Weaver's Week 2024-09-01

Current revision as of 10:14, 3 November 2024

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Last time, in our count of every game show with a lot of episodes, we had an assault course, answers seeking questions, and spoke for a minute without repetition, hesitation, deviation, pot fish, or repetition.

This time, it's a couple of very marginal game shows, more axes than a lumberjack's convention, and just one chair.

The game shows with the most episodes (part 11):

Let the Peoples Sing

An ambitious contest between amateur musicians, which spawned a European event.

No, not Young Musician – we'll come to that later – but a choir contest.

Choir singing was big across the nation in the 1950s. Every sort of choir was allowed to enter. Childrens, male voices, female voices, mixed, large and small. Everything converged to one gala final, and the gala final was a Massive Event of the sort only the BBC can do. They booked the Royal Albert Hall in the first year, the Royal Festival Hall in subsequent years.

Of course, choir singing became less popular with the advent of rock 'n' roll – why should you sing when you can compare yourself to Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, or Cliff Richard. But the contest went international, under the auspices of the European Broadcasting Union. It's now held every second year – the next event's in Barcelona just next month.

Racked up the episodes in the early years, as there were heats in all the BBC's regions. We make 77 primetime episodes to the end of 1959, and approximately 695 episodes in total.

Looks Familiar

A popular test of showbusiness knowledge concentrating on the 1930s and 40s. Hardly a game show, Norden would skilfully steer the conversation for his guests using some very gentle questions that were often illustrated by film clips, but there were no points awarded nor any winner. Still, it's in our A-Z, and we'll cover it. Based on the somewhat more competitive radio show Sounds Familiar (104 episodes).

Approximately 180 primetime episodes; the last four series were shoved out on Channel 4 when it was the retirement home for tired ITV formats. A revival now would have Gary Davies gently ask about the careers of Bill Oddie, Janet Ellis, and Rick Astley.

Love at First Sight

Bruno Brookes tries to help you find love. Well, sort of. The Radio 1 dj gets contestants to fill in questionnaires, feeds the answers into a computer because this is the early 1990s, and then completely discards this bit of the format. The contestants pick one of the other people in the studio to go out on a date with. You've matched? Oh, how lovely.

After their date in a chauffeur-driven car, the winners come back to the studio and try to answer questions about each other, Mr and Mrs style. Right answers win time to shoot targets at a board – The Golden Shot style – and potentially earn a holiday.

Stephen Leahy made this for KYTV, and it's got a bit more oomph than ITV's Blind Date. Not much budget: the "chauffeur-driven car" was a Ford Escort with one of the tail-lights hanging off. Churned out quickly, as was the KYTV way, so 400 primetime episodes.

(Celebrity) Love Island

A dozen minor celebrities are exiled to a remote island, told to pair off with each other, and certainly not with hosts Patrick Kielty and Kelly Brook or Fearne Cotton. Nobody watched, and the whole thing was so insipid and tedious that it made Five to Eleven seem exciting. Including the inevitable spin-off show Love Island Aftersun, there were 150 primetime episodes.

After two years of general indifference, ITV saw sense and ended Love Island in 2006. Thank goodness they never brought this nonsense back.

What?

They brought this nonsense back.

Revived in 2015, with narration by The Fabulous Iain Stirling, hosts Caroline Flack, Laura Whitmore, and Maya Jama. A dozen wannabe celebrities are exiled to a remote island, told to pair off with each other, and the most popular will decide at the end of the series whether to share the £50,000 prize or to shaft and take the money themselves. (Do they still do this? We literally could not tell you.)

439 episodes in the main series. Plus "The Weekly Hot List" / "Unseen Bits" (79 episodes), Aftersun (70 episodes), and The Reunion (8 episodes). We're not counting Love Island Games, which was produced for overseas viewers. Love Island All-Stars aired after our cutoff date at the end of 2023.

At the end of 2023, the flop series had managed 746 primetime episodes, and was the biggest non-sport thing on television most summers. And if that's an ITV flop, we'd love to see their successes.

Lucky Ladders was a simple word game. How can we tell it was simple? Lennie Bennett hosted. 190 episodes. And speaking of simple word games...

Mallett's Mallet

Mallett's Mallet is a word association game where you mustn't pause, you mustn't hesitate, you mustn't repeat a word, else you get a bash on the head like THIS! Or like THIS! We play for a minute and the one with the most bruises loses.

Ran on TV-am's Wacaday from 1986 to 1992. We're going to credit 100 episodes a year (weekly on Saturday, plus ten weeks of school holidays when Timmy replaced Lorraine Kelly. Hmm. They should do that again.) Somewhere around 700 episodes.

Bleugh!

Many a Slip was a long-running radio entertainment, where guests were invited to spot inaccuracies in a prepared text, read aloud by Roy Plomley. You can recreate it at home by having a friend with a posh voice read bits of the tabloid press to you, and you shout out whenever you find an error of fact or grammar. Devised by Ian Messiter of Just a Minute infamy, and ran to 255 episodes on radio and 10 on telly. 265 episodes in total.

