Duel or No Duel

Oh, ITV1. We've given you nothing but praise over the past few weeks, and how do you repay us? By scheduling another hour-long quiz show that is quite tedious to watch.

Today was the premiere of greatly-advertised Duel, a game show which despite getting a lot of publicity all week didn't tell us anything about the game itself. Presented by Nick Hancock, a man with as little charisma as a toe, it breaks the mold of question-and-answer game shows by having the option for the contestants to reply 'all answers' to each of the questions. Let me explain further.

"Welcome to the Duel Arena" exclaims Hancock, "where over the next few weeks and months, we will be making dreams come true". It's sweet to think that the show will be lasting months. Nick introduces us to the first two contestants, Matt and Karen. I'd have given them hilarious nicknames if they weren't so horribly dull. An attempted explanation about how the game works is provided by Hancock; "We'll give you one question between you and four possible answers. You are then given ten chips, and you must place a chip on your answer. If you're not sure about an answer, you can put your chips down on more than one answer. You then can lock down, or accelerate the gameplay. Each chip that is on a wrong answer is then eliminated, but the prize fund is then increased by £1,000". See. If only Deal or No Deal was that simple.

The first question is asked. "In a game of cricket, how many balls are bowled in an over?". Matt puts down his answer, 'B. 6'. Karen puts down her answer. 'A. 5, B. 6, C. 8 and D. 10'. Karen thinks she's playing Battleship.

The game plods along. Because Karen used four of her chips for her answer, she uses three of them. This game begins to make a lot of sense. Obviously, whoever runs out of chips first loses, making the other person the automatic winner. Not so. You have to win four games in a row in order to win the jackpot.

Four games in a row? Statistically, this game could go on forever. I'm glad Nick mentioned that it'd go on for months, otherwise I'd go crazy. If I was a game show fan, that is. Which I'm not.

So, Matt wins the first round. He can now choose his next opponent. Unsurprisingly, he goes for the young attractive woman. She is Sherise, a flight attendant. The game is over quite quickly, with an odd moment where Sherise seems pretty happy to think that having a knowledge of the Sugababes is more worthwhile than knowing what 7 x 6 is. Then again, she is a flight attendant.

Luckily, after Matt wins two games in a row, he's given two options: keep playing for the grand total jackpot prize, or walk away with £10,000. At this point, orchestral music is used for dramatic effect... quick camera shots of Matt's face and the cash prize are juxtaposed. Anticlimactically, Matt takes his prize and walks off apathetically, leaving Nick Hancock to quickly announce the winner of the first episode.

I left it at that point. When I noticed that what was happening was the same thing over and over again, my brain switched off. I also realised that for a high-stakes fast-paced quiz show, only eight questions were asked. Why can't TV quiz shows be about questions anymore? I miss Wipeout.

The Good Kind of Countdown

Today, Channel 4 celebrates their 25th Anniversary. This is a fact that I don't much care for. Sure, they've had a lot of hit documentaries and shows, but all of that becomes pointless when you compare it to the amount of old Simpsons repeats, spectacularly irrelevant chat shows and Big Brother. The channel has had a lot more misses than hits.

However, a fact that does interest me is that it is also the 25th anniversary of Countdown. This game show, for people outside the UK, consists of two people choosing an assortment of letters and trying to make words out of them. It sounds horrendously dull, but it is in fact the perfect game show. And because it is perfect, it has lasted so long.

It's a simple set, the rules are easy and it's a game that people at home can also play. It can be patronising at time, but that's so the old people watching with their cats feel like somebody is visiting them. It's never controversial, never pointlessly mean to their contestants and best of all, the grand prize at the end is a set of dictionaries. Dictionaries! You know what this means? You''ll never get greedy gits who are only on the show for big cash prizes like you get on Deal or No Deal.

I mentioned how it is such a simple premise. Nowadays, when a new game show is commsioned, it has to be original and fresh. My flatmate, JoeyJ, watched the entirety of Brian Connely's new vehicle Dirty Rotten Cheater yesterday, and still wasn't able to explain what the rules of the game were.

