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Did anyone see Take On The Twisters on ITV tonight? It took over The Chase's slot, and I think it's a pretty decent show, even if the questions are near Tipping Point level.

Julia Bradbury is the host, and there are 4 players, and eight egg timers represented by a different colour and each with a different amount of time in them. The less time in the timer, the more money it's worth. The values are from £300-£1,000, but they aren't revealed till after the end of a banking round.

The first part is a lot of multiple choice questions. The first player in the line gets the first question, they get given the question, but before the 3 multiple choices are given, they're offered the choice to "Stick" or "Twist". If they "Stick", they get the question, but if they "Twist", they can choose any of the other 3 to answer it. The person who gets it right then gets to "light up" one of the timers. If the original person gets it wrong, then the next question gets asked to the next person down the line, but if the person it was passed to gets it wrong, control returns to the original person. This continues until 6 timers are lit up, and the person who lit the 6th timer gets the chance to bank some money.

The 2nd phase involves the 6 lit timers, which all turn simultaneously once Julia reads the first question. The player has 60 seconds to answer as many questions as possible, and soon as he/she gets one right, they're asked to "Stick", so another question can be asked immediately, or "Twist" one of their timers before the sand runs out, then another question is asked. The aim is to have as many of the 6 timers still active before the time runs out, the timers range in time, as mentioned before (not definite, but I think the highest value is only 20 seconds long, upto around 45 seconds for the lowest value one). The value of each of the lit timers would then be revealed, and the total of those would be banked to that player.

The same thing is repeated 3 times over, with the only difference being that if all 8 timers have been active at some point, then all their values would be doubled.

After the 4th go, the person with the most amount of money plays "The Final Twist", when all 8 timers are in play, and the same rules apply as in the banking round, with the only difference that only one of the timers is hiding the money and after the 60 seconds, if the timer with the money is still lit, the person wins the money, but they do have a "Stick" or "Twist" situation if they're not sure. If they want to "Stick", they'll get £200 for each timer there is lit (e.g. £1,000 for 5 lit timers), or "Twist" to see if they've won the money.

I quite liked it compared to some others that have been on C4/ITV in recent times. What do you guys think

I couldn't be arsed reading all that. If the game takes that long to explain it aint worth watching.

Mark James wrote:I couldn't be arsed reading all that. If the game takes that long to explain it aint worth watching.

tl; dr?

That was a bit of a silly comment from Mark. Pretty much every game show format looks complicated when written down, as anyone who's ever browsed UK Game Shows will know. (Incidentally James might like to submit his description there as it's far more detailed than the one they've got.)

It's usually easier to follow once you've watched the show.

Guy Barry wrote:That was a bit of a silly comment from Mark. Pretty much every game show format looks complicated when written down

Maybe so but when I started to read it it just reminded me of that episode of Friends where Joey was to be a game show host and it took ages to explain the rules and then they decided to just do a straight up questions and answers thing because no one could understand how to play it. As you say though it's probably easier to grasp by watching it rather than reading it. I'll give it a shot.

It's awful. James's description is about as brief as you can get.

Yeah, it feels like someone had the idea for "plate juggling egg timers with question answering" (which is a questionable idea at best) and then tried to spin it into a game show. They make no attempt at explaining what's going on before it happens (presumably because it's basically impossible to do so succinctly) and so when I watched the first show I spent a lot of time wondering what on earth was going on. I agree that most shows take a long time to write all the rules down, but generally they have a very simple 'core': Pointless is "obscure answers are better" the Chase is "beat the Chaser", etc. I think the simplest you could get here is "keep egg timers going by turning them over when you get a question right" which is still a bit of a mouthful (and not even a good explanation).

That aside, the pacing was really tedious for what were mainly pretty easy questions (including some quiz machine 'start of game' style options where one is obviously wrong to give you a hand), and it needed some sort of atmosphere, like an audience, or a bit more music/sounds, just *something* - it felt really dead and awkward. Also, in the twisty bit a lot relies on how long the questions are (and so at what stage of the twisting a player happens to answer a question correctly).

That said, it's fundamentally just a load of quiz questions with a mild distraction of the egg timer business, so in that regard I can imagine people finding it acceptable.

Yep awful show, such a big thing is made of the twisters, granted, they're part of the show but they're not gods

I still watch it, only cos there's nothing much new on at the moment, although the people are hopeless on it.

Just watching yesterday's show, and one of the contestants thought that the captain of England's 1966 World Cup-winning team was David Beckham

Thankfully, The Chase is back on in 2 weeks time.

Woo hoo, sounds good, Can't wait to see Sinha-man again, his witty jokes are awesome, although I refrained from telling him he was my favourite chaser in london as I didn't want to appear a total douche lol