning contestant got £1000 at the end of the show, as did the audience member who most consistently backed a winner. Interestingly, there are shades of Liar in this.

An example can be found in this video here.

The first round, First Impressions, left the audience being asked to pick a contestant based simply on how they introduced themselves – name and location – at the start of the show. In this instance, the percentages were split 19%, 22%, 38% and 21%.

After two questions, the scores were 19, 22, 76 and 0 – contestants one and two getting one question right, contestant three getting both questions right and contestant four getting no questions right. With the audience asked to defect again, the new percentages were 13%, 17%, 62% and 8%.

This throws up a bit of an issue, which we’ll look at shortly – but you get the idea on the basic mechanism of the show.

The little device of lying through your back teeth has become commonplace – Golden Balls, PokerFace, The Great Pretender. It also affirmed that, in general, simple question/answer shows were running out of steam – virtues such as greed and deception were increasingly key

A visionary format?

After each round, the lowest scoring contestant gets kicked off. But with round two, Trust Me, the show starts to come into its own.

Before each round of questions, each contestant is given 10 seconds to make a short appeal as to why they were an expert in this particular topic. The topics are nicely varied, so it’s difficult to imagine a player who, in this example, was a specialist in children’s books, ports, cartoon characters, children of the famous, and sporting nationalities.

Cue, most probably, unending bullshit from the contestants to curry favour and votes. But this little device of lying through your back teeth has become the cornerstone of many game shows since; Golden Balls, PokerFace, The Great Pretender and so on. It also links in with one of this publication’s key themes – the idea that simple question/answer shows are dead, and that virtues such as greed and deception are increasingly key to victory.

Round three, Quick Defect, has just two contestants remaining, and by this point the audience is asked to make a decision after every question based on the subject area. In a nice touch, the host, Richard Orford, reveals how many points have been scored for the first few questions of Quick Defect, but keeps his powder dry towards the end. After a few minutes of this, it’s game over and money time for the winning contestant and audience member.

A presentation blip?

The format, as we’ve mentioned, was excellent if for one nagging issue which will be explained shortly. The presentation, however, was less so – although it certainly had its moments.

Let’s be fair – it would certainly be harsh to compare the budget of a Challenge game show with that of ITV or the BBC. So we’re not going to do that. But there were a few bizarre presentation choices. There was a big screen which seemed to do nothing apart from show the Defectors logo. Perhaps it showed the questions – that would make sense – but it was never referred to.

The incidental music played with each question also begins to grate after a while; perhaps changing key or slightly changing the pitch in the final round would have helped add to the tension while keeping things fresh. But some of the presentation, for an evidently budget production, was excellent; the dissolving effect as each question was answered, as the UKGameshows review notes, is a lovely touch.

If a contestant got a good start in the final, then is the audience more likely to back the winning horse? The general pattern of shows proved that they would, unless the question was on a subject completely anathema to that contestant

Diminishing returns

The one blip with the format, however, is actually pretty central to the whole concept of the game. Any game show should have several key tenets. There has to be jeopardy; some games you win, and some games you lose. The exception that proves the rule is Takeshi’s Castle, where a contestant who won was so rare as to be almost newsworthy.

Equally crucially, the format also has to manufacture a situation where the play is tight until reasonably close to the end. This has been examined by Game Show Gallery on several occasions; the ‘over before it’s over’ problem is a major hindrance, as viewers will invariably switch off if it’s blindingly obvious who is going to win long before the end of the game. Equally, you cannot engineer a close result in your format which seems unfair, or makes the previous 25/40 minutes an irrelevance. This is why double money, much derided by this publication, is so often used. How many times have you seen contestants on Family Fortunes miles behind at the break after the first three games, only to come roaring back in the second winning perhaps two? Double money, folks: it’s not 100% fair, but it’s good enough when you factor in the jeopardy question.

This is the key problem with Defectors, particularly in the final round, which is on the buzzer and against the clock. At this point, with only two contestants left in the game, the situation becomes too closely aligned. If a contestant gets a good start, then is the audience more likely to back the winning horse? The general pattern of shows proved that they would, unless the question was on a subject completely anathema to that contestant. As a result, many – but not all – final rounds saw one contestant pulling away considerably.

If the show were coming back today, what could be done to improve this? There are a couple of ideas:

– Take the audience element out. Well, partially. Have the audience contest to pick the best player end after round three. The audience will still vote for how many points a player can receive per question, but it won’t affect their personal standing. Will this lead to closer contests? Then again, this could lead to audience apathy – or the audience maybe voting strategically to engineer a closer contest. Would this be fair?
– Remove the ‘on the buzzer’ aspect. Have the points tally as previously – if both contestants get the answer right, they get the points. Will this lead to closer contests? Perhaps the audience vote would be quicker to sway to the lower ranked player if the scoreline was, say, 35-90, as opposed to 0-135.
– Have fewer categories of question for the final round. If the categories of questions are esoteric, then will the audience be more likely to back the player who’s winning borne out of pure simple ‘dunno’? If you’re going to have a stock list of sport, films, literature etc, make sure it’s consistent though.

Either way, Defectors was a show that was very much ahead of its time – and if repeats in the early hours are anything to go by, it’s heartening to see that Challenge hasn’t abandoned it altogether.

A note on the ‘zugzwang’ play in game shows: When does jeopardy become cruelty?

As any television executive, or anyone who’s ever pitched a game show idea for commission, will tell you, game shows need jeopardy: the underlying tension that means one wrong move could be catastrophic.