Countdown seriously cannot compare with other game shows. It's in a class of it's own. Not only that, even the dumbest of individuals like myself can take 45 minutes out of their day where they can pretend to be smart. And when you compare the fact that the first question The Weakest Link today was "What is the first letter of the alphabet", you realise that you really are talking about two different shows.

Ask The (Dwindling) Audience

According to The Sun (four words that form an inauspicious start to any blog entry,) the idiot bosses of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are creating a spin-off quiz show based on - get this - the show's '50:50' lifeline. In the show, contestants will be presented with four answers to a question, and will have to pick the two most obviously wrong ones while claiming it to be a random choice. No, only joking. In fact, according to what "an insider" told the "newspaper":

“The couples will be asked a question and then given an answer.

“They can either accept that answer or gamble on another one.

“It’s quite a tense game as the first answer will often sound like the right one.”

Now, this all sounds like a relatively sensible idea, were it not for the facts that a) there's already been a game show called 50:50; and b) the precise format of the suggested show has already been done. Now, to be fair to them, Take It or Leave It is on a relatively obscure channel (Challenge on Sky Digital and maybe Virgin Media or something) and it's possible that 2waytraffic have simply bought the rights to the format. Or already own the format and in fact produced Take It or Leave It and are simply retitling it and flogging it to ITV. (Don't think I've researched this blog.)

Anyway, since it may be heading to an inferior mainstream channel near you sometime, maybe I should explain a bit about the show. Take It or Leave It is a show themed around the idea of deciding between taking what is on offer or rejecting it in favour of an unseen alternative (I know! I had that idea in 2002. It's so obvious!) and more importantly, shoehorning in the question "do you want to take it... or leave it?" as many times as humanly possible. So to begin with, one of the competing couples (couples - how quiantly early-nineties) sees a little video of another couple, and decide whether to take them as their opponents or leave them for an unseen couple. The main section of the game is incredibly dull, and takes ages to explain, but suffice to say it boils down to a true or false quiz and some Deal or No Deal-ey guessing. At the end of it, one couple wins, and goes through to the final round to play for the money they accumulated in the main game - likely ten grand or so.

The final, thankfully, is very clever and quite fun to watch (so if you see the show in the listings - it lasts an hour - only watch it for the last twenty minutes or so). The couple see five questions, each of which comes with a suggested answer, which they either take if they beleive it to be correct, or leave it in favour of the alternative answer which they haven't seen. Now, when this happens in the main game they're then told whether their answer is correct straight away, so all this taking-or-leaving business is just dressing up a true or false question. But here it works a bit differently. They answer the five questions without being told which (if any) are correct. Six safes are presented, one of which contains the prize. The contestants can guess at a safe, or else try to eliminate empty safes with their questions. The five questions are randomly re-ordered, under the condition that the questions that were answered correctly come first, followed by the ones they got wrong. After being presented with each question, they can decide whether to play the question with the answer they came up with, or stop and guess a safe. Playing a correctly-answered question removes an empty safe; playing an incorrectly-answered one ends the game and the prize is forfeit. So if you're confident of a question that hasn't come up yet, you can breeze through all the ones that come up before it, since you must still be on the questions you got right. But if you get right to the end, and the last question you're not quite sure of, it gets trickier. Do you take the 50:50 chance on the questions, or on the two safes remaining? You probably reckon you're more than 50% sure your answer is right. But what would have been the odds you got all five correct, and then they happened to put the slightly dodgy one last? It's all good tense fun.

So, if this show does come to ITV, what do you think they'll do? Come up with a better main game to bring it up to the standard of the final? Or just make the whole thing a sub-Deal guessing game with a few true-or-false questions? If you answer after lines have closed, your entry will not be counted but you will still be charged.

Identity Crisis

I haven't had that much time to watch TV recently. It's mainly because I've moved in with some mates in Newcastle, and the television priorities mainly lie with Film 4 or whichever Rugby match is showing. Talking of which, I've really started getting into Rugby. It's amazing how you can get a score as astonishing as 97-3 in less than ninety minutes.