A revival in the mid-90s with Graeme Garden was not picked up, but may have helped him crystalise ideas for The Unbelievable Truth.

The Masked Singer and The Masked Dancer had amassed 63 primetime episodes by the end of 2023. They'll be in this list in due course, but not just yet.

Masterchef

Who would cook in a kitchen like this? Loyd Grossman hosts a nationwide search to find the best amateur chef in the land, a series guaranteed to raise the spirits of anyone who thinks that there's no cooking talent. Or that we're not capable of giving pretentious names to food. Our cooks are given two-and-a-half hours to cook a three-course meal for four on a limited budget – usually £30. Thirty is also the number of vowels Loyd will throw into each sentence.

Began on Monday evenings, soon moved to its familiar home at Sunday teatime. The final series shifted to mid-evening on BBC2, and was hosted by Gary Rhodes. Eleven primetime series of 13 episodes for grown-ups, and five series of Junior Masterchef. Plus a 10th birthday contest, ten Tales from the Masterchef Kitchen highlights shows in daytime, and a celebrity special.

That's 200 primetime episodes, and 211 episodes in total.

Masterchef went out of production after that 2001 series, and nobody ever thought of it again.

Masterchef Goes Large

"Ever" in television lasts about four years. Masterchef Goes Large plopped into late daytime in 2005. It had nothing to do with the previous series, other than the first half of its name. There was the "make something out of these unlikely ingredients" challenge. There's a "cook in a professional kitchen" challenge. There's a two-course meal, albeit with no pretentious names and fewer than ten vowels. Winners go through to further challenges, all set to a thumping disco beat and subject to vam-vam-vam cutting like pop videos circa 1987.

For a cookery show in which nine dishes are made every day, there was surprisingly little emphasis placed on the cooking, the producers evidently preferring the judges' deliberations, cogitations and digestion, and shots of the winners calling their friends and family on their mobiles. This has remained a point of difference for Goes Large – it's not about the cooking, it's about the reactions.

Began at 6.30 on BBC2, the slot more recently occupied by Lightning (55 episodes: a shame). Masterchef Goes Large had 109 daytime episodes there. Then a move to primetime in 2008, and to BBC1 in 2010, a total of 374 primetime episodes to the end of 2023.

Celebrity Masterchef Goes Large was always on BBC1, a total of 286 primetime episodes and 30 daytime eps – the 2011 series was first shown in a daytime edit, for some reason.

Junior Masterchef Goes Large made 38 daytime episodes on the CBBC channel. Masterchef The Professionals has had 343 primetime episodes.

Plus ten Christmas Cook-Off episodes, ten Professionals spin-off shows, and a couple of specials from the civilian series.

Summing up doesn't get harder than this! A grand total of 1025 primetime episodes, and 1202 episodes in total.

Do we add Masterchef to Masterchef Goes Large? This column chooses not to: the original nineties series has only a passing resemblance to the modern variant. Other people's views may differ, and we respect that difference.

Masterfan, a contest to find the biggest fan of Manchester United football club. 74 episodes on MUTV, plus another 17 when Granada pilfered the format for their own use. 91 primetime episodes.

Mastermind

Black chair. Contestant. Spotlight. Specialist subject. Two minutes. Don't pass. General knowledge. Survive. Win. Do it all again? For the prize of a cut glass bowl?

Mastermind puts humanity in the spotlight, we can only watch the contenders, we hope they know what they're talking about, we cheer when they prove to be right. And we're smug when we get an answer right, even if the contestant said it before we did.

Magnus Magnusson hosted for a quarter of a century, before the format slipped off on a quick tour of the EPG and eventually alighted on BBC2. Peter Snow, Clive Anderson, and John Humphrys were hosts of varying quality; few would argue that Clive Myrie is anything other than a great inquisitor.

Mastermind was promoted from late-night telly to the heart of primetime when Mary Whitehouse got her knickers in a twist about Casanova '73, a just-post-watershed drama. Fifteen episodes in that first series, then a standard run of 17 eps plus a "Meet the Finalists" special. That's except for five years at the end of the 1980s, when Mastermind stretched over 22 weeks.

The final television series went out on this day in 1997, the last of 13 episodes. Mastermind then pitched up on Radio 4 for three 13-ep series, and then had a quick dalliance with the Discovery channel. The BBC2 revival began in 2003 with a 17-ep series; subsequent series have been 31 episodes, but the last fourteen eps of the 2024 series went out in 2024, after our end-of-2023 cutoff.

And then we come to the specials. Supermind and Champions Mastermind extended to 11 episodes. There were 10 editions of Sport Mastermind with Des Lynam, and three Cup Final Mastermind editions aired in daytime as part of Cup Final Grandstand. Six Mastermind International eps pitched winners from around the world, there were 29 Junior Mastermind shows, and by the end of last year 192 episodes of Celebrity Mastermind. The total doesn't include the Masterbrain specials against Brain of Britain winners – they were counted to the radio format.

And then there's Mastermind Cymru – 15 episodes of the civilian series, 10 Mastermind Plant shows for children, and 5 Seleb editions with Welsh celebrities.

