Weaver's Week 2024-08-18

Current revision as of 11:24, 18 August 2024

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This week, ABC (Disney) marked a quarter of a century of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It's hosted by Jimmy Camel these days, and seems to be a celebrity show for charity.

On the silver anniversary show, we got something very very rare. A question worth one million dollars, cash. "Zax" is the highest-valued three-letter Scrabble word. What does it mean?

"Ask the Host" was available. Jimmy Camel turns out to have been a bit of a Scrabble nerd in his younger days, and reckons it's a tool for cutting roof slates. Contestants Ike and Alan Barinholtz reckoned it was a tool for cutting roof slates.

What is the correct answer? We'll take a break.

The game shows with the most episodes (part 9): HAV-ITV

Back to our quixotic campaign to enumerate the game shows with the most episodes from 1924 to 2023. We're giving write-ups to shows with at least 500 episodes, and/or at least 100 primetime episodes.

Last time, we looked at Gladiators, Going for Gold, Bake Off, and Have a Go. Before the next entry, a word from the men in brown suits.

Have I Got News for You

The topical panel game began on BBC2, under the working title John Lloyd's Newsround, because it was going to be hosted by John Lloyd. He declined to continue with the format, allowing Angus Deayton to step into his shoes. Television's most convincing non-newsreader since Ronnie Barker, he delivered the silliest lines with an arched eyebrow and an implicit "are you taking the proverbials?"

Regular panelists were Paul Merton and Ian Hislop. Paul, the young working class comedian from south London, was usually paired with someone posh, respectable, or from a journalistic background. Ian, the editor of Private Eye, would usually get a passing celebrity as he knew nothing of the world of celebrity.

After ten successful years poking fun at the establishment on BBC2, HIGNFY transferred to BBC1 in autumn 2000. It was the show's undoing: how can you be subversive and poke fun at the establishment from the most establishment channel? Angus Deayton was eased out after a smear campaign by Pears Moron; a series of guest hosts proved only that nobody could read the autocue like Angus Deayton.

Responsible for promoting Alexander "Boris" Johnson to a level of stardom beyond his capabilities, HIGNFY has never really addressed its position at the centre of establishment politics. The 1980s got Spitting Image in the 1980s; the 2010s got HIGNFY.

We've seen 168 episodes on BBC2, 443 on BBC1, plus single episodes on the web and on Radio 5 (under the cunning title Have I Got Sports News for You). That's 611 primetime episodes, and 613 total episodes.

Heart Make Me a Millionaire is one of those irritating radio features they promote forever. People text the modern equivalent to Radio Active when they hear the cue to call, and are offered a few dozen quid or a chance to win a signed photo of Mike Midmorning. "Lucky" winners are invited to spend time in a bank vault with Uncle Mike Drivetime, which sounds like a recipe for lawsuits.

As this guff appears to run on weekdays for about five months every spring, we'll credit it with 100 "episodes" per year, so 400 in total. Because radio doesn't run in primetime, and hasn't since Mike Two-In-The-Morning's career began in 1959, we need never think of this nonsense again.

And øn with the müsic! The Hit List has 57 primetime episodes to the end of 2023. Come back in about five years to see if it's hit the century – and there's no reason why it won't.

Hold Your Plums

Hey, it has an entry in our A-Z, so we'll include it here. Billy Butler's call-and-giggle quiz ran for about 12 years across BBC Radio Merseyside and Radio City. Apparently ran once a week, we'll credit it for 600 episodes.

[Richard Osman's] House of Games (3)

In the beginning, there was House of Games (1), a studio show played with household objects. Great fun, but only lasted a short while. Then came [Alex Zane's] House of Games (2), a one-off pilot where four strangers do silly things around a country house. House of Games (3) has done far better.

Richard Osman invites four mildly famous people to play a series of gentle general knowledge challenges. They film five episodes in one day, strip the episodes across the week, and commission the show into infinity. By sheer repetition, we come to appreciate the programme's tropes: cheer for the wheely luggage, inwardly groan when they bring out the round we can't play along with, cheer when we know the answer and they don't.