However, yesterday we were all able to catch a bemusing new quiz show. "Identity" on BBC2 showcases the latest notch of Donny Osmond's career. The rule of the game involves a middle-aged person trying to guess what twelve people did for a living. The occupations listed as choices varied from proper jobs (such as "Magistrate" and "Club Dancer") to just simple facts about about a person (including "Doctor Who Fan" and "Had a Hair Transplant")

If this didn't sound bemusing enough, the twelve people are basically dressed up for their jobs. It came as no surprise to see that the guy in the leotard was the gymnast, and the guy dressed as Doctor Who was the damn Doctor Who fan.

Another pointless gameshow with no questions. Deal or No Deal has ruined a generation of quiz shows.

These Four People are Amongst the Greatest Quiz Players in Britain, and CJ is Among The Greatest Quiz Players in Britain

Eggheads is getting ridiculous now. I drew this a while ago and it's just getting more and more relevant:

(I didn't upload it right away, not least because it very quickly reminded me of an old Far Side cartoon which used the same exact premise, although didn't make a point about Eggheads, possibly because Eggheads hadn't been invented then.)

It's what, fifty-eight shows in a row now that the Eggheads have won? It's hard, sometimes, to imagine that it isn't rigged, when there are questions assigned, supposedly at random, that are anywhere from blatantly unanswerable to the downright simplistic, and the same team wins every week. I don't care how smart they are, you'd think random question assignment would have done for them by now.

This is made worse by the format: I have done a Monte Carlo simulation (oh, yes) of 10,000 games of a slightly simplified version of Eggheads and 10,000 games of a more straightforward game. I've assumed that all Eggheads know 90% of all answers and all players know 60% of all answers. If the players went one-on-one for 15 questions and the team with most correct answers won, the Eggheads ought to win 98.66% of all games. Under the current rules, the Eggheads should only win 94.25% of games. That's still a lot, obviously, but there's a 96.77% chance that they should lose at least one game out of any random fifty-eight game sequence. Especially since for every ludicrously easy question (that any team would know) and every ludicrously hard question (that even Eggheads don't know) the balance between my guesses of 90% and 60% get nearer and nearer together. If it was all questions like that, the challengers ought win every other show.

So can we have a win for the challengers soon, please? If not, I may end up genuinely believing the show is actively being rigged. And nobody wants that.

Update:
Another thing about Eggheads is that the general knowledge questions in the last round are often very easy (I can tell because even I can answer a lot of them), and the sudden death games are almost unwinnable. You can answer all fifteen multiple choice questions correctly, and still lose out just because of one ludicrously difficult sudden death round.

It's almost as if the show is designed to make the Eggheads look better than they are: the several-round mechanic and the contestants-pick-of-competitors mechanic ought to put the Eggheads at a disadvantage, but when you get down to it, the whole game boils down to one round at the end, and that round is very hard for the Eggheads to lose: the questions are mostly of a level that no self-respecting Egghead should ever get wrong, and the challengers can't win unless they do get them wrong. The head-to-dead questions are very difficult, allowing a lucky team to knock out many Eggheads, but then the difficulty level of the questions is suddenly dropped, meaning the remaining Eggheads are still probably going to win. A conspiracy theorist would suggest that this was deliberate.

I don't see why they'd do that, though. Personally, I'd think the show a lot more exciting if the Eggheads lost sometimes. This isn't Takeshi's Castle. Even Knightmare and The Crystal Maze didn't go fifty-eight weeks without a win.

Can I Poke a Friend on Facebook, Chris?

A new series of blog favourite Deal or No Deal started on Monday. (I use the phrase 'blog favourite' only to annoy everyone else who contributes to this blog.) I found it slightly disturbing watching it really. You see, I occasionally have dreams where I'm watching TV shows, and these shows are invariably different in subtle, slightly freaky ways. These are really astonishingly mundane dreams, but that's not the point. The point is that Deal* has been made slightly different in largely the same way. These are not changes what would concern any normal person - the set is slightly new, the opening credits are a bit different, some new incidental music, and the phone-in competition has been changed to appease ICSTIS (see How Dare You Mislead The Very Stupid? below) - but they concern me. Why can't everything just stay exactly the same?

