Weaver's Week 2024-11-17

Last week | Weaver's Week Index | Next week

Ah, parents evening. The night every year when our teachers would tell all sorts of things to our parents, some of them grounded in reality, some of them stemming from the way they couldn't control a class at all.

Contents 1 Romesh Ranganathan's Parents' Evening 1.1 Rangabee for ITV network, 2-16 November 2 University Challenge stats pack 3 In other news 3.1 Quizzy Mondays

Romesh Ranganathan's Parents' Evening

Rangabee for ITV network, 2-16 November

Eagle-eyed English mistress Mrs. Stewart would appreciate the attention to detail in the opening titles. We see Romesh drive through a cityscape, turns out he's accompanied by his mother. They drive past billboards showing the contestants, and eventually arrive at the studio.

Soon enough, we see the contestants: celebrity and their parent or grown-up offspring. The opening episode, for instance, had The Fabulous Iain Stirling from The Dog Ate My Homework and his mother Oucho Alison. We have Carol Vorderman from Tomorrow's World and her son Cameron. And we have Alison Hammond from How to Break a Picnic Table and her son Aidan. All three couples are sat with the child on the left; the same applies to the host, who has brought his mother Shanthi to sit on a comfortable chair.

Why are the children sat on the left? From time to time, they'll be withdrawn from the conversation: they can react, but they won't be able to influence gameplay.

The kids are withdrawn while bids are placed to answer questions in a category. Fairly gentle to start with – here are 12 clues, how many do you think your child can name correctly? Alison Stirling starts the bidding, but she won't be playing – it'll be her son Iain who gives the answers. Alison Stirling bids three, so if Carol Vorderman wants to take control, she must bid four (or more), because that's how numbers work. "C'mon, you're Carol Vorderman, you know how numbers work!" And if Alison Hammond thinks that her child will not be able to name five, she can drop out. As soon as two parents drop out, the bidding ends, and the offspring needs to name that many correct answers.

When playing, the child doesn't have to give solely correct answers, the child is allowed to make some mistakes. They do need to give a correct answer in a reasonable time, otherwise they'll "time out" and lose the grid. While this is less obviously pressured than "two incorrect answers ends your turn", like on Tenable, it has a similar effect to the game – and feels quite arbitrary.

The winning bid sets the value for the round – £100 per correct answer. Alison Stirling's winning bid was five answers, so the board will be worth £500. All to her team if Iain gives the answers, or split equally to the other sides if he gets it wrong.

Three boards like this, each of the parents gets first bid on one of them. Then there are a set of open questions. "Playable characters in Mario Kart", for instance. How many of those can your child name; do they play Mario Kart on their Sneyga Ultra-System, or are they into Dungeons & Fallguys? There's £200 per correct answer if the child completes the bid, but the money's again split between the others should they fail.

This round is very much like Who Dares Wins, so much so that we expect Nick Knowles and the tension music and some incredibly long pauses to put in an appearance.

Unlike Who Dares Wins, Romesh is prepared to take money away. Should anyone dare give an answer before their child plays, Romesh will pilfer £100 from the total, and that answer will be wrong. Harsh penalty, especially when you're lumbered with the category and mum's big mouth has removed the two top answers.

The competition show ends with a Quick Fire Buzzer Round. The parents are shown a question, and two alternatives they might answer. First person on the buzzer wins control of the question, and nominates A or B for their child to answer. Child is to answer the question correctly for £500; get it wrong, and £250 to the other two teams. It's quick and competitive, and with so much money flying around it's difficult for anyone to keep track. Also means that the first two-thirds of the show had very little impact on the result, which is not ideal.

Whichever team emerges with most money is the winner. They'll be able to donate that much cash to a charity of their choice, and they have the opportunity to double it. Parent and child play together for this round, a board of 12 possible answers appear. The winners want to identify all five correct answers before they uncover three false ones. Reminds us a bit of Wipeout, only there's no clock and the host isn't as good at magic as Paul Daniels.

