Wheel Of Fortune / Ant & Dec’s Limitless Win
The Great Pottery Throwdown
Be in no doubt, Saturday night belongs to ITV. The biggest stars, the shiniest shows and the most colossal cash prizes are all on ‘the other side’.
With headline-grabbing game shows either side of ITV’s surreal celebrity talent contest, The Masked Singer, Auntie isn’t even an also-ran.
Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly returned with Limitless Win (ITV1), promising that one pair of contestants will be going home with a million pounds this series. Ant and Dec are the channel’s figureheads, but far more surprising is the face now fronting a revamped Wheel Of Fortune (ITV1) — one of the Beeb’s most highly paid presenters, Graham Norton.
What did BBC1 have to compete with that line-up? An FA Cup match, two run-of-the-mill celeb quizzes in The Weakest Link and Pointless Celebrities, and the hospital drama Casualty, now in its 38th series. Meanwhile, on BBC2, we had five hours of Shirley Bassey, which is an awful lot of Hey Big Spender.
It’s nearly 30 years since Norton hosted Channel 4’s sex-themed quiz show Carnal Knowledge, an experience that had appeared to put him off presenting game shows for life. He has a comedian’s natural rapport with the public, though, and slipped easily into banter with the three players.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists copied from classic quizzes including Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Play Your Cards Right. In less capable hands, its complexities might overwhelm it, but Ant and Dec make light of the bulky rules by goading the players into non-stop chatter and fluster
Wheel Of Fortune is an American format, like Jeopardy! (which also launched on ITV last week, with Stephen Fry). It’s been tried in the UK before: Nicky Campbell hosted it in the 1990s, before handing over to others including Bradley Walsh.
Telly historians might even remember a version from 1970, presented by Michael Miles, where contestants could win an electric food mixer or a year’s supply of eggs.
Impish Graham is offering more than eggs on the show he calls, with game show panache, ‘Wheel Of For-Choon-Ah!’ The winner collected more than £35,000 and a spa holiday, after solving a series of word puzzles that look like half-completed crossword clues.
The format feels dated, though, with players taking it in turn to spin a giant wheel, more fairground gimmick than roulette, to rack up prizes or, if they’re unlucky, lose the lot. It didn’t help that one contestant took an early lead and held on to it throughout.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists copied from classic quizzes including Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Play Your Cards Right. In less capable hands, its complexities might overwhelm it, but Ant and Dec make light of the bulky rules by goading the players into non-stop chatter and fluster.
Tracy and Tina, sisters who described themselves as ‘two old birds from the back end of nowhere,’ netted 100 grand — helped by the hosts, who supplied an answer about the number of seats on a jet to Australia. Well, they would know that.
Filming at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke, presenter Siobhan McSweeney (wonderful as Sister Michael in Derry Girls) strikes the right balance between larking about and offering support to the amateur potters
Judge Keith Brymer Jones’s scoring system on The Great Pottery Throwdown (Ch4) is brutal — any piece of earthenware that doesn’t meet his approval is dumped into his ‘bucket of doom’. That’s like Paul Hollywood chucking somebody’s show- stopper sponge in the bin.
Filming at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke, presenter Siobhan McSweeney (wonderful as Sister Michael in Derry Girls) strikes the right balance between larking about and offering support to the amateur potters.
We learn more about the contestants’ backgrounds than on similar shows, such as Sewing Bee or Bake Off. But that’s because the spectacle itself is less varied — we see clay going round on the wheel, clay drying, clay being glazed . . . in fact, it’s not till the final judging that there’s anything to look at except clay.
All very nice but it does lack excitement.