More subtle tropes also come to light: they deliberately cast two men and two women each week. There's someone for all ages so the whole family can watch; if you're not cheering for Richard Herring, you might be backing Rachel Riley, or have fancied JB Gill in his youth. We get to know the unknowns, and often get to like them. Questions are written with verve and intelligence, they try to smuggle a little education in the show. This column compiles a Quiz Digest of interesting nuggets, and House of Games is a fact-rich show.

To the end of 2023, there were 570 episodes in the main series, and 12 primetime eps on BBC1. We're not counting the twenty Christmas week episodes as primetime, they seemed to be done to the usual daytime budgets. That's a total of 582 episodes – plus another 45 in the series after we stopped counting on New Year's Eve.

I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

Ant and Dec take a dozen celebrities – a mixture of wannabes, usedtobes, and neverweres – and drop them in the middle of the jungle. The contestants are kept hungry and constantly filmed. To win better food, they have to take part in trials of disgust, fear, physical ability, and usually a tie-in with some other ITV show.

The first series rehabilitated Tony Blackburn. The most recent series rehabilitated Nigel Farage. In between, they've rehabilitated Peter Andre, done their best to make a star of Matthew Wright, and failed to resurrect Noel Edmonds's career.

Basically, it's an excuse for Ant and Dec to lark about, poke fun at their fellow celebrities, and it's tremendously popular. Very few shows these days can attract eight million viewers – I'm a Celeb is able to do that, because the whole show is done live, and there are enough people who want to see Johnny Youwerethefutureonce eat kangaroo anus.

There used to be a spin-off show on ITV2, though I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Now! was axed in the great punctuation shortage of 2018. Its replacement, The Daily Drop, lasted just one series.

Main series – 442 eps
Get Me Out of Here! Now! – 359 eps
Daily Drop – 20 online eps
All-Stars – 15 eps
I'm a Celebrity (etc) Exclusive had 10 daytime eps on the ITV network.

That's a total of 816 primetime episodes, and 846 episodes in total.

!mpossible came to an end after 237 episodes. Two appearances for Rick Edwards on this list has proved !mpossible – at least so far.

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

An antidote to panel games, poking fun at every convention of the genre. The improvised format is infinitely adaptable, so the teams can poke fun at everything from high opera to Drake, from Pointless to Neighbours.

Highlights include the singing rounds, and we regret that Rob Brydon and Jeremy Hardy never got to duet. They used to do Good News Bad News and Late Arrivals At The Ball; these days it's Historical Answerphones and Song Stoppers. And, of course, the famed Mornington Crescent game, a full and complete strategy guide was broadcast at 8pm on 14 July so we're now all experts. Shame it didn't make the I-player.

Two series of 13 episodes in 1972, when the BBC quite clearly had nothing better to broadcast. Then it was mostly 10 episodes a year, first heard in the spring on Radio 4, repeated on Radio 2 in the autumn. Two series of 6 episodes a year has been normal since 1990, with a Christmas special until long-suffering host Humphrey Lyttelton died in 2008. Plus one outlying episode on BBC4. By the end of 2023, we'd had 557 episodes.

Seminal pub games show Indoor League managed just 72 episodes. Round-the-houses fun Stephen Mulhern's In for a Penny with Stephen Mulhern clocked up 44 episodes to the end of last year.

In It to Win It

Five people hope to be in the right place at the right time in order to win a large cash prize. Players start on chairs on the right of the studio and hoped to get picked to join Winner's Row. Correct answers bank cash and keep you there, wrong answers may send you out. Whoever's there after twenty questions can answer one more multiple choice question, to secure a share of the prize fund, split between the people who give right answers to their final question.

The outcome's in doubt right until the end: about one episode per series ended with no winners, while a handful of players were first out, got all the Winners' Row questions right, and played for the maximum £100,000. Dale Winton hosted, and played to spin the show out as long as he could: "would you like me to accept 'Bogies' as your answer?"

Eighteen series of this, ending only when the BBC declined to renew its contract with The National Lottery company. 172 primetime episodes.