Good to see most of the question writers are familiar from House of Games (3), we recognise and appreciate the style of questions, mixing the standard quiz canon with more everyday ideas so we never know quite what's next. The music feels like library music, bold and brassy and a bit impersonal. Shanthi Ranganathan has very little to do other than read out the scores and embarrass her son about twice per episode: she felt like an extra wheel on an already well-staffed show. We presume the losers' money doesn't go to charity, they don't say it does and the celebs don't get to name their charity. Top prize is around £10,000, which doesn't feel particularly generous for a primetime ITV show.

There's something really weird about the lighting on set. The studio is mostly lit in shades of brown and bronze-yellow, which is a very unusual colour combination. It's quite dimly lit in those shades, to the point where Romesh almost blends into the background. The audience is sat at small cabaret tables, each with a sizeable globe lamp which casts zero illumination on the faces around it. At times, we wondered if the show had used that stupid "film-effect" look they had at Eurovision, that's how shonky it appeared.

Parents' Evening has a warm atmosphere: yes, it's competitive, but Romesh doesn't come into the room looking to bring anyone down. Instead, it's all gently encouraging, Romesh wants everyone to do well. The laughter arises from the ludicrous and occasionally smutty questions. (For that reason, Parents' Evening is a post-watershed show: there's nothing actually rude, but we might not want a six-year-old to be watching.) It's a warm show, not a laugh-out-loud comedy. Romesh is strongest when he's riffing with the celebs rather than reading the not-as-funny-as-Geoff-Norcott-thinks-it-is script.

We've had three episodes, and that's enough to get a view on the show. It's an entertaining programme, it stands and falls on the quality of the guests. And they seem to be missing at least one angle: what the children think. Last week's show, for instance, featured frantic gesticulation between Honey Ross and Phoenix Scaryspace, all behind Jonathan and Mel's back: the format didn't allow Romesh to ask what's going on.

Three episodes is enough for now. We can imagine Parents' Evening coming back for occasional episodes for a few years; we cannot imagine that there will be enough parent-child combos to allow the format to run indefinitely.

University Challenge stats pack

This week, St Edmund Hall Oxford beat SOAS by 195-155. Nip-and-tuck all the way through, St Edmund took the win from a couple of times when they narrowly won buzzer races. Both sides were profligate with their bonuses, around 50%.

But how does this stack up against the other second-round teams? Inspired by the stats packs put together for football and the other football by ESPN's Bill Connelly, we can present a number of statistics for the eighteen teams we'll see again.

Let's start with the heat winners, and some whole-game statistics.

"Pct" is the percentage of questions a team got right, counting bonuses asked to them, and all starters heard on the television show. "Right" is the number of questions a team got right, and "heard" is the number of starters and bonuses they heard.

The colours are amongst all 28 competing sides, so the strongest greens are for sides that did well – Bristol's 325, Imperial's 310. Exeter's accuracy rate of 70.6% stands out – 36 right is a good figure, 51 heard is unremarkable for winning teams, the combination shows they're a strong team.

Note how Open only heard 47 questions to win their match, fewer than the average. Cardiff also show a little red, a low overall percentage.

"Pens", five-point penalties for incorrect interruptions, should be obvious. Eight sides won with no missignal penalties, Edinburgh's three errors stand out.

Let's look at bonuses.

Bonuses right, bonuses heard, and the "bonus conversion rate" – percentage of correct answers. Here, Queen's Belfast stand out with 81.8%; Bristol, Imperial, and Warwick made merry with lots of bonuses. Edinburgh and Open did well from relatively meagre opportunities. Note how Wadham Oxford, Cardiff, and St Edmund Hall were barely over 50%.

We've also kept stats for the individual scores.

10 points for correctly buzzing in on a starter, 5 off for a penalty. Each correct bonus earns 1 point for each team-member plus 1 more for the player whose buzz led to the bonus.

The heat-map shows how Bristol balanced their starters well across all players, while Queen's Belfast (Sam Thompson), Warwick (Thomas Hart), and especially Darwin Cambridge (Harrison Whitaker) relied on one player.

