{"id":1748,"date":"2006-12-19T16:51:42","date_gmt":"2006-12-19T16:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2006\/12\/saturday_night\/"},"modified":"2006-12-19T16:51:42","modified_gmt":"2006-12-19T16:51:42","slug":"saturday_night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/saturday_night\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night Telly"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I had the misfortune to be sniffly with a cold in front of the TV on Saturday night, and having watched Strictly Come Dancing, and Robin Hood, I was not going to join the mindless masses by watching the X-Factor final.
\nMy main problem with these programmes is that none of the songs is original, so I feel that I’m just watching some kind of karaoke programme. Karaoke itself is great fun, but it’s not great television. I realise I’m in the minority with this.
\nAnd I certainly don’t want to watch Frank Sinatra karaoke as performed by a thirteen year old.
\nSo instead I got to see the first of a new series of National Lottery In It To Win It<\/em>, presented by Dale Winton.
\nWhat in God’s name have we done to deserve this?
\nFirst of all we should get to the contestants. These days, I get the feeling that show like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire are peopled solely by professional quiz enterers. From what I’ve read following the fallout of the “cheating Major”, to get on the show you have to phone multiple times to increase your chances of being picked. And practising with your own button arrangement for “fastest finger first” is de rigueur. In any case, it always seems that one in every two editions is a celebrity one, so there’s not much opportunity for the public at large. Over on Countdown you get wordsmiths, whilst on Deal or No Deal you get people who seem to believe that there’s a skill in picking random boxes. These are also people who seem to be able to spend three weeks at a time holed up in a Bristol hotel.
\nWhich brings us back to In It To Win It. There’s obviously a very careful screening process in operation here. Anyone with an IQ above, say, 50, is removed from possible inclusion. What you’re left with is the dregs of society – the people who have to think twice about whether or not Paris is the capital of France. OK, so this question didn’t actually come up, but two contestants between them came up with Paris as being the European capital city that has the Tiber running through it.
\nI know that Private Eye runs a fortnightly Dumb Britain column, but I despair when I see contestants having trouble over the kind of questions that a GCSE student should comfortably be able to answer. I’m really not trying to blow my own trumpet, but I got *every* answer correct.
\nThe producers have also evidently primed contestants to take us through their “thinking” so that we get something to listen to as they umm and ahh over their choice. Even if they know 100% that Kevin Spacey played Lex Luthor in Superman Returns, you have to ‘explain your workings’. The reason is that there are so few questions being asked that the show would be over in no time.
\nThere’s also the pointlessness of Dale asking if he should “accept that answer” after every answer is given. It’s a feeble “is that you final answer” variant from Millionaire, except that there’s some merit to it if any of the questions were actually hard.
\nI’m not sure whether it’s a great act from Dale, or whether he really doesn’t know many answers himself, but quite how he’s able to keep a straight face when a contestant gets an answer specatacularly wrong I don’t know. Occassionally you see Tarrant on Millionaire practically splutter if a contestant leaps into a wrong answer early on. “Are you sure?” he’ll ask.
\nBut it would be quite nice if, when asked which is the red planet, and the contestant dismisses Jupiter as not being it, because it’s “the one with rings” that somebody might correct this.
\nI suppose I should thank my lucky stars that there’s not a phone-in element to the show. And I only blame myself for not turning over and watching One Man And His Dog or something (It’s not still presented by that loon who’s a member of the UKIP is it?).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I had the misfortune to be sniffly with a cold in front of the TV on Saturday night, and having watched Strictly Come Dancing, and Robin Hood, I was not going to join the mindless masses by watching the X-Factor final. My main problem with these programmes is that none of the songs is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}