All that adds to a grand total of 1426 episodes, of which 1384 primetime episodes. And no passes!

Scoreboards so far

Covering shows beginning with numbers, or letters A-MAS.

All episodes

A few years until Mastermind overtakes 100%, and Masterchef Goes Large will slowly close the gap.

Primetime episodes

Whoo! Mastermind straight in at number 2, Masterchef Goes Large at 3, Love Island at 5.

Brain of Brains

The triennial competition for great players of BBC Brain went out this week. Competing for the honour were:

• Dan Adler, from Farnham, the 2023 champion
• Eleanor Ayres, Yorkshire, 2023 runner-up
• Marianne Fairthorne, Camden, 2022 runner-up
• Karl Whelan, Wirral, 2021 winner

Sarah Trevarthen, the 2022 champion, was taken ill just before recording. She's been promised a spot in the 2027 edition.

With somewhat more difficult questions in Brain of Brains, we don't expect anyone to get more than the odd one or two right. All players begin with one of two marks, until Karl Whelan starts us off with Five In A Row And A Bonus Mark. Is it too early to write "game over" in our review?

Second round reminds us of Match of the Day, as it's 0-0, 0-oh, and then Karl Whelan gets another Five In A Row And A Bonus Mark. Ten points clear after two rounds; is it too early to write "is this a record?" in our review?

Eleanor Ayres gets four in a row, but the novel "Brooklyn" defeats her. Karl Whelan remembers that Sheikh Hasina was re-elected in Bangladesh in January; her removal from office came after this show was recorded. It's part of Karl Whelan's latest Five In A Row And A Bonus Mark.

After a "Beat the Brains" interlude on the subject of quiz, we finally find that Karl has a gap in his knowledge – the tremelo arm on a record player. We also learn that Marianne Fairthorne carries one of the answers around on her trousers.

The final scores emerge: Marianne Fairthorne 7, Dan Adler 8, Eleanor Ayres 8, Karl Whelan 23. "The questions fell kindly for me; on another day, any of the others could have beaten me," he modestly says. Karl now joins David Stainer and a brain to be named in Top Brain 2027.

In other news

Basil! We hear that next year's senior Eurovision Song Contest will be held at Basil's gaff near Mulhouse. 13 to 17 May the dates, with SRG SSR the hosts. They remind us how they've hosted in Lugano (Italian-speaking) and Lausanne (French-speaking), so it's only fair to have a German-speaking city next. (They won't be able to host in the Romansh area, it has a population of about 50,000.)

No word yet on hosts, or themes, or attractions – that's likely to emerge in a couple of months, when we get the list of participating broadcasters.

ITV have told us what's going to fill the Saturday Night Takeaway hole. Bad news, folks, it's Yet More Got Talent. By stringing out the semi-finals over weeks and weeks, they're able to fill something like four months with the same old same old. A slight shame that Ant and Dec aren't doing anything new this winter, but the lads have earned a break.

Quizzy Mondays

It's fair to say that Cathryn Gahan rode her luck to win Mastermind. Questions begun just before the buzzer in the specialist round (Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd) and general knowledge round were both answered correctly, and that proved the difference. Charlotte Love (history of Shetland hand-knitting) finished one point adrift, with Robby Cheung (Spaced) a further point in arrears.

Four Opinions might also have had the rub of the green in their Only Connect win. One sequence was for things happening 8, 4, 2, and 1 time a year: the team thought it was 4, 5, 6, and 7 times and said "Months without 30 days". It wasn't what they might have intended to say, but it's what they said, and it accidentally fit the answer. Not that this altered the result, Bean Farmers would still have been behind after Sequences, and were soundly bettered in Missing Vowels.

No luck needed for Bristol, who racked up 325 points while defeating Gonville and Caius Cambridge. Across the half-hour, Bristol racked up 50 correct answers, which will probably be the highest we see all series. Strong across the board, with a particularly good performance on history and science questions. Worst performance of the night came from the host, who appeared to rush Bristol for an answer while the music cues were playing: the full clip is as much a part of the question as anything coming out of his mouth.

Quiz digest

• Ed Balls, the GMTV presenter is married to Yvette Cooper, the current interior minister. Every day's a learning day at ITV Breakfast Broadcasting. (Mastermind)
• Rachmaninov's estate receives 12% of the royalty from "All by myself", the Eric Carmen composition. The songwriter was unconsciously channelling a piano concerto, and agreed to sign a chunk of the music to his heirs. (BBC Brain)

Sunday sees the start of Olivia Attwood's Bad Boyfriends on ITV2, it'll be gone in two weeks. ITV's daytime schedule also gets something new: fresh Tipping Point and Lingo in daytime, and The Chase marks its 15th anniversary with a two-Chaser special. Lingo is only new from Monday to Wednesday, an idea they've nicked from Bargain Hunt (BBC1), which also starts new episodes.

Channel 4 is all Paralympics, all the time. BBC1 has a remarkable booking on Celebrity Masterchef: it's Diane from this year's The Traitors. Sunday lunch round her place, anyone?

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