From this, we can provisionally form some seeding groups:

• Four sides we'd hope avoid each other as they're strong – Queen's Belfast, Bristol, Imperial, Exeter
• Four sides that might not be long in the tournament – Wadham Oxford, Cardiff, St Edmund Hall, Darwin Cambridge
• Eight sides in the middle – Open, Warwick, Oriel Oxford, Christ's Cambridge, Edinburgh, LSE, and the two repêchage winners.

Why are we a bit sour on Darwin Cambridge, when they have the hottest buzzer of the series? Their bonus rate was 59%, fractionally below average, and we literally know nothing about the other members' buzzer ability. Were the team unfortunate with their bonuses? Lucky with the starters? From the very limited evidence so far, Darwin could have had the rub of the green in their heat, which is not where they need it.

Let's quickly look at the repêchage teams.

Durham look to be stronger on most metrics, two early penalties hurt their game. UCL have Josh Mandel as their top buzzer.

Bill Connelly inspired these stats; he often said in another context, "your university ain't played nobody!" One game is a data point, not a trend, statistics can be deceiving. We plan to look at these stats again after the second round, which we think will be in February next year.

In other news

Rose d'Or nominations are out. Everyone's favourite show, Bluey, is up for the Children's award. Niks te zien (VRT1) featured a lot of musicians travelling round with blind musician Karl Meesters: wonder if there'll be a BBC version with Chris McCausland. Comedy Entertainment pits Taskmaster against Network Ten's Thank God You're Here!. And in the Drama category, there's a nod for an ex-DJ's campaign for faster service at the stamp shop, that's Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

We have the Studio Entertainment category sewn up – ITV's Got Talent and BBC's Gladiators against Fox's The Floor, ABC (Disney)'s Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Telecinco's Mental Masters, and Couple Palace from Mnet in Korea – the last features 50 couples paired by the producers, who may or may not be able to hit it off.

Competition Reality is another category where a game show will win. BBC's Race Across the World is up against Squid Game: The Challenge, USA Network's The Anonymous, 1+1 Ukraine's The Voice of the Country, and Spillet (Bloody Game) from TV2 Norway. This last one feels like a localised Korean show: twelve celebs face challenges of strategy, logic, character, and wit; they decide who leaves, and who wins.

Everybody up! Ben Shephard is going to go up a mountain in New Zealand. He'll bring 14 people with him, but round by round they'll be ordered to remove someone from the mission – and the chap from Tipping Point has got to stay. That's the plot of The Summit, coming next year on the ITV network.

Start again A third series of The Finish Line for BBC1 daytime, the one with Roman Kemp, Dame Sarah Greene, and the world's most sluggish chariots. Six weeks of episodes, though no word yet on celebrity specials: we'd pit Roman's parents against Trev and Simon and Double Dare host Peter Simon.

Quizzy Mondays

We covered University Challenge earlier, but what happened in the other shows?

Olivia Wooley took the win on Mastermind, her specialist subject was the rock band New Order. No mention, sadly, of their biggest hit, the one with the John Barnes rap. Second place to Alan Marlow, who took the James Bond books and had a quietly devastating general knowledge round.

A question on Only Connect about the Eighth Wonder of the World missed only one thing: Legend from Gladiators.

Four Opinions and Cat Cows had a draw on Only Connect, which is absolutely lovely. Cat Cows got themselves back into the game with a great spot of How to Train Your Dragon books, Four Opinions had picked up lots of bonuses. A Missing Vowels set on Girls Aloud song titles allowed the Cat Cows back in; Four Opinions won the one that mattered, the tie-break.

Everyone's favourite show where ITV puts people in awkward positions is back. Yes, it's a new run of Sorry, I Didn't Know (Sun). Also a new series of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! (VM1 and ITV, from Sun).

To have Weaver's Week emailed to you on publication day, receive our exclusive TV roundup of the game shows in the week ahead, and chat to other ukgameshows.com readers, sign up to our Google Group.

Last week | Weaver's Week Index | Next week