This publication has examined the fine line producers have to traverse to ensure both the show’s contestants and its audience gets a fair deal. You need to, if possible, create jeopardy without making the result of the game obvious long before the show’s completed – the ‘over before it’s over’ rule – while at the same time making it an even contest throughout, not putting all your eggs in one basket for the final round rendering the previous 20 or so minutes irrelevant.

To find a leading example of this, look no further than Jeopardy! (exclamation mark always included) itself. The game’s title arises because players can lose not unreasonable sums of money if their general knowledge is wayward. In the Final Jeopardy! round, contestants can lose all the money they had previously earned during the show. Yet this is an example of calculated jeopardy; players can bet however much they like dependent on how confident they are. If they so wish, they can bet nothing and take their money away with them. (For those wondering why Jeopardy! is featuring on a mainly UK-based game show blog, there have been four, count ‘em, four iterations of the show in the UK over the years, all performing dismally).

Again, as this publication has examined, if you want to ramp up the tension to insane levels, you need a get out clause. Think of it like a hot air balloon; if you keep raising the pressure until the balloon becomes enormous, eventually it will burst. This was a key principle behind the success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; yes, you could theoretically lose £968,000, but you could also walk away.

Sometimes, however, you can take jeopardy a stage further. Let’s get acquainted with the zugzwang play. The word zugzwang derives from the German for ‘compulsion to move’, and is a terminology used in chess. The opponent is obliged to make a move as per the game’s rules, but any move they make will result in a serious disadvantage to them.

With that in mind, here are a couple of interesting examples which borrow from the concept:

Wipeout

Wipeout, originally from the US, made its way onto UK shores and debuted on May 25 1994. The premise was simple in round one: 16 answers appeared on the grid, 11 correct and 5 wrong. The question would be something along the lines of “Celebrities who have refused honours”, or “Countries with kings”. Get an answer right, and you get money – £10, £20, £30 for each correct answer unveiled and so on. Get one wrong, and you lose all the money you had accumulated up to that point.

An example question on Wipeout. The category is “collective nouns for animals”.* With four wipeouts and two correct answers, it’s a 33% chance of success – would you want to risk £700+ on that?

Here’s the rub; if you got an answer right, you could either go on, or pass the buck to your opponent. If your opponent happened to be sitting pretty on a lot of money, it made sense to get them to go wrong. But the longer each round goes on, the more the odds get stacked against you. For example, if you have six answers left on the board, four wrong and two right, then you have a 33% chance of answering correctly. With £750+ or more on the line on occasion, is that a risk you want to take? In Wipeout, sometimes you just had to.

Press Your Luck

In a recent post, this publication examined the hit US show Press Your Luck and one contestant in particular, Michael Larson, who made the whole format look like a sham. There was a UK version of Press Your Luck, presented by Paul Coia in 1992, but it’s little known for two reasons: 1) it broadcast only in the ITV West region, and 2) it wasn’t very good, by all accounts. Primarily this was because there was a top prize of £200. When you’ve got scores of $20,000 or so being risked – or one man on the US version risking $100,000 – who cares? Remarkably however, the UK Press Your Luck went on for two series.

The game was straightforward enough; players had to literally ‘press their luck’ against a giant screen with supposedly random permutations. If they landed right, they won money. If they landed on a ‘whammy’, they lost all the money they had earned until that point. Among the nuances of the format related to ‘earned’ spins and ‘passed’ spins. If you had spins left, you could pass them to your opponent. In the Larson episode, he had won $102,851, but still had to play on for at least three more spins after they were shoved onto him by his opponent. Clearly he didn’t want to move – but he had to.

Can zugzwang theory work?

It’s worth noting here that the above two examples aren’t zugzwang in its purest form. In pure zugzwang, any move you make results in a disadvantage. In these instances, there is a right and a wrong answer; but when it practically comes down to guesswork, and the odds are stacked against you in getting it right, then it’s a compulsion to move which the contestant sorely doesn’t want to take.

So can the idea of zugzwang be incorporated into a game show? Here’s a quick idea:

A hypothetical snakes and ladders game board. Note contestant A is at position 16, contestant B is at position 10, and contestant C is at position 13.

Many board games have been plundered to create game show formats, from the successful (Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble) to the less successful (Boggle, Monopoly). Snakes and Ladders, in the UK market at least, has only been used twice to Game Show Gallery’s knowledge; a Kenneth Horne-hosted version in the 1950s, and a pilot featuring Bradley Walsh, who made light of the audacious set design in an appearance on TV Nightmares here.

But in this particular format, let’s assume there are three contestants, and the object of the game, naturally, is to get to the top of the board before playing for the big end game prize.

To get there, let’s steal half an idea from Strike it Lucky. Instead of simply rolling a dice, contestants are offered a category – e.g. “Beatles singles” – and given the chance to roll 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 by giving that number of answers. If a player gets the answer wrong, the turn is passed to the next contestant who can move one square if they get one answer right. After a number is taken, it disappears from the board, and so the game goes round each of the three contestants twice before resetting. As the rounds progress, the categories get increasingly difficult, sometimes so esoteric there may be only 6 possible answers e.g. “Wives of Henry VIII”. (Obviously on the game board as above, for this format to work you would need the first six squares minimum to not contain a ladder, otherwise the first contestant would simply say ‘3’ and then rocket up to square 22).

