If you keep a blog or a website and your readers are interested in quizzes, you have a great opportunity to make passive recurring income as a sales affiliate with Quizmedia Ltd. Great original products and great conversion rates. Sign up today.
It’s now 2 weeks since we recorded our episode of Postcode Challenge and only now can I talk about it.
The team (Matt, Catherine, Sarah and me) went off in high spirits, despite the non-appearance of Stewart who was instantly cut out of “the deal”. This gave a starting place to Sarah who was supposed to have been the reserve.
We arrived on time and all looked amazing, so no need for hair and make-up – straight on set thankyou very much.
Postcode Challenge: Sign of the Nine
See?
The competition were from Ardersier, which is a wee place near Inverness. The captain in their team seemed to be at great pains to point out that her team-mates were definitely, absolutely neighbours and completely totally for sure from the same postcode.
This means one of them was absolutely definitely an outsider although it doesnt really matter cos its only the telly.
After all, who would come up with an idea to name quiz teams after sometihng as unsexy as Postcodes unless the concept came with the backing of a major sponsor – ie The Peoples Postcode Lottery?
Anyway, none of our team live anywhere near the postcode, EH9 1QR was simply the postcode of the Reverie where my Monday night quiz rocks hard.
So, the teuchter mob put us to the sword pretty badly in the first round via a series of utterly shit random questions to “gain control” and then a string of insanely easy questions that a three-year old should have got all right. They got two wrong but that still left us 13-0 down at half-time. Disaster.
Luckily we came roaring back, due in no small part to the captain of the opposition falling to ‘the fear’ in round two.
The Postcode Challenge format means that when a team member gets a question wrong in round 2, they have to face another question… and another… and another.
So, it only takes one team member to lose it the plot and your a team will get stuck in a hole, losing one point every time the guilty party says “pass” or gets an answer hopelessly wrong because their brain has ‘gone’.
And that’s what happend to Ardersier. Their captain was the stinker: she dried badly and after a big string of wrong answers and passes, her team were out and heading home to the Highlands.
Afterwards, our Matt confided in me that when he saw her beginning to show weakness, he began giving her the most evil and most direct stare he could muster. I admitted that I was doing exactly the same. Perhaps these tactics paid off or maybe this woman just wasn’t very good at keeping the heid. We’ll never know.
So we were in the money round and I won’t spoil the outcome for you. I’ll put a link here when its broadcast…
You might touch Dale Winton and he might touch you.
The National Lottery show In It To Win It needs audience members for recordings of the show in Glasgow in September.
You could be there and feel the excitement of Dale plus big money. You might even get close enough to touch his actual body. Who knows?
The show will be recorded at BBC Scotland, Pacific Quay, Glasgow on:
* Monday 6th September
* Tuesday 7th September
* Wednesday 8th September
* Friday 10th September
* Saturday 11th September
* Sunday 12th September
To register for FREE tickets, email television.audience@googlemail.com or call 0141 334 7186
Please state: how many tickets you require; a preferred date; whether you can make a daytime or evening recording; and leave a contact telephone number.
You have to be 16 and there’s all kinds of Terms and Conditions buts its just the usual pish. Get in there and TOUCH DALE.
If you do actually TOUCH Dale Winton as a result of this web post, please tell me. It would make me feel warm.
Next Tuesday I’ve got an audition for appearing as a contestant on The Weakest Link.
The stupid thing is that I’ve told them I’m a quizmaster. This is certain to create some hilarious rude banter from Robinson when I get a question wrong but, far more seriously, means I am almost certain to get voted out by my quiz rivals who will believe (falsely) that being a quizmaster = knowing everything.
Hmmm, I wonder if I can get in touch with them and asked to be changed to “DJ” or “Karaoke guy” or something?
Would you like to go and see a big-league quiz show unfolding live, before your very eyes?
A pal of mine, Mary, is putting together an audience for The National Lottery “Secret Fortune,” an exciting new Saturday Night game show for BBC1, hosted by Nick Knowles.
