On the Spot (1)
Contents |
Host
Co-hosts
Voice of the Balls: Alan Dedicoat
Broadcast
BBC One, 29 July to 2 September 2000 (6 episodes in 1 series)
Synopsis
Winning Lines is over for another season so it's about time the BBC came up with something tedious and inferior to fill the timeslot for the Summer months. Excellently, this one features the top banter of your friend and his, megastar Des O'Connor!
The show is filmed live from somewhere in Britain (Will it be your town? Who cares? And anyway, it'll only be your town if the BBC have some studio space there which happens to be vacant that week) and the show is split up into three sections, which intermingle with each other. They are (in order of interest):
The National Lottery Draws: Self-explanatory really.
I've got a handful of money. Do you want it, peasant? Do you? Mmmm? Yes? On the Street: Co-host goes out onto the street and gives £100 away to random people if they can answer a question. "Is that all I have to do? Flip-o-blimey!"
A quiz round in progressOn the Spot: The main "game" as it were, two people each have a maximum of 75 seconds to answer ten questions on a specialist subject. Each question has a choice of three answers but none of them are silly ones à la 100%. Whoever does better (gets more right, or is faster in the event of a tie) goes through to the final.
Here are the answers for the viewers at homeIn what is the best bit of the show (and believe us, it's not saying much), the winner selects two sub-categories within their specialist subject. In the style of Talkabout, they list as many things as they can that fits in that subject in the hope that they hit the magic three objects. (They're shown on screen at the start with a warning to look away if you want to play along.) If they manage to fill both lists up within a minute, and they can call out "change" to swap the subjects around excitingly, they win a dream prize. If not then they don't, we would imagine. (But they do get a lesser prize - e.g. the Belfast player whose round on The Beatles is shown here was offered a trip to London including a tour of Abbey Road Studios, plus a holiday in the US, but having failed on the final round still got the Abbey Road trip.)
Sadly, "I Feel Fine" proved elusive.So then, with many people complaining that they "just want the numbers" they now have a really good argument. It's called On The Spot. Oxycute it!
Inventor
Format devised by the Chatterbox Partnership and Natalie Hicks.
Trivia
The locations were, in order: Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff, Southampton and Belfast. They took their studio set with them, but seemingly forgot to pack enough lightbulbs to avoid making it look alarmingly dingy.
Theme music
Dave Arch (latterly of Strictly fame) composed a full score.
