The one who can do everything (pt3)

Hello, and welcome to part three of a special series on SATA. 

This series will be discussing Dutch series De Alleskunner and British series 99-to-beat. It will be in many (5? -- we’ll find out together) parts to be released over the next few months.

PART 3: COMPARING DE ALLESKUNNER TO 99-TO-BEAT

So, how does De Alleskunner compare to 99-to-beat?

(Of course, I’m comparing a show I’ve watched to a show I’ve not watched, so some of this might be speculative or wrong.)

Firstly, let’s talk about names. Almost everyone I’ve talked to agrees that 99-to-beat is a pretty meh name. I deliberately gave two translations of DA earlier – the allrounder is the better translation, and the one that could work as an English name – the one who can do everything is a better summary of the show’s premise. I’ve seen plenty of better suggestions for names, I’m sure you can come up with your own. 

I’m not sure putting the number in the name is the best idea – there’s already a crowded market for shows that reference numbers around 100, with Physical 100, The 1% Club and (if you're old) 1-Vs-100. In fact (a topic I’ll return to) the numbers are not important and do not specifically need to be 100.

As mentioned, DA is set in a large, airy warehouse or exhibition center. It has windows and natural light, and there is visibly ample space for all of the games. The space is dressed very mildly, with some signs and banners with the show’s logo scattered around – but is still very obviously a “real” place.

Contrastingly, 99TB uses a formal TV studio. It’s large, deep, and tall, probably about 2/3 the size of the Autotron. It’s dominated by a metal “spider”, about 2 stories tall, which holds 100 spotlights. These spotlights are used for the circle scenes, when the eliminated player(s) and the next game are announced. Over the series, they turn from white to red as each player is eliminated, creating a neat “roulette wheel” effect. Scattered sparsely around the edges of the studio are faux industrial panels with metal and chicken wire – a nice nod to the warehouse setting of DA.

Most notably though, the 99TB studio is dark. There is no natural light, and under the spotlights, the room feels a little like a spaceship. During (and only during) the games, intense artificial floodlights are used – these make the floor and the center of the room bright, but it feels contained: although there is ample space around the edges of the circle, the lighting and the spider draw focus just into the circle, which is less than half of the space.

DA has no real host – it is MC’d and narrated by the actor and comedian Frank Lammers. As mentioned already, he provides a chirpy, bouncy, and nasal voice – a parody of a PA announcer. His script is practical, but silly and funny.

99TB is hosted by Adam and Ryan Thomas – I’m not sure exactly how this will work. They filmed a link from the circle for the start of each episode, and the rest of the time they sat in a balcony like Waldorf and Salter and “reacted” to events. They are not equipped with the authority of most gameshow hosts - they are disarmed and with the audience, neither close to the players, nor in charge of the show. They therefore do not replace the disembodied voice, which is a cool and emotionless female voice. I quite like this – it’s a different but effective angle on that “parody of a PA announcement” idea -- but I’m a little sad that the element of fun provided by the bouncy Dutch MC might be missing.

On a similar note, it seems to me from the press releases, and the script that Adam and Ryan were using that 99TB is more explicitly and overtly ‘silly’, more ‘light entertainment’, than DA.

DA sets itself up seriously. The start-of-show narration doesn’t promise you chaos and hijinks, it describes a serious competition to find The Netherlands’ best all-rounder. 99TB is a fun family time, loads of contestants and crrrrrrazy games. This gives me a little hesitation: between Squid Game, Beast Games, and things like Taskmaster, there is a big market now for frivolous things done seriously – but you do have to do them seriously, else it’s just prescription lightent. 

 

The games? The games of 99TB are almost identical to the games of DA. (I was really pleased when I first walked into the studio, and immediately recognised the equipment for the first game.) I haven’t seen enough of DA to recognise every single 99TB game, but certainly most were, and all felt like DA games. Some of the games had small implementation differences compared to the Dutch game I knew, but nothing major. The games retained the playfulness, the humour, the surrealism, and the occasional unexpected edge that made for magic in DA. The only real difference is that in 99TB some of the team games (I’ll return to team games in a moment) had a little bit more complexity – a second step or a question of strategy, which made them feel a bit more special. 

