The £100K Drop

The Million Pound Drop with Davina came back today as the £100K drop in its new 4pm slot. The studio is very much the same as before but the show now comes from the Dock10 studios at MediaCity.



Couple of slight format changes (apart from the bleeding obvious):
- Contestants now only have to answer 7 questions instead of 8
- When they drop the number of answers to 3 they also reduce the time you get to answer from 60 seconds to 45
- No security (or actors as security) anymore. They obviously don't mind if someone steals £100k

Quite enjoyed it this afternoon but I always felt the show benefited from being live and the ability for the audience to interact and play along. When it went recorded for the last couple of £1million series it sort of lost something.

Also worth noting that it must have been recorded a while ago as they're playing with the old tenners.

Also a contestant on the Grand Slams question said one of them was happening right now, which isn't true. From that we can narrow down the recording date to a couple of weeks.

Filmed in September 2017. So been sat on the shelf for a good 8 months. I believe there are 60 episodes, so a 12 week run.

I’m pretty sure johnr went to one of the recordings, and it was sometime last year.

Channel 4 seem to have a habit of it with gameshows these days they were showing Deal or No Deal a year behind by the end. Cheap Cheap Cheap was shown halfway through the next year.


And The Crystal Maze referenced it being 2017 the other day.

I'm almost certain they started recording July last year... heard it is a 60 part series too, although it's questionable whether they'll all be shown consecutively.

It was last year, I went to see the 18th September recording - if they had held back for a few more weeks knowing it wouldn't be aired until now they could have probably got their hands on the new tenners!

I didn't realise Davina doesn't walk up the stairs any more as the cage lifts up, and the totally black credits were a bit odd compared to the slow motion replays of the show!

What you don't see on TV is the poor bloke with a massive camera on his back that does the sweeping shot of the screens for each question!

Also I've been to see the live show too, which was exciting but at least this time they provided the audience chairs to sit down!

Didn't they drop it to 7 questions at during the dying days of original run?

Also is 3 Mills still going?

Yes but it seems to largely be home to scripted productions and Masterchef.

Thanks for the insight. I think the second and fourth things you mentioned actually helped with the energy on previous series, making it a bit more dramatic and tense. Did they do the cage lift sequence when you went to the recording? The slow mo shots also were missed, even in between questions when we used to see the money dropping and security picking it up while Davina explained the answers to the question. Implementing that would make the cuts between them moving the money back and being ready for the next question less abrupt too.


I've always thought that answers shot would be awkward too. Did anyone else feel like the 2 box shot with the overhead camera of the drop seemed a bit stretched?

Don’t think they’d be able to do the security thing anymore, you can see that the playing area has been quite significantly loweredwhen compared to before, but I suppose you could keep the explanations though. You can now also just see that the money that’s dropped is left throughout gameplay, through the clear section of the floor.

And yes, I seemed to think the overhead shot was stretched on the split screen.

I'm sure security was there in one way or another, but perhaps not needed for the audience as much since MediaCity have airport scanner style barriers and their own security staff before letting anyone in to watch a show, be it 100K Drop or Countdown! (then again not quite as strict as 3Mills/£1M Drop where they took every single belonging off you before entering the studio!)

I can't remember if the cage moved during my recordings, but I was fairly sure Davina did the walk and wave! Maybe not...

The audience should still have plenty of energy, as the warm up was Mark Olver from Deal Or No Deal fame!

They messed around with the format too much before with the 'tag teams', Question 8 double or nothing (might actually have worked on this version when they're only risking say £5k, but when they were being asked to risk £100k...!) and far too many celebrity editions. At least this series has gone back to basics, and even better news there isn't an invisible age barrier now that the contestants must be under 30!

Is 3 Mills particularly tall for a TV studio? I remember seeing something made there before (possibly CBBC's The Slammer?) that had a similar look with full-height balconies, it's quite a distinctive look.