Here’s where zugzwang can come in. Using this game board, let’s assume in this instance that player A is on square 16, player B is on square 10 and player C is on square 13. Player A and B have taken 6 and 4 respectively, and player C has 1, 2, 3 and 5 remaining. The category is “South African major golf championship winners.” Player C may know 5 South Africa major golf championship winners*, but by opting for only 2, it puts player A in an unplayable lie. With only 1, 3 and 5 moves left, whichever one player A hits will land them on a snake.

The next move. As you can see, player A’s three options all lead to snakes.

Of course there are plenty of things to iron out – player A may just purposely get the answer wrong to avoid a snake – but this is a simple concept of how pure zugzwang – i.e. any move a player makes will damn them – could work.

* The correct answers were a knot (of toads, or snakes – naturally!) and a smack (of jellyfish).

**Infact there are 7 at time of writing; Bobby Locke, Gary Player, Ernie Els, Retief Goosen, Trevor Immelman, Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel.

A legendary US game show rule stretcher: Michael Larson and Press Your Luck

Back in April 2014, this publication examined three major examples of contestants on UK game shows who have bent the rules in order to win the most money:

• Mr and Mrs, whereby contestants would agree beforehand to say the answer which was alphabetically first, regardless of whether it was true or not
• Grab a Grand on Noel’s House Party – the precursor to the final round of the Crystal Maze – where professional snooker player John Parrott simply draped his jacket over the fans and took the money Noel Edmonds fed into the machine
• Blockbusters, where contestants realised the value of picking random squares to tot up more money by trying to put off winning the game as much as possible

You can find the 2014 article here. Over in the US, however, one man made these daring ploys look like a petty swindle in comparison.

The game

“I went in there to shoot the moon, so to speak” – Michael Larson

Michael Larson, an “unemployed ice cream salesman”, started taping episodes of the CBS game show Press Your Luck shortly after it first broadcast in September 1983.

Press Your Luck, produced by Bill Carruthers and Bill Mitchell, was in essence a hybrid combination of Wipeout and Strike it Lucky, but with a minimal general knowledge element. Contestants literally ‘pressed their luck’ against a computer screen with 18 squares; the light indicator would move from square to square, seemingly at random, and whatever the contestant hit, they won, or – in the case of a ‘whammy’, whereby the contestant’s total was wiped out in one hit – lost. There were variously sophisticated rules, but this was the gist. Some squares offered an extra spin, contestants could pass their turn over to an opponent, a la Wipeout in a zugzwang-esque strategic play, while if they hit four whammies, they exited the game. The first round was a question and answer to build up spins, while the second round focused mainly on the game board.

In the pre-Millionaire prize ceiling days of the 1980s, when the top prize for an off-peak game show was capped by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) at £6,000, the idea of putting a show like Press Your Luck on UK television screens would have been practically a non-starter. True, the contestants did have to answer general knowledge questions to earn spins in the next round, not unlike Wheel of Fortune, but the game’s self admitted reliance on luck was anathema to UK execs, who would scrutinise The Price is Right to ensure contestants were winning big money prizes by means of skill. In the UK, the idea of contestants picking a square at random was used sparingly in this period (for example, Catchphrase, when selecting the amount of money won in the bonus prize), but not for a whole show.

The problem was, however, that the ‘random’ nature of the board’s movement wasn’t as random as it seemed. Through his video tape recordings on a stop-motion VCR machine, Larson determined there were five looping patterns the light indicator always travelled through. He also determined that two squares – 4 and 8 – not only didn’t contain a whammy, but also offered up an extra spin. Thus, if he could memorise those patterns and keep hitting those two squares, he could continue playing indefinitely.

Michael Larson in-game. The squares highlighted in white, going clockwise from top left, are squares 4 and 8 – whammy-free zones.

Larson went to Los Angeles, armed with this knowledge, and got on the show. The strategy wasn’t entirely flawless. Larson hit a whammy on his very first go, with no money to lose, and on a couple of occasions went wrong, but thankfully for him – if not CBS executives – missing a whammy. He hit square 6, square 17 and square 7 twice, visibly surprised in one of these instances. Square 4 had monetary prizes of $3000, $4000 and $5000 and an extra spin, while square 8 had prizes of $500, $750 and $1000 and an extra spin.

Eventually, Larson clocked up an unprecedented $102,851, so unprecedented it caused the six-digit scoreboard to recalibrate and lose the dollar sign. Mentally drained, he passed, and after a few more jousts with spins he had to play, he had $110,237. The very last spin he took landed unexpectedly on square 17, which earned him a holiday. Square 17, notably, was where he first landed – and hit a whammy.

The end of Press Your Luck arrived when all the spins had run out and it was a head to head showdown. In Larson’s case, this was a mere formality, being more than $100,000 up on his nearest opponent who had spins left. As host Peter Tomarken jokingly remarked when the contestant, Janie Litras, had one spin left: “To say the least, you will have to get something that gives you an additional spin in order to stay in this game and continue, because CBS will relinquish its entire daytime schedule for this show to go on if you keep going.” Litras hit a square containing a Mexican cruise, and the game ended.

The aftermath

Bill Carruthers: “Peter, keep it going as long as you can.”
Peter Tomorken: “Bill…this guy’s gonna walk away with the network.”

Larson’s turn took so long the show had to crudely ‘fall over’ into another episode through a post-edit. The game itself was described as “bedlam” by then-head of CBS daytime programming Michael Brockman. In the control room, the discussion went from ‘how is he doing that?’ to ‘oh my God, he’s doing that’. The atmosphere became tense and quiet. The format had been rumbled, and all the execs could do was watch and pray. It was the complete opposite in the studio, with audible gasps and cheers from the audience as the money went up and up.