In a move desired to drive lovers of routine and of slightly tired game show formats to nervous breakdowns, the same has been done to ITV1's premiere quizzer Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, only, this being ITV1, they've done it to a much less forgiveable degree. When Millionaire* returns on Saturday (with a special celebrity edition of course; this is ITV1) some changes will be afoot. Most notably, contestants will only have to answer 12 questions to win the prize. Cleverly, this has been accomplished by removing the first three questions that are pathetically easy anyway, so that the first question is now worth £500. Hopefully, this has been done with an eye to getting through more contestants and more interesting questions, but a more worrying and likely scenario is that it is so the show can be padded out with more crap like the 'text game' that has blighted recent series.

Not content with this change, the middle rungs of the money ladder have also been messed with. instead of the pleasingly mathematical-looking £4k-£8k-£16k-£32k-£64k-£125k-£250k-£500k-£1m, it will apparently proceed: £5k-£10k-£20k-£50k-£75k-£150k-£250k-£500k-£1m. While I can see some kind of logic in switching things around to put a smaller increase after the last milestone (now £50k) where there's no effective risk anyway, this clearly is just change for change's sake. It's wrong. I'm personally too old to be said to have grown up with Millionaire, but I assume kids today are born with an innate knowledge of the rules of the show in the same way I was with The Crystal Maze or Family Fortunes. I'm sure ITV1 will say they're trying to 'refresh the format' and 'shake things up', and the falling viewing figures may seem to justify this. That's all well and good with The X Factor. But there's a higher responsibility here. ITV are messing with our culture! (More specifically, 2waytraffic are, having recently bought the rights to the format from creators Celador. Just so you know who to write in to.) I frankly don't care if their viewing figures fall to three people and their pets. This sort of fiddling isn't going to help. Neither is finding contestants by audition as is now going to happen - it would take an entire new rant to cover what's wrong with that.

So stop it, ITV. Stop being useless. Please.


*Why anyone uses abbreviations like DoND and WWTBAM is beyond me. Look how stylish I look referring to Deal and Millionaire like that. Lovely.

Up! In the sky! It's Producer Man!

There are moments when I genuinely question the sanity of American television producers.

I can't say I watched a tremendous amount of television before I moved to Los Angeles. It became such that if I was sat in front of the TV for any amount of time that it was usually because I was watching Doctor Who or Torchwood. I still don't watch a lot of television here since moving out to the US, but when I do it is statistically likely that I'll be watching something of American origin.

This is not, strictly speaking, accurate. Since I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport I think I've watched more British television or television created by British people than I had in the UK the previous month. When you're sat in a house in LA, drinking tea and watching Jeeves & Wooster, you really begin to wonder if you've slipped into a parallel universe.

One of the channels that I have been keeping an eye on is the Scifi Channel. Being a huge Scifi fan, I like to keep check on what the channel is showing or what it will be showing. I recently discovered that Flash Gordon would be returning in a brand new television series, but that's not even the worst discovery I've made so far.

Upon browsing the Scifi Channel website, I discovered that they're running a Reality TV show called - you're going to love this - Who Wants To Be a Superhero? Ten people have to live as Superheroes of their own creation, wearing costumes they've made themselves, with the winning character becoming immortalised in a comic book.

Yeah. That's American television for you.

You See Through Fads And Your Crazy Phases, Yeah!

I was channel hopping a few days ago, when I happened across a show I'd never seen or heard of before, which upon later investigation turned out to be BBC2's Let Me Entertain You. I didn't know what was going on. Almost immediately, a pair of dancing magicians were introduced, and a small clock started counting in one corner, while another counter slowly increased from 0% in another. This puzzled me, so I kept watching. After a minute and a half, the right hand counter reached 50% and a sound instructed the dancing magicians to please clear off now, which they politely did. They had yet to perform any magic. Because I am more intelligent than a melon, I successfully inferred more or less the entire premise of the show from this. (For the record, I would like to ask what kind of mind goes to see a talent show and presses their "get 'em off" button within two seconds of an act starting. That seems more than slightly perverse to me.)

Now far be it for me to point out horrendous flaws in game show mechanics, but it seems to me that this programme is essentially little more than channel-hopping for the terminally lazy and suggestible.

After this, a singer came on and I turned over. Hence, by its own scoring system, Let Me Entertain You scored a little over three minutes and failed to win the £1000 prize. Oh, well. Can't win 'em all, eh?

