-
07 Nov 2009 09:27
7th November 2009
Just a quickie this week, there have been two games called Pivot on the Fort. The second one we've covered already and is the worst game in the history of the Fort, this one was much more fun and rarely won. This playing comes from 1997.
ACCUMULATE! IS! BACK!
Here. With eight teams and seven shows it is sure to be some great entertainment!
Clip Boyard
-
06 Nov 2009 11:33
6th November 2009
Fun Friday Quiz!!!!!
So your starter for ten, which famous celebrity from the recently released Wii version of a popular TV quiz is this?
Sorry it's a bit small.
-
05 Nov 2009 19:26
5th November 2009
BANG!!!1
Do you know what I forgot?
Yesterday I was quite surprised to find my V+ Box recording at about half eight because I couldn't think what I had asked it record. It turns out it was Britain's Best Brain which I put on series link. This is probably not a ringing endorsement for the longevity of Britain's Best Brain.
Something else I fully expect to forget to watch from episode 2 onwards is Sell Me the Answer which begins on Sky 1 on Monday afternoon and is hosted by Gethin Jones off of Blue Peter. In it, contestants are asked ten questions in order to win £25,000. If they don't know the answer, they audience gets all excited because they can sell the player the answer. Two people are selected and they're given ten seconds to pitch why they should give it to them. They win money if they're selected, but the player goes home with nothing if they are wrong. A guide to the potential quality of the show can be found by the fact that one of the audience members bluffing an answer in the pitch film from the Keith Chegwin hosted pilot is none other than Graham off of Coach Trip. I don't think any more needs to be said although doubtless everyone who was on it reckons it's a really brilliant format.
In other news, thanks to Buzzerblog for pointing this out, the Daily Mail has an article (which has spread to Digital Spy) that are suggesting that C4 are asking Deal or No Deal to make cutbacks when its contract comes up again as part of a channel wide budget cut, including potential lowering of prizes (this would almost certainly kill the show). There may be some truth in this (Paul O Grady has already had a whinge) and I will ask Glenn Hugill how much truth there is to this for you Travis, although I would largely suspect a non-illuminating answer. Perhaps most interesting is the Daily Mail's asertion that Noel's on £20,000 a show. I'll tell you what, I'll do it for £250 a show then you can send it into You've Been Framed and claim it all back. Perhaps it is time to bring the viewer competition back.
That new Ant and Dec format (Push the Button) sounds eerily like something 12 Yard were kicking around about ten years ago, although I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.
At a glance: Speed of Countdown air dates, Gizensha makes a baffling context-less comment about Dale Winton, University Challenge. Damian Eadie hates us and everything, Push the Button and Ant and Dec generally.
-
05 Nov 2009 03:22
4th November 2009
It was Deal or No Deal's fourth birthday yesterday! Well done Noel and The Banker.
Er, we forgot. It isn't personal or anything. In fact we may go visit next year, and finally get round to opening one of the competition boxes I was promised about three years ago.
-
03 Nov 2009 15:13
John and Edward are doing Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. next week.
It's Fantasy X Factor Week 4 - The Results!
, and Part three will be here in the morning. Edit: it's here now.
Speed of Countdown air dates, Gizensha makes a baffling context-less comment about Dale Winton, University Challenge.
Olivier and Anne-Galle: are they or aren't they? Schlag den Raab, Vicks' World Tour, X Factor, ACCUMULATE IS (almost) BACK!!!
-
02 Nov 2009 23:17
3rd November 2009
The Clipton Factor - A Word or 2
Now I promised a full episode of something last week because it completely slipped my mind to do a clip. Now, it was going to be an episode of something else. However, I've had as last minute change of heart and decided that under the circumstances, I'm going to put up A Word or 2, which we did a feature on several years ago. It's the South African version of the Des Chiffres... format, and this episode comes from 2004.
Part two can be found here, and Part three will be here in the morning.
Watching telly: Countdown
Well, back from a fun recording session of Countdown in Manchester. And I will try and describe it without going into spoilers.
- I was the honoured guest of TV's Ryan Vickers, a Canadian who I've known for years and years and years, and as such we met up at Euston, trained up and got a laid on hotel room for the night before at The Jurys Inn in Manchester and it was very, very nice. The Jury's not out on The Jury's Inn!!!! *does thumbs up*
- Sunday night was spent wandering around the streets of Manchester, getting dinner at the hotel bar (where it was an unbelievable £5.35 for a bottle of Magners), watching The X Factor results, watching re-runs of Never Mind the Buzzcocks on Dave and playing a practice game of Countdown with the board game I bought with me.