The tape is a remarkable watch, with hindsight. Think of it this way: everyone, including every player who had ever previously played on the show, everyone in the audience, the TV critics, everyone, aside from a few technicians, assumed this game was down to luck. And this guy comes on and spins 45 consecutive times without hitting a whammy.

Using the most basic probability, assuming the board goes through all its permutations and each of the three ‘squares within a square’ is revealed, there is a 6-1 chance of hitting a whammy (18 x 3 = 54 / 9 whammies). Ergo, the odds of not hitting a whammy on your first go is 5/6, or 0.833 – an 83% chance. Calculate 0.833 to the power of 15 as probability of independent events, and that turns to 0.064517127213901471941937071349377. Therefore, you have a 6% chance of not hitting a whammy across 15 goes assuming the permutations all go through once. Possible, yes, but a tad unlikely. To take 20 spins without hitting a whammy is a 2% chance. 30 goes means the percentage of not hitting a whammy – assuming it’s still random of course – is 0.4%. 35? 0.1%. By 38 the chances drop to 0.09%, 40 is 0.06%, until we get to 45 – 0.02%. It’s worth noting that this is only theoretical – on many occasions Larson waited an almost interminable amount of time to play each spin – but this hopefully gives some idea as to the odds stacked against him.

After the recording, CBS executives investigated Larson and how he’d totted up his six figure winnings. One of the key indicators noticed was how Larson celebrated as soon as he’d hit the square, without having time to read what was on it – therefore, he had worked the system out. Similarly, while other contestants would spout banalities and over-excited Americanisms such as “big bucks” during their turn, Larson remained silent, deep in concentration. However, they eventually paid him after agreeing he didn’t cheat.

$100,000 up. Note how the scoreboard has to be recalibrated.

The man

“You can like him or not like him, but you can’t help but admire what he did” – Peter Tomarken

Sadly Larson, who was described by his family as having a thirst for knowledge and a desire to make money as quickly as he could, encountered a string of problems following his record breaking win.

An example of the latter was shown when, in November 1984, Larson heard of a local radio promotion whereby if you had a dollar bill with a certain number on it, you would win $30,000. Larson, flush with cash at this point, withdrew his remaining winnings in $1 bills and inspected each one to see if he had the jackpot. He didn’t, and, to add insult to injury, around half of this total was burgled from his house soon afterwards.

Larson consequently moved from being champion of Press Your Luck to being down on his luck. Getting involved with an illegal lottery scheme meant he lived on the run for his final years. Previously, he had contacted the producers of Press Your Luck to ask if he could be featured on a special champion of champions series – an offer which was declined. He died from throat cancer on February 16 1999, aged 49.

The documentary

“I was frightened by that thought it might ruin the show, but it wasn’t my hundred grand that he’d got” – Bill Mitchell

For years, the Larson episodes were suppressed by CBS. As they saw it, it was one of the biggest embarrassments in the network’s history, and they pretended it never existed. In the pre-ubiquitous Internet and YouTube age, the urban myth buster site Snopes.com confirmed the story was true. Sure, many barroom conversations across America might have gone along the lines of ‘hey, didn’t some guy win $100k on Press Your Luck once?’ but that was it – just how CBS wanted it.

Four years after Michael Larson died, the Game Show Network (GSN) put together a documentary entitled “Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal”, pulling together everyone who was part of that remarkable recording, from executives to family to contestants:

Peter Tomarken, alongside the other contestants that day, Ed Long and Janie Litras, was shown how Larson won his game by memorising the patterns of the board. He remarked: “So he had to memorise five patterns, while being under the lights, with me in his face, with the audience, with all the pressure…to be able to identity five different patterns then pick one out of the five to capitalise on is just nothing short of incredible.”

Yet the documentary had a bitter edge to it. Litras described Larson on the recording as “creepy”, and expressed dismay at the manner of his victory. Larson’s ex-wife, Teresa McGlynn, told the filmmakers: “At one point in time, in my life, I really despised Michael Larson. I despised him for all he’d put me through, for what he’s put his son through.” As one commenter described it, it felt as though they had shot the documentary to make Larson look like a ‘sociopath’. At the end of the piece, however, the executives agreed that he deserved his money, and they all raised a toast to Larson’s memory.

So what to make of all this? In this reviewer’s opinion, it’s plain and simple: Michael Larson took on the system and beat it hands down. Of all the participants in the documentary it was host Tomarken, who was killed in an air crash in 2006, who was most gracious. “Michael’s guilty of nothing more than being enterprising,” he said.

It’s worth noting that, back in the 1980s, ‘random’ computer technology wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as today. Many programmes were pseudo-random; it went in a predictable mathematical formula. This is still used today; if you own an entry level mp3 player and use the randomise shuffle for long enough, you can begin to work out which song will come next. The work of Dr. Mads Haahr, of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, helped utilise ‘pure’ randomness through atmospheric noise; the RANDOM.ORG service has existed since 1998. In 2002, when Press Your Luck returned as Whammy!, technology had moved on, and the show was officially “Larson-proof”, as Tomarken put it.

There’s a clear lesson to learn here for executives: don’t assume your format is unbreakable. Before the first Press Your Luck was filmed, CBS execs sat down to assess whether the five looping patterns would be enough to be seen as random. They did, and were proved spectacularly wrong.

Compare this tale to the UK based game show rule stretchers. In those cases, were they ‘cheating’? It depends on how you define the word of course – but if they haven’t broken the rules because it doesn’t exist and they’ve thought out of the box, then what have they done wrong? Therefore, Michael Larson – just an ordinary guy from Ohio – should be seen as a hero, rather than a pariah.