The One Where Underdog Gets Away

It's a very human thing to root for the underdog. That's why there are no films about a boxer who is expected to win, triumphing over no adversity, and coming out, as was presupposed, on top. I always wanted the kids on Knightmare to do well. Of course, they never did. They'd always get killed in a corridor of blades, or accidentally issue their interpid duneoneer clear and explicit instructions to walk off a nearby cliff. But the fact that almost nobody ever won that show (eight teams won it altogether) meant that every contestant was an underdog, and since (unlike, say, Fifteen To One, there was no requirement for any of the underdogs to win, it made you want them to do well. It made me want that, anyway. You may have just wanted it to go away. The same is true of the even more unwinnable Takeshi's Castle. You always want someone to win, but they never ever did. (I'm told exactly one person ever won Takeshi's Castle. I think they got a silver-plated chequebook and pen or something.)

So why can't I apply the same logic to The Crystal Maze? The contestants on that didn't win very often either, and there's no requirement there that anyone should, and yet invariably you sit there for an hour just hoping that they'll all get locked in before they reach the Dome and there'll be nobody there to gather tokens (and then in one case the screen would go black and it would tell you that the team captain had died since the show was filmed and you'd feel all guilty, unless like me you have no heart, in which case you might vaguely wonder if he died as a direct result of his apparent inability to complete simple tasks). My theory is that it is a survival mechanism.

The players on Takeshi's Castle and Knightmare didn't win much because those are genuinely difficult games. The contestants on The Crystal Maze didn't win much because they were a bunch of incompetent blundering buffoons. Yesterday I watched a woman with bad hair wire up a giant button to a giant battery and then stand around like a mute Dalek trying to work out what she had to do next, as if it was somehow not the most obvious thing in the world. I think that if you were rooting for them, you would get frustrated and tear out all your hair. Then you wouldn't get a date and wouldn't reproduce. This is an evolved survival mechanism.

If we wanted contestants on The Crystal Maze to win, we would die out. That is clearly scientific fact.

Panel Beating

I fell firmly into the Jekyll camp on Saturday night. This was due largely to my long-standing belief that anything Steven Moffat writes will be brilliant and anything hosted by Ant and/or Dec will be dismal. (Whenever I see Ant and Dec I find that I like them and hate whatever they're presenting. I can't seem to help it.) I loved Jekyll, though I have to say it puzzled me somewhat. A comic writer and a cast best known for comedy (Peep Show, Coupling, the Yellow Pages ads, Green Wing, and so forth) come together to create a drama. Okay, I guess that makes sense. I look forward to seeing the BBC's new comedy made by newsreaders, and sports coverage done by classically trained actors.

But when it had finished, the television was left on, and thus watched BBC One's new comedy panel show Would I Lie To You largely by default. The show is a by-the-numbers panel game in the truest traditions of by-the-numbers panel games: one host, two regular captains, two or four guests, a theme, and no apparent desire to answer questions from either team. The only thing it appears to be lacking so far is one team that always wins.

To host it, the BBC have come crawling back to Angus Deayton. This seems strange to me. You will of course recall that they fired him from incredibly-similarly-named panel show Have I Got News For You some years ago, and since then Have I Got News For You has been running with increasingly dreary (and incompetent) "guest presenters". Now the BBC have apparently forgiven Deayton enough that he can host Would I Lie To You, but not enough to give him his old job back on Have I Got News For You. There's probably some reason of policy for this, and personally I expect him to appear as a contestant any day now. Meanwhile, the team captains are David Mitchell, the man who puts the Mitchell in Mitchell and Webb, and Lee Mack, who as far as I can tell appeared out of nowhere about a year ago and I'm very glad he did.

"We start, conventionally enough, with round one". It's like a quiz show virus. Eventually all shows will be announced this way.

As with all by-the-numbers panel games, the show consisted of five or six rounds, all of which were the same: determine if statements are true or false, under a thin guise of a "spotting lies" game. In one round, the statements were preceded by unrelated footage from the BBC archives. In another, they were read out by the other team. In one round, they brought on a guest to stand there while the statements were read out. Not a celebrity guest, mind. Just a guest. She was one of the panelists' mates. Each round is introduced by Deayton in his trademark style. You know the one, "we start, conventionally enough, with round one". It's his lasting legacy on Have I Got News For You, and he takes to to all new game shows he presents. It's like a quiz show virus. Eventually all shows will be announced this way.