It’s a brand new BIG MONEY quiz sho, featuring a pair of contestants guaranteed to leave with a Secret Fortune. How big that Fortune is will depend on how well they cope with a series of life-changing decisions.
The show will be recorded at BBC Scotland Pacific Quay, Glasgow and Mary is looking for a lively audience to join in on the fun!
DATES
A pilot for the show is being recorded on Thursday 13th May
Thereafter:
Thursday 24th June
Friday 25th June
Saturday 26th June
Sunday 27th June
Monday 28th June
Last Sunday I was in Glasgow to audition for The Chase, which piloted on ITV 1 last year and is back this year for a full series.
Unfortunately the audition clashed with Old Firm day, so although I got a whole table to myself at Waverley, the train filled up at Haymarket with a herd of tattooed fellers who spent the rest of the hour growling “We Arra Peepel” and bragging about how late they were out last night.
I’ve been to a few of these quiz show auditions now and a fairly standard procedure is emerging which involves two parts:
Personality: You talk about yourself in an attempt to prove you are NOT REALLY REALLY BORING
Quizzing: You prove you can actually answer a question or two.
This time the talk-about-yourself bit was a straightforward 2-minutes speech from each punter as we moved around the semi-circle of 9 hopefuls.
Waiting to hear who's got the nod
Talking about how great you are to the panel of 3 production staff, eight potential rivals all in two minutes is rather like a super-condensed job interview. Here’s a tip: don’t go for this if you’re the kind of person likely to go to pieces.
To add to the pressure, first up was Brian from Edinburgh pub quiz legends THE DUDE ABIDES who had co-incidentally shown up on the same day. I already knew Brian is a top quizzer but I did not know that he’s got loads of stories to tell, including a border incident in war-torn Sierra Leone. Brian nailed his 2 minutes, filling it up with rat-a-tat nuggets of real interest, leaving me in no doubt that there would be a big green tick beside his name and wondering how to follow it.
I was next and my contribution was unprepared and therefore felt a bit meandering and woolly. I tried a few funnies but wasn’t really getting the laughs. The panel had asked us to mention evidence of risk-taking in our lives so I told them about the time I was Naked Elvis.
This appeared to get no reaction and at this point I was wondering if I had fucked up. And that was my two minutes.
The rest of the group included an extremely bubbly woman from Fife, a woman from Nigeria who now lives in Glasgow, a big friendly bald bloke, a Glasgow cabbie who once won a car on Real Radio, a copper who had previously won £50k on 1 vs 100, a self-employed woman from Helensburgh, a student-y bloke and a full-time mum (“the hardest job in the world – and the least paid”).
The quizzy part of the audition involved filling in a sheet, exam style. No talking! I felt good with the questions and I knew that some others didn’t – the extremely bubbly woman kept screaming that she didn’t know any of the answers. No talking!
Also, I know that Brian knows more or less everything but when we were chatting afterwards he revealed that he didn’t know which Sesame Street muppet lives in a bin.
There followed a slightly ludicrous game of outburst/scattergories which involved a lot of shouting and a final episode where we mimicked the final part of The Chase by answering questions “as a team”. In reality, this was me and Brian taking turns to shout out the answers. This was filmed as well and I suppose they were looking to see how confident and how quick you could be.
I understand that at most contestant auditions, they will send you away and let you know later. However, on this occasion, the prodcution team told us on the day if we had been successful.
Expectancy and Fear: waiting to hear...
We all filed back to the other room and had about five minutes to guess what was going to happen before the woman came through and told us who had got through. Six of the nine got through and I thoguht this did not include me but my name was the last one. Phew.
This means I am on a shortlist of 240, from which they will need 160 contestants so from here I’ve got a 2/3 chance to get on the show.
Yvonne, the very very bubbly woman was not picked. I thought they would take her because she was so bright and bubbly but it looks like the trivia knocked her out. She thoguht she scored maybe one or two out of twenty on the quiz and the drama in The Chase depends largely on how close the contestants can run The Chaser. It was a shame because she’d be great on-screen. I think she said she’d been on Golden Balls. That seems about right. She should apply for Deal or No Deal.