A few thoughts on Deal or No Deal in 2015: Box 23, moving to 3pm, Double Trouble, and more

Back in November 2013, Game Show Gallery posted a missive on Deal or No Deal as it turned eight. At the time, your correspondent argued that the show was nearing the end of its natural life and that it had run its course with the first male jackpot winner, Paddy Roberts. With that, and with a game with a set maximum jackpot, the only statistical anomaly had been solved.

15 months later, however, and a few interesting developments have been made – enough for this publication to revise its previous prediction. The biggest, introduced in January 2014, was Box 23 – an all or (possibly) nothing end game gamble, whereby the contestants could either double their winnings, quarter their winnings, add £10,000 to their total, or leave with their BFH. The box could be bought for the contestant’s current winnings, and wasn’t mandatory.

With a new week-only (for now) feature, Double Trouble, involving – yes, you guessed it – couples, as well as a recent move back to 3pm, this seemed like a relevant time to assess what Deal or No Deal looks like today.

Introduction

When game shows are on the air for several years or more and its popularity is on the wane, producers are left with a decision to make. Do they make gradual but effective changes, do they revamp the whole thing completely, or do they just let it run its natural course? To give examples, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? opted for the former, then hastily moved to option 2 with disastrous results. The Weakest Link went with the latter, although in both cases there’s a proviso, in that their shelf lives were ended when the host called it quits.

Deal or No Deal, however, has clearly gone for option 1. It’s a completely different game to the one which first hit our screens in 2005, but the basic premise hasn’t been altered. The machinations have changed a bit, such as the Banker butting in with mid-round offers, but more on those shortly.

Release those big money balls

Let’s get the aesthetics out of the way first. For our episode review, taken from the February 11 edition here, Ricky and Keri were the contestants. Their names were picked from a bag of balls, which looked rather Lottery-esque, and the balls themselves looked like knock offs from Golden Balls. Well, they had to end up somewhere.

“Split or steal? Sorry, wrong show”

Speaking of the Lottery, the Banker’s first offer comes via a tube – and here we get to our second new feature, the Offer Button, introduced in September 2014. Instead of getting a basic offer, the contestant has to predict what their offer would be based on their first round board, and if they’re close enough they can press the button at any time and the banker has to give them an offer. It’s interesting, and gives more power to the contestants, but it’s another new rule for the audience to remember.

The Banker evidently has a lot more to say these days – well they would, now the show’s been increased by 15 minutes. Their remarks, of course fed through Edmonds, range from insult comedy – asking Keri what she was doing with a man who had “a badger on his head” – to cheap psychology, telling Ricky a certain box had the £250,000. Only the independent adjudicator knows what’s in what box, so this really is a cheap stunt.

Deal or No Deal, meet Mr and Mrs

Evidently these extra 15 minutes can’t just be filled with waffle. To this correspondent, it didn’t feel that padded, to DoND’s credit. Instead what we got, as it’s a couples show, was the Banker’s Breakup Quiz, which attempts to wrestle control back to the Banker after the Offer Button. Each contestant is asked five questions about the other – if they fail to get eight or more of these right, then the Banker can separate the couple and place one in an isolation booth whenever they so wish.

Despite the fact it’s heavily influenced by Mr and Mrs, it represents a good change of pace. Let’s not forget Edmonds exposed the way to cheat on Mr and Mrs back in his House Party days, from contestants who answered multiple choice questions alphabetically first, so you’ll be pleased to know they don’t make that mistake here. Ricky and Keri failed to get eight right, so midway through the following round Keri was sent to the isolation booth.

Even though the show doesn’t feel padded, we were 20 minutes in (including ad breaks) and only six boxes had been opened. Ricky, on his own, deals at £8,000 with a decimated red side but £15,000, £75,000, £100,000 and £250,000 still remaining. Here’s where things get a little too close for comfort.

Is that your final answer? A question of ethics

Ricky and Keri are isolated, but the home audience can hear what Keri is saying when Ricky is asked the question. She says deal. Ricky, unbeknownst to this, deals. Game over, one would think – but no. The Banker calls, and explains/lies that Keri had strongly advocated a no deal, and therefore is “commanded” to ask the question again. Ricky says deal again – but this isn’t right.

Take Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, for example. A contestant is on £125,000, and has an inclination towards answer C for the quarter million, but they don’t risk it. They tell Chris Tarrant they want to walk away, Tarrant confirms. Once the applause dies down, Tarrant then tells the contestant: “It’s not answer B. Will you still go for the £250,000?”

It would just never happen. The most important thing about Millionaire was that once a contestant said they wanted to walk away, they could walk away. That’s why they could ramp the tension so high in the first place. And given the Banker had told a blatant lie anyway to set this scene up, it felt awfully contrived and unfair. Imagine, in our hypothetical Millionaire situation, that Tarrant had told the contestant it wasn’t B, the contestant played on and chose C, only for Tarrant to say it actually was B and he threw in a red herring. It would be appalling.

Thankfully, Ricky held his nerve and dealt. “Always worth a try,” the Banker commented afterwards. Sorry, but we’re not convinced. There’s holding your nerve, and then there’s contriving things – although it has to be said that it would (read: should!) be in the contestants’ application form to prepare them for this kind of situation.

Box 23

Good job Ricky and Keri didn’t buy Box 23, else they’d have gone home with £2k instead of £8k.