The show was uninspired, formulaic, derivative, and brilliant. I watched Have I Got News For You for years, but now it just feels stale. Ian Hislop seems to have taken to just being mean to everyone, regardless of who they are, and Paul Merton is very clearly very bored of the whole thing. You can watch his face fall every time the latest novelty round is announced. The audience laughs out loud, but watch Merton. You can see it in his eyes. The show's lost its soul.

But Would I Lie To You is fresh, and the panel is new and shiny, and Deayton, Mack and Mitchell are all very funny people. You don't watch it for the format (which is tripe); you watch it for the panel. Just like you don't go down the pub to do the quiz on your own. At least, I don't. Apparently I stay home and watch panel games.

Can You Read My Mind?

I like watching game shows. In the absence of good game shows, the best thing to watch is of course really bad game shows. Unfortunately, there's recently been a raft of game shows that, while bad, aren't bad enough to be so-bad-they're-good. All of them are based on the fundamental misconception that game show contestants, never the smartest bunch, have an innate ability to divine the inner thoughts of their fellow players.

Can you work out who earns £23,000 and who earns £26,000 based on which one of them knows who wrote The Mill on the Floss? Yes? Well that won't help, because they won't ask anything that highbrow.

Channel Five (or if you prefer, five) recently launched a show called Payday. It's a thoroughly dull quiz, based around the concept of trying to guess what other people earn, and hence winning their wages. (You don't actually win their wages off them, mind. That'd be too interesting. You win a prize equivalent to their wages.) In the final round of Payday, the winning contestant can pocket the annual pay of the highest earner among the six other contestants if he or she can match all six of those contestants to their wage. They know what six jobs the contestants do, but not who does which. All they know about the other contestants is the manner in which they answer general knowledge questions. There are 720 ways of matching up six contestants to six salaries. Can you work out who earns £23,000 and who earns £26,000 based on which one of them knows who wrote The Mill on the Floss? Yes? Well that won't help, because they won't ask anything that highbrow. This game is flatly impossible. Perhaps this is no accident; Channel Five probably can't afford to be giving away tens of thousands of pounds every day, and since you can't do premium-rate phone-ins anymore, these things have to make some financial sense.


ITV, never ones to miss out on making bad television if they can possibly avoid it, have their own conceptually flawed show. It is called Golden Balls, and is hosted by Jasper Carrot, who owned a large part of Celador when they invented (or, if you believe this man and his astonishingly poorly-written book, stole) Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? and so has more money than any man will ever need and therefore has no excuse. I shan't bore you with the details, but essentially, the contestants have several golden spheres with different amounts of money inside, some of which are on show to the other players, and some of which are secret. After they've chatted for a bit, there's a vote, and whoever has most votes is eliminated and takes their balls with them. Since the balls left at the end are used to make the prize, it's helpful to vote off the people with the least money in their balls. And herein lies the problem. There's no reason for any player to do anything other than pretend they have more money than they do, and no reason for any other player to believe them. So the game quickly descends into this:

"I have the twenty-thousand pound ball!"

"No! I do!"

"Well you don't, because I have it."

"Don't!"

"Do!"

This is not the most thrilling spectacle that has ever been seen on television. Indeed, it ranks somewhere below switching over to Richard & Judy where you can probably listen to Julia Hartley-Brewer's opinion on something that was in a tabloid newspaper the previous day.

So, if any game show commissioning editors are reading this, please remember: we are not all Derren Brown. We cannot spot liars at twenty paces. (Remember, if they look up and to the right, that means they're recalling visual information about sums of money written on the inside of gold balls. If they're looking up and to the right, they're accessing the creative centres of their brain and inventing sums of money written on the insides of gold balls.) Watching people try isn't fun. It is particularly not fun when the people trying are the 'characters' you so love to populate your shows with (that is to say, people who talk loudly and insistently while not actually expressing any coherent thoughts.) Please stop it.