Good Game, Good Game!

In the last year or so I have been to see a good number of radio and TV shows being recorded, mostly comedies and panel games, and this week I have been to see two contrasting TV gameshows. First it was off to Elstree to see The Edge, a BBC daytime show that will debut in September. The show is hosted by Mark Benton, who starred in Waterloo Road and appeared on Strictly Come Dancing but is probably best known for turning "New customers only" into an everyday saying in the Nationwide ads. By the by, that was one of those unfortunate ads where Nationwide probably actually lost business as viewers associated the "new customers only" phrase with them and not their competitors.

Mark Benton

The Edge is a somewhat unlikely mix of quiz show and bowling. Contestants answer questions to earn the right to bowl a ball down a lane to win cash prizes, but roll your ball over the edge and you lose. Now sometimes it can be difficult to get tickets to TV and radio shows, but  probably because it is a new show and recordings are on weekday mornings and afternoons, tickets for The Edge were not hard to come by and the audience was a bit thin on the ground. Actually at one point I thought there may be more people on stage than watching! Those of us who made up the audience were huddled together in a group but I'm sure that some judicious editing of the audience shots will hide the large number of empty seats. Chances are you may see me in some audience shots as the camera was frequently perched directly over me. As gameshows go it wasn't bad but I don't think it will be as long running as something like Countdown. As it hasn't been on yet, no one (including the contestants and at times, the host) really knew what to expect or sometimes what was actually going on, but I've seen worse (Tipping Point, for one).

That was Monday. On Tuesday evening it was off to The London Studios on the South Bank to see Trust Me, I'm A Gameshow Host being recorded. Now whereas The Edge appears to be an original BBC idea, Trust Me is an American show that ITV are piloting in this country. Sue Perkins (best known for The Great British Bake Off) and Frank Skinner (fan of George Formby and West Bromwich Albion) host the show in which they offer a series of wildly implausible stories to a contestant who has to guess which one is actually the truth in order to win a cash prize. Unlike The Edge, the studio was packed for Trust Me, which was just as well as it was filmed in the round, so floor crew were going about making sure there were no empty seats within camera range.

Interestingly we had seats in the second row (watch out when the show is broadcast, there's a good chance you'll see me), no more than six feet behind where Frank Skinner was standing and from where I could read his autocue. I say interestingly because while we were queuing outside the studio some priority ticketholders were ushered in ahead of us yet we ended up with better seats. On the whole going to the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House is a better experience than seeing a TV show at either Elstree or on the South Bank.

The view from the Media Cafe at BBC Broadcasting House, much better than queuing in the rain.

At Broadcasting House you wait to be shown into the theatre in the Media Cafe overlooking the newsroom whereas at the other studios most of your waiting is done outside (and I've stood outside in winter, in pouring rain too) and can't get a drink or a bite to eat or have a sit down. Also, the radio recordings tend to be quicker with few, if any interruptions (although there are inevitably retakes), whereas TV shows have breaks while make-up, lighting and set arrangements are changed and there are seemingly interminable pick-ups. As a result an important member of the team at TV recordings is the warm-up man to keep the audience amused during the breaks, in this case Ian Royce who frankly is funnier than most comedians you see on TV. Being near the front I kept my head down in case he picked on me as he was fairly merciless with most of his victims from the audience.

While we all know that TV shows are heavily edited, that pick-ups and retakes abound, I guess I thought that gameshows would be a bit, I don't know, more seamless. After all, in a comedy you can ask the audience to react to a gag again and again, but how easy is it in a game show to have audience and contestant repeat their reactions, especially their reactions to a wrong answer? Surprisingly easy as it turns out, especially in Trust Me, although you have to feel sorry for the contestant having to pretend, for the fourth time, that this is the first time that he has heard he has the wrong answer. That said, the contestant on Trust Me was not quite as ordinary a member of the public as the show's hosts might have had us believe, as a quick Googling of his name revealed the next morning. I suppose that for a pilot show one can forgive the producers a certain amount of poetic licence.

TV game shows make a lot of money; if not always for the contestants then certainly for the companies that devise, create, make and market them. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has been licensed to over one hundred different countries and is hugely profitable; it genuinely turned its creators into millionaires. Gameshows have came a long way since the days of Take Your Pick, or The Generation Game with bigger prizes and spin-offs; lots of spin-offs. Board games, smartphone apps and in-show competitions that generate huge amounts through phone charges make the actual show itself quite peripheral in a way.

At one time the way to fame and fortune may have been to write a bestselling song, now there are vast sums to be made in devising a successful gameshow, so I'm off to put my thinking cap on!