Let's talk about timing. DA plays 10 games in each 44 minute episode – so has around 4-5 minutes per game. 99TB will play 7 games in a similar time – allowing for slightly over 6 minutes per game. I think that this could be a good change – allowing a little more time for the contestant’s reaction to the game, the game being played, and the “funnelling” effect as the game approaches a result. One criticism I have of DA is that it often jumps straight from the first few seconds of a game to the very last moments, when (and I can confirm this from experience) often a lot will happen between those ends.

I should mention at this point another show: “De Alleskunner VIPS”. As the name suggests, this is a version of De Alleskunner for “celebrities” (I’m not Dutch, so I can’t comment on the calibre of their celebrities). The set, games, and style are all recycled from De Alleskunner (in fact I suspect this is a way they can effectively get double value from some of their materials), and like with many shows, it seems to be the pattern that a civilian and a celebrity series get filmed back-to-back each year. 

Due to the limited supply of celebrities, seasons of DA:VIPS are shorter, with fewer than 100 players and fewer games per episode. (The numbers vary, but for example, season 2 featured 55 players, and 6 games per episode for 9 episodes.) Presumably this is because we can get more airtime from the celebs being entertaining than the general public – but I find that, regardless of not knowing any of the celeb players, DA:VIPS is better paced, less frantic, and more engaging to watch.

 You might spot an issue with the maths here – somewhat like DA:VIPS, 99TB will have 7 games per episode (and 8 episodes, totalling 56 games), but like regular DA, and as the name suggests, 99TB starts with 100 contestants. This means we sometimes need to cull more than one player per game, and 99TB’s answer to this is to exploit the team games.

 

Team games are part of DA. These games are fun, and let some of the most visually interesting, and materially complicated events in the show happen. They also provide a different kind of test, and different kinds of moments for the contestants: working together, being with (not against) your neighbours and friends, and needing to cooperate and strategize. 

But there’s a big difference – in DA, team games are still for eliminating just one player – this works by having teams compete, and then having the worst team play an individual version of the same game (for example an 81-player game puts the players into 9 teams of 9, with the worst team then playing the individual version). In 99TB, team games are for eliminating several players – there is one stage, and the losing team are all cut.

 

99TB has exactly one team game per episode, eliminating up to 12 players in one go. This difference has lots of consequences.

-         It means that the team games matter more. Rather than having the lifeline of the second individual part if your team loses, you are at risk of all being sent home. And due to the large teams, the odds of losing a team game are much higher than those of losing an individual game. For the players, this makes the teamwork, the strategisation, and the pressure during these games much more intense. For the audience, it means you risk seeing a whole bunch of your favourites drop in one go. You get your Red Wedding or Squid Game moments.

-        The team games in 99TB (compared to DA) have a little bit extra added to them, to make them more strategic, interesting, skilful, or complicated. They feel like a big event, which breaks up the potential samey-ness of the cycle for the audience.

-        (On that note - you might think that this would make the team games a good choice to put at the climax of the episode, to help each episode have more structure than just “here are some games and then we stop”. 99TB have not done so)

-        The prospect of losing in a team game felt less stressful. I’ll emphasise once again, how daunting the idea of seeing the whole field overtake you and getting left behind as the single loser is – in the team games, that wasn’t so bad; you would have a bunch of friends with you as you fell.

-        The team games created upsets. Strong characters who never seemed to struggle are suddenly gone. Things get shaken up. It’s difficult (and dangerous) to speculate, but this might have meant a wider and more interesting pool of players make it to the late episodes of 99TB than there would be on DA.

-        The team games mean that more players are eliminated in the early than late episodes, giving the numbers in the series a curve rather than a line shape. (For example, around half the players are eliminated by the end of episode 3 of 8). I do think this is a big positive, because it gives us a taste of the big-and-early chaos, but then bit more time when there are fewer players and we can focus on individuals. DA is probably at its least interesting between 80 and 60 players.

-        As a player, surviving a team game felt like landing on a ladder in Snakes and Ladders. While I was realistic about my chances of winning, I hoped to leave with as a low a number as I could – and suddenly we were 12 players further along. Although I enjoyed all the time filming, filming only 7 games per episode, and potentially 56 games in total, felt like a pleasantly more reasonable prospect than 10 and 99.

