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If you could appear on any game show...


HarmonicGenerator

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On 12/14/2018 at 5:51 PM, Glenryck Pilchards said:

@Stylin_and_Profilin up until the early 1990's the maximum cash prize on a quiz show was £6,000 due to the Broadcasting Act. Hence why a lot of the 70s and 80s gameshows had prizes instead of cash (Generation Game, Sale of the Century, 321, Bullseye etc).

When that legislation was repealed there was a surge of gameshows which offered bigger prizes like Play Your Cards Right and Catchphrase. The big change was when Millionaire hit the screens then other channels followed suit with humongous prizes.

The main reasons why Eggheads and Pointless has such low prizes in comparison is that they are a daily quizshow so the budget is a lot less than the weekly primetime gameshows and the BBC have reduced the prizes after a scandal a few years ago when a BBC radio contest was found to be fixed which stopped competitions for quite a while. Back in the day you won premium bonds for picking goal of the month on MotD and that has not been reinstated. 

Gameshows and quizshows aren't regulated by the Gambling Commission as the contestants aren't risking their own money. It is regulated by OFCOM. 

That makes sense, cheers for that.

MOTD thing rings a bell now you mention it, i remember for a while Lineker kept emphasizing about the Goal Of The Month just being 'for a bit of fun' or words to that effect to the point i thought it was some some of inside joke or rib between him Hansen and Lawrenson.

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All of the Chasers were/are career quizzers, surely? That's how they get the gig. The Beast used to (maybe still does?) work for NGW in some capacity, so not surprised to see him popping up at wrestling shows.

I think I've mentioned on here before that I was on Five Gold Rings in the first series, as one of the audience members that can be used as a lifeline - my dad and my brother were playing, with my aunt and I in the crowd, along with three random Dutch audience members to make up our "friends and family" section, as they'd only added the lifelines as a format point about a week before they started filming, and as they were filming in the Netherlands and just after Christmas, barely anyone could get people to fly in at short notice.

My brother and dad got asked to audition because they'd auditioned for Pointless, been accepted, but then pulled from the episode they were on because they already had a father and son team, so were fast-tracked to auditions for the new show.

Quite a few of the other contestants were, if not career quizzers, at least repeat offenders who had done one or two other shows, and auditioned for plenty more. There were also two women there as alternates, who were there for the whole week of filming in case a team had to pull out, and they were proper career quizzers, to the point where it was a genuine way of supplementing their income.

We were in Hilversum for two days, arriving at the hotel the night before filming, and going over to the studio first thing in the morning. The whole time you're in the hotel, they scheduled three production meetings that you had to attend, and they could easily have fit it all in one meeting - I'm convinced it was to keep you all in the hotel bar chatting to each other so you'd be more relaxed/chatty during the filming. 

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My Dad appeared on largely forgotten Channel 5 game show 100% in the 90's.

In what has to be the most quintessentially 'My Dad' thing in the world, he got the highest losing score in the history of the show (and thus got no money whatsoever). He also turned up for one taping dressed like another guest, so they went down to bowels of the costume department and pulled out Carbomb's shirt for him to wear instead.  

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The last time he was on Fighting Talk Paul Sinha said that he had been quizzing at a good level and heard that the producers of The Chase were looking for new chasers. He emailed them, told them he was a quizzer and stand up and got an audition. He had previously got to the final of Are You An Egghead but lost in the final 2.

Of all the Chasers he does best in the WQC, though none of the Chasers can get near Pat and Kevin off Eggheads. 

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It's such a strange, incestuous (no, I don't mean Beast Labbett) group of people the trivia/quiz lot. A gang of about 20, most of whom are right oddballs, who seem to be involved with everything quiz related on telly. 

I reckon it attracts a similar brand of weirdo as pro wrestling does, albeit people with significantly more mental horsepower. 

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if we are talking from a position of purely hoping to win i'd take Pointless, because if you get a subject you know a bit about its pretty easy. The other day for example one of the lead question was 'actors who were in the Big Lebowski', another recent was 'Foo Fighters singles', it can a pretty easy game.

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18 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

At the 2018 WQC Sinha was 11th. The Beast wasn't ahead of him. It was a bad year for the Eggheads as well. Kevin was 6th, and Pat was 3rd. This year's winner was Olav Bjortomt. He sets the questions for University Challenge and The Chase. 

He was in my A-Level English class.

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49 minutes ago, Gus Mears said:

I reckon it attracts a similar brand of weirdo as pro wrestling does, albeit people with significantly more mental horsepower. 

I think a closer comparison is something like crossword setters. Weird intellectuals doing behind the scenes jobs that most people never even stop to think about. It's a relatively recent phenomenon with The Chase and Eggheads that the "real" quizzers are given a public face, rather than everyone on every quiz show just being Joe Public.

It's an interesting one - my Dad had been trying for the better part of a decade to get on quiz shows before he even got an audition, but as soon as he got one, he started getting recommended for others, invited to shows just starting out and so on.

It's probably as much to do with the likes of Endemol making everything as it is the incestuous nature of quizzing itself. 

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On 11/8/2018 at 12:26 PM, Keith Houchen said:

I once got an audition thing for Only Connect but it was during my upcoming honeymoon so I had to pass.  I was gutted. 

I was trying to cajole @JNLister into doing Only Connect a couple of years back. Have we found a third man?

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