- The final score was something like 88-26 to him. That is because I'm really poor at Countdown. However, I don't think that makes me a bad person as I am quite good at Tetris, Bejewelled Blitz and Carcassone, although it is probably for the best nobody has turned The Settlers of Catan into a gameshow yet.
- Monday morning and we get to Granada Studios which is TERRIFICALLY EXCITING, possibly because they're also filming Jeremy Kyle today. We get there at midday for a 1:30pm start, another contestant and guest has already showed up so we're chatting to them in the Green Room. I insinuate he looks about 12, it turns out he's 18 (er, sorry Eliott on the off chance you're reading). I tell Ryan there's no shame to losing to an 18 year old.
- All the other contestants turn up, including the current champion. Five episodes will be recorded today - three in the afternoon and another two in the evening. It is all nice and jolly now, but there was a noticeable nervous tension between the guests when the contestants were taken away for wardrobe.
- We discuss who is in Dictionary Corner. It's Amanda Lamb from A Place In The Sun and the Scottish Widows advert. I ask the current champ who they got last session, it was only bloody Tim Vine "and he was brilliant". It is hard not to feel a little short changed here. Staff members tells us that it's actually quite difficult to get intelligent female guests for Dictionary Corner. DC doesn't pay an awful lot, so the pool comes down to people who don't mind travelling up North and who quite like Countdown. Jo Brand a divisive figure amongst the Countdown audience, apparently.
- We can choose to sit in the audience or we can sit in the Green Room, whatever, we're all looked after and escorted brilliantly by lovely Liverpudlian Adele.
- Ryan's first show is the first show filmed that day, which we are reliably informed will be broadcast on Monday 16th November, which is a much faster turnaround than I was expecting.
- The audience comprises of the elderly, guests and contestants playing that day, and unemployed precocious layabout Countdown champion Kirk Bevins. The warm-up is Dudley Doolittle, old-school northern comic who goes down well. The audience are provided with pads and pencils to playalongathome with.
- Out comes Jeff and Rachel! Rachel Riley is much more chatty than I was expecting, and actually happy to join in the football banter between warm-up man, host and some of the audience.
- Jeff Stelling seems to be the most amiable man on television. If you don't like him, it is very simple: you are wrong. He's also very professional - of the three episodes I saw, I think he only needed to do two pick-ups. And he did a wicked Doctor Who joke, and a Grease joke.
- Things you may not know if you've never actually seen it live: it's recorded pretty much as live, so Rachel is literally racing to put words up to pose with, and sometimes there are just mere milliseconds between Rachel and the stagehand clearing the previous letters and getting into position and Jeff throwing over to the contestant for their next selection. You can tell when they've been a bit slow because he puts bigger gaps between the words in the build up.
- There's a twenty-second pause for the numbers game whilst they rotate the board and bring the cards in, but then it's straight back into it. Now, I always assumed the number board was just a sort of whiteboard thing that they just wiped clean between games - not so, a new bit of whatever it is they write on it pinned to it each time. I know Ryan's taking one of the used ones home.
- Amanda Lamb is really lovely as it turns out. Not much good at Countdown really, and she admits as such, but very likable. Would still have preferred Tim Vine though, obviously.
- The usual day seems to go Episodes 1 and 2 filmed together, a tea break (the audience get an orange juice and a Twix and all the contestants get a photo opportunity), episode three, "lunch" (it's about 5:30pm by this point) and then a new audience comes in for episodes 4 and 5 in the evening.
- Unfortunately my train left at 7:15, so as Ryan's other friend had a train leaviung at 6:30 we decided to get a taxi to Picadilly, which The Lovely Adele all sorted out for us.
- And that was it - basically a really good fun set of recordings. Now I don't really watch the show, partly because I'm useless at it and partly because I've, you know, got a job, but the idea that it's bombing a bit when the production team seem to really put the effort in to make a great show makes me furiously angry. So there.
We're back from Countdown! I keep saying "we're", I do in fact mean "I". Anyway, I will be writing it up between now and when I go to bed, as well as putting up a ful episode of something. So stay up, or go to bed. It depends on how hard you are, really.
-
31 Oct 2009 08:37
-
29 Oct 2009 20:25
29th October 2009
Matchroom Men and Matchroom Cats and Dogs
So we caught some of Five's Partypoker World Open V last night, except we hilariously missed the first half hour and fell asleep towards the end. And we noticed a few things very different to Matchroom TV tournaments in the past: namely eight player tables, deep triple stacks (i.e. 300,000 to begin as opposed to 100,000, but with apparently the same blind levels as before) and its set in an actual casino, so presuambly they can put the money they save in hiring a studio into recording a longer tournament.
So I'm just wondering: did anyone else watch it, and what else has changed regarding the structure? Is it still 21 hands to a level? How many heats is it? Enquiring minds want to know.
