'Short Cut: Late-night quiz shows', The Guardian

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Send to a friend
How to win at those late-night quiz shows, by James Silver

You may not have come across ITV Play's Quizmania, an interactive quiz show that airs overnight to an audience of insomniacs and post-pub channel surfers. Be thankful. Regulator Ofcom has now ruled that ITV Play broke broadcasting rules last September by making some of Quizmania's answers too obscure when it invited viewers to identify "13 things you find in a woman's handbag". Callers objected when it was revealed that the answers included "balaclava" and "Rawlplugs" along with the rather more plausible, though arguably still left-field, "rubber band", "dog biscuits" and "false teeth".

The components of quiz show programming - wobbly sets, babbling presenters, dumb questions and, most importantly, phone lines that cost 60p-75p a call - are TV at its cheapest, making the output highly lucrative. Between April and September last year, ITV Play made a pounds 9m profit on revenues of pounds 27m. By offering an additional "free" way to play, via their website, quiz channels are able to classify themselves as "prize competitions" rather than lotteries, which would be subject to the laws covering gambling.

The night I tuned into another ITV Play programme, The Mint, happened to be "Crazy Wednesday". Presenters Beverley French and former Big Brother winner Brian Dowling were offering viewers the chance of pounds 21,000 for coming up with a word or phrase beginning with the word "time". It sounded easy enough, but in the two hours I endured, I placed a dozen calls at a cost of pounds 9 to a variety of quiz channels and never got any further than a recorded message commiserating that I "didn't get through this time". It turns out that my experience was the norm. At a hearing in November, it emerged that on The Mint, 400,000 callers phoned in over four hours, but only one in 400 had a chance of getting through.

Luckier than me was "Maggie from Manchester" and "Joan from Bolton". Maggie guessed wrongly with "time bomb", before Joan struck it lucky and won pounds 3,000 with "time off". According to one addict, the key to getting through is to hit the redial button repeatedly. Another option, of course, is to turn the TV off and go to bed.

(The Guardian, G2: January 17th, 2007)

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Send to a friend

SITE MAP