Wheel of Fortune / Ant & Dec's Limitless Winnings
The great potter's throw
Be in no doubt, Saturday night belongs to ITV, with the biggest stars, the shiniest shows and the most colossal cash prizes all on the 'other side'.
With headline-grabbing game shows on both sides of ITV's surreal celebrity talent competition, The Masked Singer, Auntie isn't even a supporting player.
Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly returned with Limitless Win (ITV1) and promised that one pair of contestants in the series will go home with a million pounds. Ant and Dec are the showpieces of the channel, but far more surprising is the face now at the helm of a revamped Wheel Of Fortune (ITV1) – one of the Beeb's highest-paid presenters, Graham Norton.
What did BBC1 have to compete with this line-up? An FA Cup game, two regular celebrity 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 a lot like Hey Big Spender.
It has been almost 30 years since Norton hosted Channel 4's sex quiz show Carnal Knowledge, an experience that appears to have put him off a lifetime of game show hosting. However, he has a comedian's natural rapport with the audience and easily fell into banter with the three players.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists modeled after classic quizzes like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and play your cards right. In less capable hands it could be overwhelmed by its complexity, but Ant and Dec make light of the extensive rules, encouraging non-stop chatter and excitement from players
Wheel Of Fortune is an American format, like Jeopardy! (which also started on ITV last week with Stephen Fry). It has already been tried in the UK: Nicky Campbell hosted it in the 1990s before handing it over to others, including Bradley Walsh.
Television historians may even remember a 1970 version presented by Michael Miles, in which contestants could win an electric mixer or a year's supply of eggs.
The mischievous Graham offers more than eggs in the show, which he calls, with game show flair, “Wheel Of For-Choon-Ah!” The winner raised more than £35,000 and a spa holiday after solving a series of word puzzles that look like half-finished crossword clues.
However, the format feels dated, with players taking turns spinning a giant wheel, which is more of a fairground gimmick than roulette, to rake in prizes or, if unlucky, lose big. It didn't help that one competitor took the lead early and kept it throughout.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists modeled after classic quizzes like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and play your cards right. In less capable hands it could be overwhelmed by its complexity, but Ant and Dec make light of the extensive rules, encouraging non-stop chatter and excitement from players.
Tracy and Tina, sisters who described themselves as “two old birds from nowhere,” raised $100,000 – with support from hosts who answered 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 fooling around and supporting the amateur potters
Judge Keith Brymer Jones' scoring system for The Great Pottery Throwdown (Chapter 4) is brutal – any piece of earthenware that doesn't meet his approval is thrown into his “bucket of doom.” That's like Paul Hollywood throwing someone's spectacular sponge in the trash.
Filming at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke, presenter Siobhan McSweeney (wonderful as Sister Michael in Derry Girls) strikes the right balance between fooling around and supporting the amateur potters.
We learn more about the backgrounds of the contestants than on similar shows like Sewing Bee or Bake Off. But that's because the spectacle itself is less varied – we see how clay spins on the disk, how clay dries, how clay is glazed. . . In fact, it is only during the final assessment that it becomes clear that there is something else to see besides sound.
Everything is very nice, but there is a lack of tension.