From that, we go to Box 23, which is a very, very good idea, for two reasons. It kills off two nagging problems with the show Game Show Gallery pointed out in its November 2013 article; the maximum prize ceiling, and the ‘over before it’s over’ rule.

This correspondent argued that with the first male jackpot winner, all the boxes had been ticked. Not anymore – contestants can now win £500,000, if they hit the jackpot and then go for the gamble. Similarly, the persistent nag that players who deal early (as Ricky and Keri did) simply go through the motions for the rest of the show is also put to bed, as Box 23 makes you watch until the end.

Game Show Gallery thoroughly approves. One of the major headaches for producers is striking the balance between making sure a contest isn’t over before the end, and putting too much emphasis on the finale making the previous 25/40/55 minutes irrelevant. Box 23 treads this line nicely.

The move to 3pm: a nail in the coffin?

Alongside all this, Deal or No Deal has been moved back in the schedule to 3pm, which certainly raised eyebrows. The 4pm slot has now been taken up by US-influenced reality show Shipping Wars, with Come Dine With Me at 4:45pm. Countdown, by contrast, is now back at 2:10pm.

This move prompted Game Show Gallery to remember when Fifteen to One was moved back to that slot; a year later, the show was cancelled. Today, with the prevalence of catch-up telly and Netflix, this isn’t as relevant and doesn’t affect the oxygen supply as much. Nevertheless, moving TV shows back has never been a positive sign.

This is how it affected the ratings, as noted by Richard Osman: Countdown 0.4m, Deal or No Deal 0.45m, with a peak at 0.55m, and Shipping Wars 0.43m. Bother’s Bar had an interesting take on the figures:

I think the missed story is however C4 try and kill Countdown, it ain't happening.

— Brig Bother (@BothersBar) February 11, 2015

When we analysed Deal or No Deal back in late 2013, it was getting between 0.8m and 0.9m, which was steady, if not spectacular. Channel 4, as a broadcaster with a remit to produce alternative, independent programming, doesn’t need to chase ratings – but this is still an interesting comparison.

Conclusion

“It’d be a major surprise if Britain’s favourite box opening show didn’t make at least its 10th birthday,” this publication wrote on the occasion of its eighth. “But like it or not, there is plenty about today’s show that simply doesn’t sit right with viewers.”

Things needed to be changed – and they have. Some, like Box 23, have worked wonders, while others, such as asking the walkaway question twice, haven’t. The key, however, is that even though the show is increasingly looking more like psychological warfare than a game show, it’s kept the machinations in place, crucially made incremental changes rather than rip the whole thing up and start again, and it’s made an hour of TV less padded than before.

Given where it was 18 months ago, things are looking rosier for Endemol’s poster child – but maybe keep an eye on those ratings just in case.

Greg’s Full House, apps, and assessing the potential of new tech in game shows

Earlier this month Greg Scott, late of Quizmania’s parish, revealed his ambition to present an updated version of bingo classic Bob’s Full House, called, naturally, Greg’s Full House. Scott was speaking on Quizmania co-creator Chuck Thomas’ Croydon radio show (listen to the segment here), and mentioned how there could be an interactive element to the updated game through a play-along app.

This comment made Game Show Gallery ask; what other emerging technology is out there, and are game shows on the cutting edge?

Picture credit: TV Cream

It’s worth noting first that plenty of game shows in the past, with soaring ratings and agreeable budgets, were keen on exploiting the new technology of the time:

–  The $64,000 Question utilised an innovative glass screen to read Bob’s questions out. Less remembered was that another Bob, Holness, used a tablet computer to read out questions on Raise the Roof in 1995.
–  Family Fortunes’ supercomputer, Mr. Babbage, was a superb feat of engineering, while Dusty Bin, believe it or not, was state of the art tech in the 1970s.
–  Two Chris Tarrant vehicles utilised the then cutting edge technology of electronic handsets which fed answers into a computer; Everybody’s Equal, and the fastest finger round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Later series of The Krypton Factor utilised similar in its Observation round.

But what can be updated for the 21st century? Here are a few thoughts:

Tablets

With increasing power of handheld computers, the iPad seems like an easy win for producers. It’s happening already; Sandi Toksvig reads the questions out on new Fifteen to One from a tablet, for instance. Yet as previously mentioned, Bob Holness was doing that on Raise the Roof as far back as 1995. How else could they be utilised?

This publication first thought of TV Scrabble. The last iteration, circa 2002, saw contestants input their answers using tablet computers and styluses. Touch screens would certainly make that easier. Yet tablets are really more about convenience rather than stunning high tech, so expect it to be just a more sophisticated pack of questions – however, on the new Fifteen to One, Toksvig is now able to assess the state of play and see how many questions have been answered by whom. An A5 card can’t do that.

Apps

Tablets may not be that exciting – but the apps contained within them are. Popular shows, such as The Chase and Pointless, already have playable apps which aren’t a specific measurement of how a contestant would fare on the actual show, more a mix of the general standard and a bit of fun thrown in.

Picture credit: ITV

Take apps as a tool for audience participation however, as Scott suggested for ‘Greg’s Full House’, and you’re really talking. It could be used for a number of devices.

Real-time analysis could show who was playing best out of the audience at home, with a daily winner receiving a small prize. Seminal yet long-forgotten Challenge show Defectors trialled a similar thing with its studio audience. The format was brilliant. Contestants had to score the most points to win the game – however points were determined by how many of the audience thought they were going to get the question right. Smarming, begging and downright lying were employed by the contestants to curry audience favour. For the viewers, the audience member who selected the most winners won a prize of their own at the end, and host Richard Orford would periodically give updates.

