Hole in the Wall
Bear with me here. At first glance, this is worse than weird. It has a big dollop of genius behind it though, and it doesn’t take long to get hooked.
The format is big in Japan (all the best gameshows happen in Japen) where it’s called ‘Tunnels no Minasan no Okage Deshita‘, but more commonly known as ‘Human Tetris’. When the new BBC One website linked to a preview clip I dug around and discovered the format had been sold to France, Australia and the USA (have I missed any?). It seems someone in TV land clearly must have shares in the international big-polystyrene-sheet company.
Dale Winton. Lycra clad celebrities. A heavy dose of camp. Anton Du Beke looking a bit like Rob Brydon. Andi Peters taking it rather seriously. I think it has the potential to be a memorable Saturday evening show.
Incidentally, when Dale introduces the concept and says that each wall will become “increasingly harder” I have a tiny cringe (actually, an identical cringe was caused every week Sir Alan challenged the apprentices to bring back “the most amount of money”) but if you’re going to get picky there are much bigger things to complain about than some dodgy grammar.
Never mind the wholes in the production, this is something I can’t look away from. It gives me the same tingle as the first time I saw Gladiators. Stunning television.
Grammar’s one thing but they got the maths completely wrong.
In a round where one team had to answer a “question” they were presented with something like this (I can’t remember precisely):
4 x 9 + 8 / 4
The two options were 11 and 12. But neither was right. The contestants plumped for 11 as reading left to right that appears correct.
But as anyone who studied GCSE (or in my case O level) maths should know, multiplications and divisions should be carried out first and in my, possibly misremembered example, the answer is actually 38.
If I actually felt it was worth complaining to someone, I would!
I’ve just rewatched that bit of the show and the question was in fact:
3 x 12 + 8 / 4 = ?
It still should be 38 and not 11…
Wow. I totally missed that. Precedence is important, and is totally overlooked. How infuriating. Maths teachers across the country will be quite rightly sharpening their letter-writing pencils.
[...] Charlie Brooker’s screen burn | Culture | The Guardian - “But really, so what? We’ve been here before. It’s basically a Nintendo version of It’s A Knockout. And, what’s more, once you factor in the knowledge that the contestants are competing for charity, it looks less like the death of civilisation and more like a daft game at a village fete, writ large. This is TV blowing off and giggling for 30 unrelenting minutes.” [I wrote my own review last night at watchification.com/2008/09/21/hole-in-the-wall/] [...]