>From Mark Jeffries > As far as I can tell, "Take It All" was not a direct adaptation of a > British format, although the "Prisoner's Dilemma" gambit is or has been > used by a British game show >
Yes, as the Wikipedia page points out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_It_All_%28game_show%29 - it is similar to the incomprehensible Golden Balls and also Shafted which was something of a notorious disaster (although more so in hindsight as the host's career completely self-destructed a few years later). It's interesting The Match Game is mentioned here because of course the British version, Blankety Blank, was probably the ultimate in pointless games-for-the-sake-of-playing-the-game - http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Blankety_Blank I was reading an interview with Terry Wogan from his spell as host as he said he loved it when nobody scored any points or won anything because he felt that was really the ethos of how they approached the game in the UK, just half an hour of idle fun, comparing it to The Match Game. He said that if the prizes were actually any good (which famously they weren't due to the Beeb not wanting to spend licence-payer's money on them) they'd all have to concentrate, which wouldn't be right. I think that's always been the way. Probably the biggest game show on British TV now is Pointless (I love this piece, written from a US perspective - http://gameological.com/2012/05/british-game-shows-pointless/) and last week the rollover jackpot had swollen to its highest ever total (which as a daytime show on the BBC isn't much, around £25,000, it goes up a thousand pounds a day), but the game was still played in the spirit of it just being a bit of fun. And that's the way I prefer it. I'm much more engaged if I like the contestants or the questions are on a subject that interests me. I'm not winning the money so I don't care how much they're winning. I'm more interested if they're playing for £1000 on Manic Street Preachers singles than £25,000 on Robert Downey Jr films. When The Weakest Link began and took off in the UK (which it did to the extent that when it started in the US, the BBC showed the first US edition unscheduled, almost immediately after its premiere in the US, because it was such a novelty), there was a huge number of "nasty" game shows following - Shafted was one of them - where contestants were encouraged to rubbish their opposition and stab each other in the back but none of them really caught on. I guess in the end it doesn't really ring true because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter so why take it seriously? As the losing contestant on many a British game show has pointed out, they'd had a lovely day regardless. And of course if a format isn't engaging it doesn't matter how big the prize is. In 1995, when the limits of the size of prizes were finally lifted by the broadcasting authorities, Raise the Roof began which offered a house as a prize, by some distance the biggest prize ever offered on UK TV, and it got a lot of publicity, but the show completely flopped because the format was as boring as they come. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
