Greeting friends! And I come bearing good news: Quizzy Mondays returns with a full line-up next Monday! So, tune back in this time next week for my first write-up of the series. That's then though; this is now, and now we have another of Radio 4's pilot quizzes to look at.
So, so far we've had Bookmarks, which is an excellent show a couple of tweaks away from greatness, and Deja News, which is a good show but probably better suited for Fridays at 6:30 than the Sunday quiz slot. Next up, we have Your Number's Up...
Now, Max Fosh is not someone I was familiar with before this show, but my first impressions of him here were positive. In fact, given that this show is apparently made by the same people as QI, I'm quite surprised he hasn't been on that show since given how large and diverse its cast has become in the last few series. Here, he does an excellent job, has a strong handle on the format and can add plenty of humour to proceedings when needed.
So, once again, this is a quiz contested by teams of two. Like Bookmarks, they are introduced on first name terms only; I'm pretty sure though that the two on one of the second show's teams were Katie Steckles and Paul Taylor of OC S16 winners the Puzzle Hunters. (I could also hazard an educated guess on who the other team were)
Round 1 then; Max asks the teams a series of trivia based maths questions (for example "The number of teams in the English Premier League minus the number of teams in the Scottish Premiership"), first team to buzz in with the correct answer AND show their workings (for example, eight, because it's twenty English teams minus twelve Scottish teams) gets a point. A gentle and easy to understand start to the show to get proceedings underway.
Round 2 is Estimate Guestimate; this round takes quite a long time and eats up almost half the show, but it's still a good round. One team is sent backstage, the other is asked a long and complicated maths question, accompanied by music; for example, one of the questions on the first show was "Lou Bega decides to send a Valentine's Day card to all the women mentioned in his hit song Mambo No 5 and, to save money, decides to do so second class; how much money does he spend on stamps?".
Once the team has taken their time to work it out the best they can and have a guess, they go backstage and the other team comes back and attempts the same question (albeit without the music this time!). After both teams have answered, they are both brought in to hear the correct answer; closest team gets two points. And, if their answer is closer than the average guess of the audience, they get a bonus two points.
A second question is then asked, this time with the team who went second last time going first this time, but otherwise it's the same.
Despite the fact it takes quite a long time, this is still a perfectly good round. If you wanted to cut it down a bit, you could maybe have both teams attempt one question each and work out some other way of awarding the points.
The third round was different on the two shows. In the first, Round 3 was a simple variant of the card game Pontoon: Max asks the teams to write down as many correct answers to a certain category as they wish to; in the show we got, the category was "Eurovision winning nations". Standard Blackjack rules apply: closest to 21 without going over are the winners; 22 or more and you're bust. As it happened, both teams went bust!
This probably explains why they changed it for the second show. In that, Round 3 was much simpler: Max gives both teams a series of categories and they have to say whether there are more or less than ten of them (ie series of Red Dwarf broadcast on the BBC, which would be less as there were eight). Both have one minute to get through as many as possible; one point for each correct answer.
On balance, I think the second third round is probably the better one and, if it gets picked up for a full series, that's the one I'd run with.
And the final round is probably the best of the show: Max asks the teams a series of maths cum trivia questions (eg number of Scottish top flight titles Celtic have won, or 224 divided by four; answer to both is 56); first to buzz in correctly gets a point.
I enjoyed this show a lot more than I thought I would. Max is an excellent host, the questions, far from being out of the league of a non-maths person like myself, are very fun and easy to play along with and, while the second round is quite long, it all flows reasonably quickly enough that you won't get bored. If you wanted to cut this round down as I suggested with both teams facing just one question each, you could always do both the Pontoon and the More or Less round to fill in the extra time.
Overall, this is another excellent show, and I definitely think you could get a full series out of it; maybe an eight team three round series of seven/eight episodes. But, yeah, another winner; if there really is only room for on of these pilots to get picked up, I don't envy whoever it is who has to decide which of the three we've had so far gets the nod.
One last of these pilots to go: Around the World in 80 Ways, hosted by Simon Reeve, begins its two week run this coming Sunday. Review of that coming back a fortnight tomorrow.
Firstly, though, we have the small matter of the return of Quizzy Mondays next week! See yous next Monday with my first write-up of the season; until then, sayonara...