Note: If you intend on following the tournament on the telly, don't look for answers because you'll probably get the ultimate result spoiled for you as it would have been recording a little while ago.
And yes, sorry, The Clipton Factor completely slipped my mind this week. I'll make it up to you by putting a FULL EPISODE of something very weird and possibly wonderful, possibly not up next week. Also because we're going to be at the Countdown filming Sunday/Monday, this week's Fantasy X Factor results will not go out until Tuesday.
28th October 2009
Britain's Best Brain, then.
Have a new comment box.
- Immediate thought - it tooks hours and hours and hours to film, and yet it's been so badly edited! Whatsallthatabout? Some people get a chat at the beginning, some don't (but we're then reminded of all of them, including the ones we've not really met yet), then one person gets a countdown for their first maths round whilst everyone else apparently goes straight into it, which is a bit of a shock for the viewer.
- To be honest, what we wrote about the show when we went and saw it live (28th August 2009) absolutely stands for the actual broadcast show (laziness or efficiency? You decide). The challenges are genuinely fairly tough and I think there needs to be more obvious transparency in the scoring which you'd think would be fairly easy to edit in, although it might push the editing time from 20 minutes to 22 or possibly 23 minutes, it's been a long time since my media studies A-Level.
At a glance: Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, Amazing Race, The Apprentice US on BBC, The X Factor voting, death of Cambridge University Challenge contestant, Election nominated for a BAFTA, QI moves to Thursdays, things on a Box.
-
28 Oct 2009 12:29
27th October 2009
It's Britain's Best Brain tomorrow on Five (from 8pm), come back tomorrow night for some opinion, and you can read our recording review dated 28th August 2009 if you desire.
In all the excitement we had an e-mail from Wiggy pointing out something about Danish Fangerne På Fortet which seemed to have passed everyone by when we had a chat about it - it's being hosted by Peter Schmeichel, of football, Strictly Come Dancing and 1 vs 100 fame.
-
27 Oct 2009 10:46
26th October 2009
Y bother, then?
So yeah, we've been watching The X Factor and saw the rather unpredictable bottom two last night (I still believe the four judge format doesn't really work, the fourth judge gets to easily cop out all of the time and take it to DEADLOCK) where one of the favourites, Danyl survived against (let's be honest) filler act Miss Frank.
Now to the average viewer, The finals of The X Factor usually consist of four or five proper contenders (this year Stacey, Danyl, Jamie, possibly Olly and Lucie), the joke act who survives until it's down to the proper contenders plus them through entertainment (John and Edward) and everyone else who will fight to extend their fifteen minutes of fame but once they're gone they're gone.
Now it's OK for us as viewers to analyse it like that, what's rather more interesting is when the judges and producers seem to be openly admitting to it. As suggested on The Xtra Factor last night and this DS story, judges and producers were having "crisis talks" last night in order to try and prevent the 'wrong' people facing elimination in future.
Hmm! We've always enjoyed the panto aspect of The X Factor, but it's hard not to feel just a little bit sorry for the also-rans who are probably unaware that really they don't stand a chance. I bet this was never talked about in Alan Boyd's original Pop Idol memo, I'm not entirely certain because I can barely make any of it out.
In other news: Geocities winds up today. Geocities is where I cut my internet teeth about fifteen years ago, so if you want to read some genuinely awful pre-sixth form writing, alongside some insightful stuff (including the internet's first Fort Boyard game guide and proof that Jacques Antoine wasn't and indeed still isn't dead despite David J Bodycombe's protestations), you've only got a couple of hours before proto-Bother's Bar Nick's Gameshow Courtroom (everyone has a "page", I wanted to do something else - this continues to this day, although the 'bar' concept has been done pretty weakly) closes its doors for good.
In the comment box beneath this one, Dan Peake is enquiring about gameshows that have changed radically between seasons. Do pipe up if you have an interesting example.
25th October 2009
So, Fantasy X Factor results preview, and perhaps unsurprisingly as she's been in the bottom two the previous two weeks, Rachel was the overwhelming eliminee prediction this week. Miss Frank picked up a couple of predictions as well. Will it be them or will it be someone else, and how will tonight's vote affect the charts? Join us later!
Bother's Eye View Week 3 - now up!
At a glance:Deal or No Deal sold to Ireland, Watch continues to let Chris Tarrant work with kids, could there be a BSOP 2010?, Survivor: Quite Good, where have all the University Challenge winners gone? Just Dance becomes Got to Dance, how to make your own clepsydre, Iron Chef America UK, Ratings Bear, fun gameshow Family Fortunes is a bit loose, The X Factor, Alan Boyd can't write, Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
Search the Site