The full-time mum also didn’t make it and she seemed pretty aggrieved. I don’t know what her trivia was like but perhaps the chatty bit let her down as she was determined in insisting that her life was not as interesting as the others – perhaps not a great tactic. Also, maybe the full-time-mum-hardest-job-in-the-world thing didn’t strike a chord with the all-female panel who are obviously “career types”.
Anyway – the hardest and worst-paid job in the world would be in some kind of chemicals factory in Western China?
You can’t study for a TV quiz show. Or at least, that’s what I used to think.
Now that I’m actively applying to appear on as many cash quiz-paying quiz shows as I can, I’m watching more of the shows on YouTube and starting to notice certain sets of knowledge which keep coming up.
As a quizmaster of many years myself, I should know this but then I’ve always tended away from mainstream quiz stuff and gone more for material that asks the relative size of various animals’ cocks, and so on.
Anyway, these sets of knowledge, sometimes known as chestnuts, are relied on by quiz writers looking to bulk-out their question databases and are things like:
US state capitals
The periodic table
Succession of English/British monarchy
Succession of Conservative Party leaders (other parties too, but the recent chequered nature of the Tories = tricky questions that you think you ought to know)
Shakespeare’s plays
Classic Horse Races
Who wrote which opera
You’re never going to win a competitive quiz on this knowledge alone, you need to have some depth in other areas but in just about every episode of every TV-quiz I’ve watched so far, there is something from one of these lists.
So, I’m thinking: it shouldn’t take too long to rote-learn some of these which won’t guarantee me a million pounds, but should throw me a safety net now and again when I might otherwise be in trouble.
For instance: right now I would be screwed if I got ANY question on the periodic table. I’m just not interested in that stuff.
Q. What element is represented by the chemical symbol Na?
(Iowa [Des Moines] Picture you borrow some coins. You keep saying to yourself, “I owe dem coins, I owe dem coins.” I + owe = Iowa. Dem + coins = Des Moines.)
And as for the periodic table, there’s always Tom Lehrer:
LEt me know in the comments if you have any other good ways of remembering such lists of info.
My quest to have a go at every single British quiz show that pays a cash prize has taken another step forward with the news that I’ve got an audition at the end of this month for The Chase.
The show is on ITV 1, is presented by Bradley Walsh and is a variation on the Eggheads theme of beating champion quizzers at their own game, except this time there is only one ‘brain’ instead of five.
Here’s the ending of the first show form last year’s pilot series: The Chaser in this clip is Mark Labbett who once won £32,000 on Millioniare and plainly knows his shit. This is what stands in the way.
So, the quizzing looks pretty hard but it might be one of these things where you can take a good guess at the question setters’ preferences. On Eggheads I would have done well to study at US state capitals, and in this case it might be clever to look at Kings of England.
My mission to appear on all of Britain’s cash-prize game shows continues with the Deal or No Deal application form.
As you might have guessed for a show that has no quiz content, the questions on the application form are designed to tease out my ‘personality’ and determine whether or not I will make good telly when I appear.
The form is lengthy but the “save and return later” feature means I can take my time about filling in the form and try to think of something good to write for the trickier questions.
If I get on the show I could end up a quarter of a million pounds better off, so its probably worth taking my time over this (the deadline for submission is the end of March).
There is plenty of the usual stuff about whether or not I would consider myself competitive (please give examples), but here are five of the more difficult moments on the form.
What do you think I should write for these..?
What would be a life changing amount of money and what would you spend it on?
Who is your all time hero and why?
If you could swap lives with someone for a day, who would it be and why? (You can’t say The Banker or Noel)
If you were to take The Banker out for a day or night, where would you take him and what would you do?
Write a 4 – line poem about Deal or No Deal
By the way, if you want to apply yourself, go to the Deal or No Deal website to get started,
Be the First to Comment 