-        Players cut in a team game don’t get their individual moment in the spotlight, nor do they leave with the satisfaction of learning the unique “thing” that means that are not De Alleskunner. Although everything is fair in a literal sense, it might not feel so meritocratic or satisfying to have a strong or interesting player leave based on the team they were drawn into.

-        For me, it feels like by doing the team games in this way, the show is losing some of the narrative power that allows it to justify how cheap and silly some of the games are. “Yes we’re asking them to melt t-shirts – have you tried coming up with 100 original games?” doesn’t hit quite the same when the number of games in the series is a consequence of the tournament structure, rather than the premise. It makes the individual elimination games feel a bit tedious and unnecessary – why couldn’t we just do 10 of these team games and have the show all over in an evening?

 

I certainly can’t give you an unbiased opinion about the 99TB approach to team games and how it will seem to the audience. But, in my opinion, as a way to solve the problem of not having enough resources to make / screen time to show 99 games, I think it would have been better to go down the DA:VIPS route, and start with fewer players – maybe 50 or 60, for roughly the same number of games per episode, and have the team games stay two-stage and the eliminations one-by-one. As a bonus, this also means you can give the show a better title at the same time. 

To conclude, then. 99TB is a subtly, not hugely different show to DA. Most of the changes can be explained by 99TB seeking a more traditional, Saturday-night, Family-friendly vibe -- on this front I'm slightly concerned it might trip over itself, and end up without the enduring charm of DA. Some of the changes are practical, logistical changes (you need a lot more budget to create 99 games than 55) -- these are generally sensible but I personally think there was a better way. 

To be continued…

The one who can do everything (pt2)

Hello, and welcome to part two of a special series on SATA. 

This series will be discussing Dutch series De Alleskunner and its derivatives. It will be in many (5? -- we’ll find out together) parts to be released over the next few months.

PART 2: WHY I THINK DE ALLESKUNNER IS REALLY GOOD

The first joke of De Alleskunner is the games. It’s a joke about gameshows. As an occasional game designer, I love games that are playful, that are funny, that have an unexpected edge. Let me explain:

- The premise of De Alleskunner is to find one winner from 100 candidates. De Alleskunner means “the allrounder” – literally “the one who can do everything”. Like any Battle Royale, almost everyone will lose. The winner, however, will be so impressive – the one person who can do it all, the one person does the best out of 100. And to get this winner, we’re going to run 99 games, the most possible, and so eliminate the cast one-by-one. This will make DA the best test of all-round skill, the best gameshow there can be. 

- In Season 1 of DA there WERE games that you would put on your list of all-rounder-ness. There was climbing, running, general knowledge, driving, paintball, hammering in a nail. But of course, that’s not 100 things, and there’s no point testing similar skills again and again: that's boring. So many of the games – most, in fact – were strange little “silly” things. 

- To give just one example – there’s a game in season 4 of re-threading a drawstring into a pair of jogging shorts. That’s an infuriatingly difficult task – so fiddly in fact, that if I were faced with it in real life, I’d probably just abandon the trousers. Having to do it is tedious. But having to do it on De Alleskunner!? Suddenly you’re thinking: is it better to get a leader thread in with a needle? Is it better to scrunch up the trousers, to go bit-by-bit, or try to do a lot at once? 

To the player, to the fan, there’s this puzzle – there’s an important decision. And yet to the new, casual viewer, it’s a competition to thread a drawstring – how ridiculous! Playing with this edge, creating this space where over-analysis and surrealism can mingle, is the magic of DA’s games. 

- As the seasons have gone by, DA has understood more and more how to hit that sweet spot. 

 

The second joke of De Alleskunner follows close behind: It’s cheap. Like the first, this is a consequence of the premise: We have 100 players and (spoiler alert) we’ve blown most of the budget on accommodation for them, and on the venue and crew for such a long shoot. So the set, the décor, the props, all have to be unnaturally, awkwardly cheap. 

The tables are the cheap, flippy-out kind you see in an exam hall. S1 is set in a factory, S2 in a hangar – both are sparsely decorated with a few “De Alleskunner” signs sticky-taped to the preexisting pillars in the building. The crew – both film crew and logistical crew – are often seen in the back of shot.

