Heads or Tails - new UK game show

[Lirodon]

Leave it to Five to try and put excitement and depth into among other things: the coin toss. Justin Lee Collins hosts this new British game show which seemed to premiere today from what I heard, overshadowed by everyone listening to see Rage Against The Machine be Christmas #1 after an online campaign, seems to combine some Deal or No Deal like elements with the fun of 50/50 wild guessing.

Format goes a bit like this I'm told; Basically, 20 coins, each secretly valued with either one of 16 amounts of pounds (100/200/300/400/600/800/1000/2000/3000/4000/6000/8000/10000/25000/50000/100000), or a Life (which are the rest). Basically, you get 12 flips, and for each one, you pick a coin and then try and predict the result of a coin toss from a regular coin (heads or tails, as it were). Get it right, and the coin reveals its value and becomes live (indicated by turning gold), or if its a life, its saved for the endgame. Get it wrong, and its revealed, and is taken out of play. Now, to actually bank the money from a live coin, you have to play another flip on it. You can take as many tries on live coins to bank them (limited by your number of flips of course)

At the 10th flip, you can either continue on, or you can choose to use "Fast Forward" (which exchanges the ability to bank an unrevealed coin on one flip for your 10th flip), or "Show the Lives" (which at the same cost, reveals where all the lives are hidden)

Now the end-game, this is fun: its more guessing. Every correct call doubles your current bank contents, every wrong call reduces it by half, and costs you one of the lives you earned earlier. If you're out of lives, you lose everything if you get one more wrong call. The winnings no matter what, is capped at a potential top prize of £1,000,000. And yes, you CAN safely leave during this too.

And yes, you got the obligatory "appearances friends and/or family" stuff too, and as the kicker, they wheeled out Dane Bowers to give advice on what the contestant should do, he was only slightly popular in 2002 for gods sake!

The format itself seems pretty solid from what I've learned about it, and JLC does seem like he's a pretty popular personality up there but until I see some videos I won't say anything. Its an hour long, and they only get through one game per show, but thenagain I don't think a "rolling" format like DoND could work here.

This might be good enough to be picked up in the U.S., it's extremely less ridiculous than Million Dollar Beat the Clock, but at the same time its just as.

[Brig Bother]

The actual reality is that it's really boring, and JD Roth co-created it so we're not taking the credit/blame.

Also Fast Forward means you automatically bank any of the final two coins you correctly guess for.

[chad1m]

"It's almost usually heads!"

[Twentington]

Was anyone else reminded of the "Million Dollar Heads and Tails" that appeared in that one episode of How I Met Your Mother?

[Clay Zambo]

The Million Dollar (Pound) Coin-Toss?

Really?

Have they been trolling us for ideas?

We. Were. Kidding.

[tpirfan28]

I will overlook this as an anomaly as opposed to the norm of recent game show development in the UK.

/Cube, Pointless
//I can't be the only one who really likes Pointless, am I?

[TLEberle]

[quote name=\'tpirfan28\' post=\'232600\' date=\'Dec 20 2009, 05:36 PM\']I will overlook this as an anomaly as opposed to the norm of recent game show development in the UK.

/Cube, Pointless
//I can't be the only one who really likes Pointless, am I?[/quote]No sir. I dug it, or at least the idea. The level of Anglophilia in the questions bothered me, as well as the kicking-off mechanic, but the game is a solid one, and it is a fun, quiet way to spend an hour.

[gamed121683]

Whoever created this show was probably inspired by How I Met Your Mother, IDK :-/.

[Unrealtor]

[quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'232601\' date=\'Dec 20 2009, 07:39 PM\'][quote name=\'tpirfan28\' post=\'232600\' date=\'Dec 20 2009, 05:36 PM\']I will overlook this as an anomaly as opposed to the norm of recent game show development in the UK.

/Cube, Pointless
//I can't be the only one who really likes Pointless, am I?[/quote]No sir. I dug it, or at least the idea. The level of Anglophilia in the questions bothered me, as well as the kicking-off mechanic, but the game is a solid one, and it is a fun, quiet way to spend an hour.
[/quote]

What didn't you like about the eliminations? They should have shuffled around the order of the second half of each round to avoid the anti-clamaxes they had, but other than that, I wasn't bothered by it.

[fishbulb]

Hey, if Card Sharks worked, I don't see why this couldn't.

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'fishbulb\' post=\'232611\' date=\'Dec 21 2009, 01:38 AM\']Hey, if Card Sharks worked, I don't see why this couldn't.[/quote]
Apples and oranges. With CS, in most cases you had more than a 50/50 shot. Math was my worst enemy in high school, so I don't know the probability of calling "HIGHER!" with a 3, only for the next card to be a deuce (1 in 51? I warned you that I suck at math). Regardless, with some common sense, you can at least play the odds, knowing that 9 times out of 10, your next card will be a 3 or higher.

The heads or tails is completely blind luck, and requires absolutely no strategy whatsoever.

/One thing I loved about being a journalism major
//We stopped after College Algebra I

[J.R.]

I kept getting IMs on this throughout the weekend thinking my friend was just yanking my chain/making snarky commentary on the state of recent picked-up concepts.

This is for real? Wow.

[Kniwt]

Oh dear.

The pacing on this show makes Deal or No Deal look speedy by comparison.  7:30 into the show, and one decision has been made.

Flying logo with zoom through a letter (in this case, the O)?  Check.
Asking "Why?" for everything?  Check.
Annoying pre-commercial promo?  Check.
Meet the whole family and every friend the contestant ever had?  Check.
"Surprise" celebrity guest?  Check.

I'm also reminded of the sketchy fake-games casino in "Vegas Vacation."  Honest, if I didn't know better, I'd think this was a special parody episode, one of JLC's stunts.

"IT'S TAILS!!!11!11!!one!"

[MikeK]

[quote name=\'fishbulb\' post=\'232611\' date=\'Dec 21 2009, 01:38 AM\']Hey, if Card Sharks worked, I don't see why this couldn't.[/quote]
I gather you didn't see this.

[quote name=\'fostergray82\' post=\'232612\' date=\'Dec 21 2009, 02:13 AM\']Apples and oranges. With CS, in most cases you had more than a 50/50 shot. Math was my worst enemy in high school, so I don't know the probability of calling "HIGHER!" with a 3, only for the next card to be a deuce (1 in 51? I warned you that I suck at math).[/quote]
4 in 51, 7 in 51 if pushes are considered losses.

Nobody's mentioned the dimmed lights and the spotlights/Vari-lites used during the flip, and an overhead camera focused on the host's hand cupping the tossed coin.  There's polishing a dog turd and then there's whatever level of pointless chrome used on a frickin' coin toss.  For all that excessive, pricey window dressing, the host manually tossed the coin.  Could they not build some type of non-computerized randomization device?  I'm thinking something like that zig-zag chute used on Just Men! for randomizing the car keys.  Someone must've had a need to make a late submission in some type of "The Worst of the 2000s" competition...

/Pointless--the best new UK show of the year, better than The Cube IMO.

[Jay Temple]

[quote name=\'Twentington\' post=\'232596\' date=\'Dec 20 2009, 06:29 PM\']Was anyone else reminded of the "Million Dollar Heads and Tails" that appeared in that one episode of How I Met Your Mother?[/quote]
before I even opened the thread

\I saved the HIMYM episode for that alone.