Beat the Pack
Synopsis
One player tries to answer a series of questions better than a pack of competitors, hoping to eliminate them all and win the day's jackpot.
At the start of the show, one player has been selected as the "control" player, and the other seven are The Pack, standing behind a long bench. There's a top prize of £12,000 to be won.
The set has a long desk at cross-purposes to Control.
The player in control is shown a board with six precise categories on it. The player picks a category, and is asked a question with four possible answers. The Pack give their answers, and a sound effect plays when all have responded.
Jake and the player in control then have a long chat about the possible answers to the question, what answers might be right, and indeed whether the Control player is actually going to play it or not.
Jake and the contestant prepare to chat.
Suppose the Control player plays. A correct answer to this first question is worth £2000, and gives Control the opportunity to remove any player at the bench. An incorrect answer will remove Control from the game, and the best player from The Pack will step forward and take their place.
Usually, Control will decide to pass the question. At this point, there's an extended sequence where lights in the desk flash, before eventually coming to rest as either green or red, right or wrong. Whoever in The Pack has given the correct answer goes to the safe area, a soft seating area out of Control's sight. These players cannot be eliminated in the current round. Should all of The Pack qualify for the safe area, then the player in control is eliminated as if they'd given a wrong answer.
Correct answers let you go to the safe area.
Assuming Control passed on a question, and at least one of The Pack got it wrong, the game continues. The value of the question is halved, to £1000, and the cycle repeats. Subsequent questions in each category are easier, and the values halve at each turn – to £500, £250, and they might have got down to £125 once.
Each category is played with one fewer contestant – either the Control player or one of The Pack will be eliminated after each round. As well as managing the order of categories, the player in control has one small advantage – when answering a question, they can give a Double Answer. This advantage lets them pick two answers to the current question, and continue if either answer is right. The player can only play this once during the entire game.
All the Pack are safe - apart from one.
For the final, whoever's in Control is asked 75 seconds of rapid-fire questions; their one remaining opponent waits for them to make an error and pounce with a correction. Three corrections to steal the prize, otherwise Control keeps it.
Beat the Pack took "Play or Pass" into uncharted territory. Quizzes are usually about giving answers to questions, and taking the consequences; rarely had there been a quiz where there were rewards for not answering a question and great jeopardy when you did answer. It needed an unusual and quirky tone, but felt and looked like every other daytime game show of the time.
The show received a mauling from game show fans; we didn't really understand what was going on, and the programme was always going to be very slow and ponderous. Our abiding memory is of us watching most of the show, getting somewhat invested in the Control player, only for them to leave the game quite late on, and leave us wondering "why did we bother?"
Inventor
Paul Brassey and Nick Carmichael-Jones
Theme music
Marc Sylvan and Richard Jacques
Trivia
Mostly aired at 3pm slot, with the last episode going out at 2.10pm because of Good Friday holiday schedules. BBC Two scheduled a rerun of the series from 11 November 2024.
Web links
There used to be an article at Wikipedia, but they deleted it.
See also
Weaver's Week review and a re-evaluation in 2025.