This vaguely industrial, vaguely film verité feeling is maintained throughout. The disembodied voice addresses contestants through an on-screen loudspeaker. Vox-pops are filmed with <whatever> going on in the background. Important details are sometimes only seen in the back of a wide shot, and a red circle has to be added in post (a bit like Total Wipeout but not). Very often, the game is played in a line, with the contestants awkwardly close to each other. People’s name-tags fall off. Props break.

These factors create a sense of unpretentiousness. De Alleskunner isn’t laughing at itself – it’s laughing at those who dare to pretend that television is swish, shiny and expensive. That things always work and the perfect shot is always there. 

Probably the third joke of De Alleskunner is an obvious one: the prideful fall. 

This one isn’t original – it’s the same joke that has kept The Apprentice in business for 15 years. But regardless, it is reliable humour to see a bunch of people line up in the start-of-series montage, declare themselves the best at absolutely everything, and then (with 99% reliability) get spectacularly proven wrong. And failure usually really does require you to be quite notably bad at something – with so many players, there’s a lot of margin for error before you’re gone. There will be a lot of people who are quite bad at each game who aren’t eliminated.

There’s a certain wholesome flavour to this joke resulting from the surreal nature of the games. “Ha, you thought you could do everything, but you were in fact rubbish at deflating an air mattress” isn’t exactly the character assassination you might see Alan Sugar or Anne Robinson dishing out. Although often snarky (we’ll revisit that momentarily), everyone who leaves De Alleskunner leaves on a definitive beat, on their own legs, and being applauded by their 99 new friends. 

 

The fourth joke of De Alleskunner is… the jokes. The disembodied voice is snarky – the catchphrases are “jullie zijn met 94 - maar niet voor lang meer” -- “there are 94 of you – but not for much longer” and to the departing loser: “tot noit meer!” – effectively “see you never!”, and these turn up over and over.

Most contestants are also dismissed with a jibe at the nature of their failure: “Bob, step by step it became clear that you aren’t De Alleskunner - tot noit meer!” to the loser of a game about balancing on a step. You get the idea. The voice itself is a parody of a “PA voice”, overly nasal and bouncy

This provides some lightness, but also some concession (and connection) to the audience, who might be feeling a bit distant from proceedings. The goading serves a reminder that this is sport, this is for your entertainment – not just some televised holiday camp. The constant use of catchphrases helps ease the audience through a very repetitive cycle of admin as each contestant is dismissed and the next game is announced.

In addition to these four jokes, De Alleskunner is a great, fun, rollercoaster ride. It goes up and down, from silly, light and fun, to moments of intense pressure, vulnerability, fear and failure. 

The players of DA care about surviving every single round – and most of the rounds are structured to find, challenge, spotlight those who are the weakest in that particular area. (I’ll revisit this point in a future post). 

I said this in part one but it bears repeating - losing doesn't just mean Not Being Able To Do Everything And So Not Being De Alleskunner, losing means leaving a crazy fun experience, the chance to play 90 more exciting new games, and saying goodbye to your newfound friends. (And, if you care about it, being mocked and shamed on national TV.) This stuff matters.  

Consequently, when you watch DA, you are watching -- every few minutes – fully grown adults flail, grasp, struggle, and despair. That’s drama! Real drama, real stress, anguish and disappointment.  

And now we’re on to another section of VO and another game. This one’s about stacking toilet paper!

High and low. Light and dark. Happy and funny and scary and sad. This is why I love De Alleskunner

To be continued…

The one who can do everything (pt1)

Hello, and welcome to a special series on SATA. No, SATA is not back – SATA never went away. I reserve the right to write here whenever and however I want.

This series will be discussing Dutch series De Alleskunner and its derivatives. It will be in many (5? -- we’ll find out together) parts to be released over the next few months.

PART 1: DE ALLESKUNNER

Let me start by talking about De Alleskunner, a show I absolutely love.

De Alleskunner is a Dutch Gameshow where 100 players play 99 games, to whittle them down to one.