Thirty-five years ago this week, Hilary took a lift on the back of a tractor, driven by a local farmer. Only, it wasn't a local farmer, it was Interceptor, and they buried this standout moment in the middle of the series. Just eight episodes, we like it.

It's a Knockout

Ran on BBC1 from 1966 until 1982. It was always a very silly show, a group of young fit people did battle for local supremacy by taking part in foolish games while dressed in outlandish costumes. Put on an oversized leek costume and chase around the field until you're caught. Haul a wooden horse while dressed in a cumbersome mermaid costume. Put on an oversized penguin costume and waddle through a tiny gap in the fence. You get the drift.

Winners of each local heat got a trophy for the town hall to display, and went through to Jeux Sans Frontieres, an EBU-sponsored contest to find the best team on the entire continent. (Except not Spain, ensuring Spain didn't host any Eurovision contest for half a century.) It's a Knockout didn't attempt to educate or inform, it was lighthearted entertainment. Family-friendly fun, nobody gets hurt beyond a bruise or a scrape, and people look silly because they're running around dressed as a giant leek.

Pretty much unrepeatable now, on the grounds that host Stuart Hall is a serial sex pest. Briefly revived in 1987, in the early 1990s when S4C picked up some rights the BBC weren't using, and for a couple of series on Channel 5 hosted by Keith Chegwin.

Including the Jeux Sans Frontieres programmes, we reckon 342 episodes, of which 340 primetime episodes. (The two that weren't? TVS's local inserts into Telethon '90; and It's a Charity Knockout From Walt Disney World on Christmas Day 1988, which filled a gap at midday between Noel Edmonds Is Stuck Up The Telecom Tower and the Eastenders Omnibus.) We've not included The Family Channel's re-voicings of JSF in 1994-5, simply because we don't have any listings for these shows.

ITV Play

Call-and-lose television was a bizarre phenomenon. Initially popularised by Channel 4's Quiz Call, ITV got in on the act with Quizmania at the end of 2005. People turning on their telly at 1am saw the question, like "What's in this woman's handbag", and called a premium-rate number. Very few people got through to the studio, and very few answers were right. Especially when they're asking for things like "packet of tissues", "used bus ticket", and "rawl plugs".

Call-and-lose spread like an invasive weed, and colonised every corner of the schedules. ITV used some of its precious Freeview space to carry this guff, preying on the stupidity and innumeracy of the public. The whole bubble came to an end when it emerged the contests were rigged, and no woman has ever carried rawl plugs in her handbag.

Rather than trawl through the individual record of every named strand of this nonsense, we're going to lump it all together as one massive show each day with lots of hosts. (Much like we deem Sky News has only ever had one programme, it's just been going since 1989.) Call-and-lose lasted from 16 December 2005 until 30 September 2007, except on the Christmas Day and New Year's Day mornings. We'll make that 650 episodes, with 321 primetime episodes on the ITV Play channel. What a senseless waste of time.

Scoreboards so far

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

All episodes

Hold Your Plums the first radio-only show to make this list.

Primetime episodes

Long-running reality shows can really notch up the episodes, as I'm a Celeb finds out. At current rates, HIGNFY could overtake Family Fortunes during 2026.

In other news

Reader, a zax is a tool for cutting roof slates. Great moment for the duo's charity, a bit of a shame that ABC (Disney)'s editing doesn't let them luxuriate and revel in the win, which was gone in the blink of an eye. Chris Tarrant would have made much, much more of this special moment. But let's not carp, charities have taken Disney for a cool million.

A development in the case involving Joost Klein. You'll recall that the Dutch competitor was excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest after a complaint against him was referred to the local prosecutors. The prosecutor reported their provisional findings this week.

The prosecutor has found that whatever happened was not a criminal act, and hence that no charges can be brought.

Eurovision has determined that whatever happened was serious enough to remove Joost Klein from their workspace. Yes, it is possible that both of these can be true at the same time: the Eurovision Song Contest arena is a bubble, the organisers have the ultimate right to give access to whoever they want. If the EBU wanted to arbitrarily exclude someone for no good reason, they have the ultimate right to do so.

