Not sure there's a
very
direct comparison to be had there. I certainly can't imagine
Bank Balance
getting whatever the game show equivalent of 90%+ on Rotten Tomatoes or 8.0+ on IMDb is.
I imagine if the BBC want to be in line for a future Studio Ramsay show then the last thing they'll do is pull a show with the company's founder starring in it.
I don’t really understand this. Surely a production company like Studio Ramsey need the BBC, more than the BBC need Studio Ramsey?
Besides if it wasn’t performing any other broadcaster would be pulling it too.
I very much doubt ITV would pull it either given how important the "Gordan, Gino and Fred..." franchise is to them now. I cannot remember when they pulled a show anyway. As it just causes bad publicity and alerts advertisers to a flop.
Didn't help, that there was no studio audience for him to work off and work into the patter.
Not even sure those on Studio Ramsey's payroll were in the studio to add some applause of encouragement every now and then.
Any audience you heard were watching remotely and were shown the programme already edited and packaged up.
I was in the virtual audience for show 4 and as you say, the show was already filmed and edited so basically what we watched was the show ready for broadcast (minus the audience noise). Before the show started we were shown a video by a member of the production team and they mentioned that the team in the studio did their best to cheer and applaud while it was being filmed but it was no substitute for a full audience.
Well it won its slot last night... but still only managed 1.9m.
With regards to the BBC pulling things we're in an age of it being acceptable for BBC1 to have low ratings for a number of shows that have been on iPlayer already. As has been mentioned a number of dramas that have been released as box sets have totally flopped on the main channel so I don't think they'll pull Bank Balance, even if it's not all already on iPlayer. Pooch Perfect has been coasting along under 2m for weeks now.
That's a terrible number though, especially given how well gameshows generally have been doing of late.
Winning the slot against Life Stories is no achievement, although it sounds like that did especially horribly last night. Good luck to it tonight against Gogglebox!
That couple last night were painful to watch, the wife telling off the husband every time he did something.
It really needed the Action Line phone number at the end. Was quite uncomfortable.
1.9m is very poor and I doubt it's the sort of show which will inflate much with 7 day/30 day figures. They'll stick it out though as it's not content you can justify ditching, and probably better to suck it up for three weeks rather than cut it to once a week and be stuck with it for two months. Shows rarely get pulled from the schedules nowadays - can't really recall the last time tge BBC did that to a flagship 9pm show.
I can't help but think that better contestants would have made this more of an enjoyable watch.
I am thinking mainly of the husband and wife duo, to whom we were sadly introduced last night, where the latter scolded the former throughout, and expected all of the answers to be spoon-fed to her, even where they were incredibly open questions, such as naming any U.S. President of the 1900s. I don't believe for a second that she'd never heard of Bill Clinton or JFK but she didn't even try. You can have one or two bad rounds, but she basically said that she wouldn't be answering anything at all at the very outset of the show and that her husband was being relied upon.
The issue is: (as bad as it sounds), I see that, and I have no desire to see these people win any money and therefore, a lot of the tension is lost, as I couldn't care less if they win or lose the game, so I lose interest in it.
You only need to see the early days of
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
and contestants like Rachel Da Costa and Fiona Wheeler for the impact having great, down-to-earth, root-for-able players can have on audience reception to a programme, especially one just starting out like
Bank Balance
.
Television chef Gordon Ramsay asking people general knowledge questions in the TARDIS while they play Buckaroo with coloured trapezia was always going to be a bit of a hard sell, but getting affable, relatable contestants that the audience can really get behind would have really helped the show.
