Credit for spotting this goes to Chico (ironwing) on the gameshows LiveJournal community.
X-Fire was a paintball-based action game show which ran for one series on Channel 4 in the UK starting in 2001. Unfortunately it was broadcast in the autumn of 2001; after September 11th, the show was fairly quickly pulled for many months because people didn't want to see shows which made light of shooting. The ratings weren't sufficient to get it a second series, though this wasn't helped by its neither-fish-nor-fowl timeslot.
A full description of the show (accompanied by a review that is slightly more negatively critical than I had expected) can be found in the
usual place on ukgameshows.com but in short, each episode sees a team of six contestant paintballers take on a
(n American) Gladiators-style lineup of regular house paintballers over three linked, vaguely-espionage-themed missions. The style and appearance of the show are very much video-game-inspired with little expense spared. The look and sound of the programme are far more hip than that of most game shows; the style is silly and jokey but retains a good sense of fun.
Over a thirteen episode series the later shows sometimes tend to get a little bit same-y in a
bad way but if you're prepared to accept and enjoy watching
Iron Chef and not worry that it's not a traditional intellectual studio-based game show then you've got enough sense of humour and sufficiently little starch to enjoy at least one episode of this. (Conversely, if you look at this sentence and it fills you with dread, feel free to decide this show is not for you and kindly pipe down about it.) As a sample, the show has what I think remains one of the silliest and so greatest lines from a game show yet: "At the end of the series, the team at the top of the leader board gets to come back and try to save the world."
I have vague concerns in that the show was made for a UK TV hour and so might have to have another ten minutes hacked out to fit in the usual number of adverts for a US TV hour; if they re-edit the show more tightly then this could work well, but they could screw it up.
You can see the show between 9 and 10 Eastern and 12 and 1 Eastern (erm, 9 and 10 Pacific, I guess) on Tuesday nights on OLN. I think it was one of the best new game shows of 2001 (...though wasn't
The Mole (2?) that year as well?) and remember thinking of it as an 8/10 show; I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it if you do tune in.
Haven't I had this sense of
déja vu somewhere before?
Chris