Similarly, it could potentially be used as a competition mechanism. Now don’t worry, this publication hasn’t forgotten the ITV phone-in scandal of 2008 which practically ended the quiz competition as we knew it. But if it’s through using an app, then there doesn’t have to be a charge for entering a competition – a bit similar to using social media to register your entry. Yes, it will go down as a loss, but if it attracts 200,000 more viewers, and a thriving community alongside the audience base, then it could be worth a shot.

Of course, these days taking an audience figure as stock isn’t much of an indicator because of the prevalence of catch-up TV through iPlayer, Netflix, and so on – but more of that later.

Wearable technology and virtual reality

This is a potentially huge area of improvements. Instead of getting the contestants to go all the way to a flight simulator for the Krypton Factor, why not hook them up to an Oculus Rift instead? Similarly the Adventure Game could be completely reimagined for a new audience with VR capabilities.

Krypton Factor response round, 1992. Would anyone care to activate the cube? Didn’t think so.

What’s better – and more finance-efficient too, for any producers listening – is that you could do away with fancy sets and designs. Imagine the vast landscape of The Crystal Maze but in a virtual reality headset. Of course, part of the thrill of these programmes is to take on the physical challenge, and this could easily turn into a discussion about whether this is just an updated Gamesmaster.

Yet subtle changes could work. Contestants given smartwatches to assess where they are on the map. Anneka Rice on Treasure Hunt not having to faff about finding a public payphone – or use a phone at all, for that matter. Fitness trackers on Gladiators, anyone?

It has to be noted though the growth of satellite navigation technology (through smartphones in particular) has practically knocked Treasure Hunt into a cocked hat of irrelevance. This isn’t to say it can’t come back with contestants only utilising maps, but it would be a bit of an anachronism.

Netflix

To this publication, the key to Netflix is not just being able to watch whenever, wherever on your terms, but it’s more that producers don’t have to be strained by set timeslots.

Take Fifteen to One as a classic example. At its best, the show would have to cram every last second of action into its 27 minute timeslot, occasionally reducing the closing credits to a 5 second fadeout. Other times, host William G Stewart would procrastinate beyond belief, going down the Finals Board with a fine toothcomb, discussing the Elgin Marbles, and so on. Game Show Gallery has touched upon dodgy format issues and timeslots in the past, but think about it: with Netflix, you’re the boss. Many Netflix original series employ this tactic, including Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. Episodes of the former range from 51 to 92 minutes in length.

The issue with this is that a viewer will spot an 18 minute episode compared to a 28 and think “well those contestants must have been rubbish; I don’t think I’ll bother with that.” But if that’s the case in a regular 30 minute timeslot, viewers may end up making that decision anyway. What’s more, the oft-cited bugbear of banter, backchat and waffle bloating proceedings to 45 minutes or an hour could be a thing of the past. Could be; but let’s not get our hopes up too much.

How would Greg’s Full House get on?

This publication would like to think it would work, but is not at all convinced, for two reasons:

1) Bingo uptake: While online bingo is surging, regular down-the-hall bingo isn’t.
2) It’s been done: Lucky Numbers, One to Win (no, not the Lottery game), The Biggest Game In Town, and Lingo (well, ish).

“And here is your host of Lingo…Dr. Niles Crane!” Of course not. It’s actually Martin Daniels – son of Paul.

The main counter-argument to this, however, is that while the aforementioned re-did Bob’s Full House, they all did it rather badly.

The Biggest Game In Town, in particular, had the play-along element if you’d bought that week’s Radio Times, but this publication remembers getting annoyed more because the show failed to justify its lofty claims. If you’re The Price is Right, with cars, holidays, insane audience and William G Stewart in a gold spangly jacket every week, then yes, go nuts. Daytime bingo, no. It did have a fair bit of lolly for a daytime quiz (theoretically £12,300), although the law of diminishing returns applied for the end game, which is a great way of marketing a game show (Deal or No Deal, The Weakest Link) but is a bit of a swizz on the viewer.

Ironically, the ‘biggest game in town’ was given Granada’s smallest, pokiest studio to record in. We’re hardly talking Blockbusters on the expenses, folks.

Conclusion

So are game show producers missing a trick today with new technology? It has to be noted that some game shows (Raise the Roof, The Chair) fall into the trap of thinking too much over the graphics, the tech and the set design that they completely flunk it on the format.

And it also has to be noted how quizzes actively dislike technology, if anyone who’s had the temerity to check their text messages during pub quiz night at their local can testify. One quiz which has stedfastly kept itself to itself while technology has coursed around it is, of course, Countdown. Just for the record, Dictionary Corner doesn’t use an anagram solving kit, either.

As for the future, why not let producers storm up an idea for a game show with geeks truly at heart? That was the premise behind Computer Challenge, hosted by science broadcaster Brian J. Ford, back in 1986. Why not today?

A bit more on the ‘over before it’s over’ game show no-no

There are two things you should never do in entertainment, the age-old maxim goes; work with animals, or children. Endless blooper reels are testament to the unpredictability that causes. But in game show land, there’s one more cardinal sin for your format: the over before it’s over rule.

Game Show Gallery briefly mentioned it in the review of the new Celebrity Squares, but it’s worth going into in a little more detail. If your game is suitably concluded yet there’s still time to go, it’s a nightmare for producers.