De Alleskunner itself is a spin-off from “Homo Universalis”, a segment on a Belgian magazine show (which, yes, they played out in 99 segments over 99 days) with the same concept. Think like how In for a Penny spun off from Saturday Night Takeaway.

De Alleskunner is filmed in an abandoned paper factory (season1) or the autotron (seasons2-5). (Aside: I have never figured out what the autotron is. Is it car museum, that they somehow clear all the exhibits from? Or is it an airplane hangar? Or something else called that for historical reasons? Please write in.)

I first found out about DA in 2020, from Nick Gates aka BothersBar. We’re both big fans of two other Dutch gameshows: Wie Is De Mol and De Slimste Mens, (among many other old and foreign gameshows), and some clips from DA Season 1 were going around on Youtube. From the clips and a few translated articles, I got a nice sense of what the show was, but didn’t think about it any more. Later that summer, bored during COVID, I forked out for a VPN and started watching all sorts of foreign shows that I had not been able to before. (Ok, mainly Fort Boyard. In a way, all of what follows is a consequence of them deciding to geo-block Fort Boyard, so butterfly-effect that.) 

I chugged through season 1 of DA over a couple of weeks as an after-dinner treat. I was using the Dutch channel’s online player and I was able to get a browser extension to translate the subtitles, so I could actually follow what was happening. I remember discovering ‘the magic’ of DA over those weeks: the onslaught of challenge after challenge, the highs and lows of survival and elimination, and the way that in 100 faces, certain people started to stand out – the natural heroes and champions of the competition.

I also (checks notes) enjoyed that they used Extreme Ways in the soundtrack. 

In September that year, the company I worked for at the time (who were lovely, fun people who were always up for a challenge) were looking for some fun events we could do to keep people happy (remember, we are still right in the middle of lockdown here). I invented, pitched, and ran, “the 95% challenge”. 

The 95% challenge was a multi-week event for about 60 players (around half of them went the distance) – each week they were sent “homework” of 12 games – each game took less than 5 minutes and had some objective criteria which allowed me to rank all entries. The top 95% in each game would score one point. Anyone who completed all 48 games in the top 95% (I think around 7 of the 60 did so) won extra special kudos. Of course, this was De Alleskunner in all-but name, although I think my changes made it work better in the circumstances.

About a year later, smash hit Squid Game came out on Netflix. I really enjoyed that show (it was gamey, foreign, and genuinely gripping), and I remember a certain cultural mania just after where everything was being compared to Squid Game. I remember thinking that with its warehouse style, player “uniforms”, sneery disembodied voice, array of wacky games from ordinary objects, and emotional highs and lows, DA was “the closest thing” to a real Squid Game that had ever been done. I even started writing a SATA post on the topic, but (fortunately?) it is lost to history. I did however, find this discord message:

 

 

Now, jump forward over two years, to some time in 2024. A rumour went around that we were getting a show called 99-to-beat, which was the rough translation of “99 - wer schlägt alle?”, which is the name of the German adaption of De Alleskunner. Again I need to thank BothersBar who both provided the rumour and the connection (via the German show) to DA. Because a few years had passed, the Dutch channel (SBS6) had uploaded seasons two and four to youtube, where they are still viewable. There were also a lot of clips of other versions around, especially the German version. I got interested in the show again, and watched season 2, which opened with a 90-second compilation set to thesong Legends Never Die by Against the Current. This 90s clip is awesome, if you do nothing else for me, go watch it now.

I mention this because that song then lodged itself so deeply in my subconscious that MONTHS later, when I heard it randomly somewhere else, I was suddenly reminded of DA.

Anyway, I watched season 2, and I also wrote this comment (which Nick then republished with my permission) on discord because people were totally confused by the rumoured format of the show:

 

You’ll notice that my comments there are not 100% positive! I had some doubts about how well DA would translate to Britain, and to ITV. We’ll return to that discussion in a future part…

Then come the summer, the applications open for ITV’s 99-to-beat. Reminded of the show, and with suddenly a lot of free time on my hands, I also get around to watching season 4 of DA, “just for fun”.

I do think at this point I was the British person (aside from probably some of the people who were working on producing 99TB!) with the most knowledge of De Alleskunner.

To be continued…