A gap exists between the EBU's position and the prosecutor's position. Perhaps a little nugget might help fill this gap. AVROTROS, the Dutch broadcaster, said that they had told the EBU that Joost Klein was not to be filmed or photographed – under any circumstances – immediately after he came off stage. The EBU said that no such request was placed with them, a claim that AVROTROS disputes. It is possible that the whole thing has stemmed from a failure of communication, which is a) completely unbelievable for organisations that are meant to be all about communication, and 2) completely believable in the world of pen-pushing bureaucracy.

So, this gap exists between the EBU's position and the prosecutor's position. And, whenever there's a gap in Eurovision things, the fandom will attempt to fill it, with theories of very variable credibility. We've literally just done that, in the very last paragraph. It would be massively helpful for the EBU to close this gap, to provide some sort of transparency about what happened. Dispel the fog of doubt with the searchlight of fact. The EBU can actually communicate with the people, which remains rather essential for any organisation in the field of communications.

Our analysis from May applies. The EBU has the right to exclude people from its bubble. The EBU has a responsibility, a duty of care, to people in that bubble. Changes in organisation would be welcome, bring in more voices than the producer and supervisor. Make sure that somebody reads the memoranda from broadcasters, and acts upon the contents. When personnel problems arise, a clear line of report for problems is needed, and it must be seen to be working without fear or favour.

The EBU must take action on complaints from delegations, such as to throw out creeps who film people without their consent sooner than Saturday afternoon. And if the EBU had taken action on complaints about the creep from KAN who was deliberately filming people without their consent, perhaps Joost Klein wouldn't have been so upset by an EBU photographer who had not been told that he didn't want to be photographed at that moment.

We hope not to return to this topic in a hurry; we fear that we'll have to.

In other Eurovision news, RTÉ has confirmed its costs for this year's contests. €389.999, which includes €73.438 on staging, and €101.090 as a participation fee.

Final honkings for the Strictly Come Dancing klaxon:

• Nick Knowles, Who Dares Wins host
• Paul Merson, footballman
• Sam Quek, hockey and A Question of Sport

The full series begins in September.

Let's go, girls (and enbies, and any guys taking part). Quizzy Monday returned in triplicate, and if only they'd started with the Mastermind round on Shania Twain. Anyway, Nancy Braithwaite won this week's edition – she took Jane Austen as her specialist subject, and rattled off nine in a row to start her general knowledge set. Second was Claire Reynolds, Dad's Army and a solid second round brought her to within two of the win.

Al Frescans beat the Midlanders as Only Connect (2) returned. Key difference was the wall, where the Al Frescans got a group of towns missing their final ___on, and the Midlanders didn't get a group of Katy Perry singles. Lots of OC classics, the definitions of anagrams, the disguised days of the week, the song titles moved one day later.

Googly eyes on a potato University Challenge returned, with Queen's University Belfast beating Liverpool. A commanding performance from the QUB side, leaping to a 70-0 lead and never looking like they'd be caught. Sam Thompson is already buzzing strongly, seven starters and we reckon he's responsible for almost half the team's success. Liverpool got more than half their bonuses right, QUB hit more than 80% which is a remarkable achievement.

Quiz digest

A short round-up of interesting things from quizzes. This section's longer when House of Games is in season.

• Only Connect talked about Picanmix in the Asterix albums. He's the young lad who sees Cacofonix being kidnapped by the Romans in Asterix The Gladiator. He's known as Keskonrix in the French original.
• Will Amol Rajan be able to make a catchphrase out of "One year out!"? Not this week, a round on NME Singles of Which Year was all answered correctly.

This week! Jason Manford's back on television. The Answer Run comes to daytime BBC1, hammocked between new eps of Antiques Road Trip and Pointless. Channel 4 has The Big Fat Quiz of Telly (Fri), a pre-sport treat. Freeview viewers get to see the Never Mind the Buzzcocks revival (Sky Mix, Mon).

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