In which the Author remains convinced that ITV know nothing about primetime quizzes

As Dan Peake remarked ITV haven't made a successful primetime quiz since...
[insert your own punchline here].

ITV have, in fact, shown two good quizzes in this author's memory: Duel (2008) and The Exit List (2012). That neither was successful we wholly blame on ITV's decision not to renew.

Let's Duel.

In fact, if we discount instances of friendly fire, we think ITV has only made one good quiz at all in recent memory; that being Jenny Ryan's programme. Tipping Point, by the way, does not count because it is an arcade game (not a quiz), and 1000 Heartbeats does not count because it is a multidisciplinary challenge (and/or: we forgot it). That said, we hear Rebound is being afforded a second series - if so then we might afford it a review.

This is not a picture of Revolution.

A lot of the demand to create new primetime gameshow things has been absorbed by The Cube, which is a great show, but not a quiz, and is getting a bit old. Perhaps 500Q was ITV's one attempt to find a quiz replacement before reverting to the safer territory of physical games - perhaps it was their attempt to copy the success of The Million Pound Drop Bank Job. We know something called Revolution was worked on for a while, but never good enough to be shown to us.

#givethatmanapodium

We're not actually going to pour very much over 500Q itself, mainly because there's not that much which is both interesting and not obvious to the naked eye. The Challengers are a bit redundant. The questions are (slightly) too hard, and there aren't 500 of them. The catchphrase (can you remember what it is? Exactly.) doesn't work. The set's too big. The lack of a destination has been patched, but at the cost of making the game overtly asymmetric. Position in the queue is everything.

Three wrong and you're... eliminated?

The problem is, turning our eyes upward, Sata's author knew that 500Q would be a disaster. We've already seen it fail in America - few people watched it and even fewer thought it any good. We've heard that it failed to shine in Germany, and even on paper, it seems obvious to us that 500Q is a weak format: it's just questions, not five hundred of them, not particularly fast, and with no real destination.

Some of the not 500 Questions.

What bamboozles us is that heavy resources have gone into producing 500 Questions. They've got (borrowed) an expensive set, the questions are of an ok quality, the editing is tight, and we (subjectively) like Giles. It's not going to set the world alight, but, it is watchable; Sata comfortably sat for an hour. The programme produced could (with some numbers changed) fit comfortably into the 5pm daily position.

And ITV are actually great at this. We haven't bothered writing about many of them, but over the last 2 years we've seen ITV create 4 or 5 middling-to-competent teatime alternatives. (And Freeze Out.) This one just happens to have escaped into a slightly bigger studio, and a slightly later transmission. But we can't just wrap things up there: 500 Questions as a format demands to be primetime, demands to be eventful, demands to be Big. For it to be a mediocre hour, is, due to its own nature, a failure.

We think everything wrong with the Format 500 Questions is endemic; no amount of work could save it. We cite the programme produced by ITV as evidence. What we find most annoying is that this wasn't an easy mistake to make. We think any ITV exec could and should have noticed that 500Q was a lacking format, and we think the same work done on a blank slate would probably produce something adequate; maybe even another Exit List or Duel, (which the channel could then inappropriately cancel, obviously).

We ranted last summer that BBC4 had had one successful gameshow and then given up trying. We might contrast ITV, who have almost given up on primetime quizzes, and who we doubt have the insight to ever get one right.