It’s the same sort of sinking feeling sport execs feel when their big football game is 4-0 after half an hour; unless you’ve got exceptional circumstances*, the vast majority of viewers will look at the score, look at the time, and switch over. Sport is sport though, whereas game shows are at heart, games.

Here are a few examples of game shows over the years which have fallen foul of this issue:

1. Treasure Hunt. This was the archetypal over before it’s over. Contestants would have forty five minutes to uncover five clues and find the treasure. The problem was – and it happened more often than you think – if they still had to uncover three clues, and there was 10 minutes on the clock, you just knew they weren’t going to make it. And they still had to play out time.

Take a look at this clip from You Bet, which occasionally suffered from similar problems. It became obvious very early on that this challenger wasn’t going to win, but there’s still three agonising minutes to go. Bob Mills, in his inimitable style and with license to take the piss, does exactly that.

2. Everybody’s Equal. This late night show, presented by Chris Tarrant, suffered one of the all time game show nightmares. The format was straightforward: 200 contestants in the audience, multiple choice questions asked, weed out the 200 to 10 for the second half. Except for one occasion.

With about 160 left in, the question was asked: How many seconds are there in a day? 156 picked for one answer, feeling quite satisfied, safety in numbers and so on. Unfortunately, 156 people got it wrong, and the round ended there and then, leaving Tarrant desperately trying to fill time.

If anyone remembers Everybody’s Equal, you’ll remember the witless Four to Follow section which tracked what the show’s ‘computer’ (read: producers) believed were the four smartest contestants. UKGameshows points out the feature, which was pure filler, “if anything…seemed to detract from the quiz itself.” Given the Four to Follow carried over into Whittle, the cheap and cheerful Channel 5 knock-off presented by Tim Vine, it was a surprise.

Whittle wouldn’t learn these lessons. An early edition got as far as the 10 final contestants with the first half going perfectly smoothly; but in the very first question of the second half, only one person correctly identified a picture of Bungle, one of the characters from children’s TV favourite Rainbow, automatically making them the winner. Vine, at this point inexperienced in television presenting, cottoned on straight away, and had to fill time on the hoof in a manner not too dissimilar to Tarrant all those years ago. The result, as one might imagine, was toe-curling TV.

Of course, with both programmes being cheap and cheerful, the television gods wouldn’t exactly hammer them down for these cock-ups. Other interesting moments in Whittle’s brief history included an episode which was mixed so badly both edits could be heard at various points in the show; and an edition whereby a Japanese tourist, bussed in by a travel agent who had no idea the game show would involve audience participation, miraculously made the final 10 by pure button bashing despite having zero command of the English language.

3. Countdown. This is only a small feature, but it’s still worth noting. If contestants were more than 20 points up and only the final numbers game and Conundrum to come, then it was over as a contest. The one little side note here is that, if you’re a serious Countdowner, then you can go for a ‘perfect game’ – being able to get the longest word from each letter game, 10 points on each numbers game as well as the conundrum.

And here are some which have taken steps to prevent it:

1. The Krypton Factor. “The end of the round, the end of the contest, and the winner, with a Krypton Factor of 46, the journalist from Kennington, London, Andrew Craig!” Craig romped to victory in the 1992 final because of his outstanding general knowledge – a round which prevents the over before it’s over rule.  The preceding five rounds were marked 10, 6, 4 and 2, while general knowledge was 2 points for a correct answer, 2 points deducted for a wrong answer in 75/90/100 seconds dependent on the year.

There were complaints that this demeaned the show. How could someone who did poorly in the previous five rounds win the title United Kingdom Superperson because they were a pub quiz bore, they cried? But that was the point: if someone was more than 10 points ahead after round five, what was the point of watching till the end? Ironically Craig, who was behind in both his heat and group final before roaring back and scoring 16+ points in General Knowledge, was ahead by that stage in the Grand Final.

2. Pointless. In the first round, each contestant in the pair has to pick an answer from the board. Good answers receive minimal points, bad answers receive lots of points, and incorrect answers get the maximum 100 points.  If the first team, for instance, scored two wrong answers, then they were on 200 points. If the other two teams had answered correctly, then you knew the first team was out. Here’s how they got around that though: it’s still worth other teams answering, because a ‘pointless’ answer adds money to the overall jackpot.

3. A Question of Sport. Traditionally, the closing round was the One Minute Round, in which teams had to answer nine questions in a minute, ranging from  bog standard question-answer to fill in the gaps. This was changed to a generic On the Buzzer round with a non-specific time limit, which also drew moans and complaints, but it’s the same effect at work here.

Game Show Gallery always groans when a game show opens a second half with double money, as it’s the laziest device ever, but in retrospect it’s a decent mechanism to avoid this problem. Family Fortunes is the classic example of this; one family can win all three rounds in the first half, but lose one in the second half (as so often happened) and suddenly the other family was in front.

Deal or No Deal was another show that aimed to halt this problem. In the very early days of the show, players could (and did) deal early. To fill the time, the game was played as if they had carried on, in a ‘here’s what you could have won’ style. To this reader, it was a bit like playing a game of pool and potting the black on the first shot. You keep on playing, to get your quid’s worth, but you know the result. Subsequently, the Banker started offering more deals and box swaps to keep the player in the game longer.

Either way, it’s worth noting that if you have a format, you’ve got to get the balance right. Make sure each game is relevant to the very end, but don’t make the end game so important it makes the format unfair.

Addendum: Arsenal beat Reading 7-5 in the League Cup in 2012, having been 0-4 down after half an hour. Sorry, Reading fans, but it was remarkable.