The Million Pound Cube

I'm surprised ITV Studios are producing the Australian version as it's an all3Media format.

I don't think all3 have an Australian entertainment company. The local ITV Studios will have licensed the format from them for that reason.

The UK has a Christmas special to come with McFly and Emily Atack but back to the £250,000 format by the sounds of things

Well from looking into it, all3media do have South Pacific Pictures but that is New Zealand based. So I'd say it would be either easier / cheaper / better for them to license the format to ITV Studios Austrailia than have to set up a one off production unit.

Also kind of thinking of things, it would make sense of them to license the format to someone who they work with domestically (ITV) and have said partner produce a localised version through their - ITV that is - global division. In this particular in this case, ITV Studios Australia.

But that may be all WMGing without looking at the deets of the contracts and so forth.

This is airing tonight at 8pm, but yeah looks like the jackpot has been reduced.

Although I suspect winnings won't be too different.

They’ve even gone to the trouble of reducing the pretend winnings on the app back down!

"Let's see whats inside the £1,000 Cube!"

Crikey, the budget has been slashed a bit Phil!

Just seems odd to have raised the prize in the first place if they couldn't sustain it. The show didn't need a £1m jackpot, but now it's had it and been taken away it feels like it's somewhat lost something.

Do seem to be a few new games tonight though which helps. Missed the first part but not feeling particularly Christmassy other than the hat on the lives.

I think what happened is that they had more footage than they needed for two episodes of the celebrity editions so just made the rest of the footage into a Christmas Special. An intro from Phil followed by a normal episode. There was a Christmas theme at the start before it abruptly cut to ‘It’s McFly’ and the Christmas theme was gone.

It’s also possible that these were the first celebrity games filmed and so the money was £250,000, but they changed it to £1,000,000 because they had second thoughts. That’s probably why it’s airing apart from the rest of the series and not just with the rest of the series as a normal celebrity episode.

How odd that the lives graphic is in the top left, meaning the ITV DOG has to be moved to the right like on sport coverage. I thought there would have been graphic guidelines given to producers about avoiding the DOG (and end credits style etc)

All in the name of continuity. The series started years before the DOG was in existence. Therefore the DOG had to make way of the graphics. And if they make the decision to move the graphics, then ITV have to remember if it gets repeated which series to move the DOG for and which not to.

Keeping the graphics where they are makes it simple, they move the DOG for every episode.