The Chase

That's not a flaw - that's common sense rewarding "the team" for every player who gets to the final. What doesn't make so much sense is when none of them get to the final but they all then get to play for £1000 each is they still get a one step head start.

It did take me a while to work out whether it was a really old one or just a brand new look, but given how much Bradley Walsh was explaining the rules it was pretty obviously eventually.

There's lots of gameshows/quizshows that look very different in the first couple of episodes than what they'd later become. Early Deal or No Deals were basically just a contestant somberly picking boxes for 45 minutes, without the screams/tears/hugging/chanting that later developed. Even The Banker doesn't have much of a personality, Noel Edmonds just picking up the phone and saying "Ok" and putting it down again (to the point where for ages I thought there was no one on the other end and Edmonds was just miming a conversation, which would have got old incredibly fast).

Early Have I Got News For Yous in 1990 had about six or seven different rounds, and even something like Whose Line Is It Anyway started out as a more serious, cerebral improvisational challenge with the likes of Stephen Fry and John Sessions, before it became Ryan Styles and Colin Mocherie falling over and doing silly voices.

Yeah, all long running programmes evolve and develop as time goes on, there's very few that come on air fully perfected. Most panel shows started off with a lot more structure than they end up with after a few series, things that don't work so well are abandoned as the off the cuff material increases.

Yes, Whose Line was very different, when it started on Radio 4, it was based a lot on literary styles and pastiches of genres. Mock The Week is another good example, the early episodes (which come up on Dave every now and then) were more improv and impression based


Incidently I noticed the other day that Pointless has finished it's series and is also now old episodes

Millionaire is one of the programmes with few changes over the years. Until they really started to change it in the late 00s.

Originally of course though Fastest Finger First was just a straight multiple choice question. Also in the very first episodes Chris Tarrant had a fake cordless phone for phone a friend. A few very slight changes to the set, took place over the years before the more more drastic recent changes.

Things like listing the players for the next show and recap of the previous were phased out early on as well.

Also originally saying 'Final Answer' wasn't always necessary, I believe a contestant just said it once and it just stuck.

I think originally episodes were shot the day before transmission weren't they?

On the flipside, the intended follow-on success to Millionaire, The People Versus, changed significantly over the course of the first short series, and was then completely reformatted for its second series (with some minor tweaks halfway through that series).

I guess this must be the series of The Chase that was made at Granada Manchester? I only flicked through it but it looked like the current episodes in that the audience isn't really there.

The only time I've seen an audience on The Chase was for a celebrity special.

As for Millionaire, I seem to remember the £1m was in a big glass case between Chris and the contestant to begin with?

That's the thing, gradually evolving a programme is good, when it need major changes and more tweaking it's probably a dud.

Yes, the audience only exists on the celebrity specials of The Chase.

Yes the first series was made at Granada in Manchester then moved to the London Studios.

I noticed today that Bradley Walsh now explains that the contestants choose from two sets of questions before the Final Chase. I believe this has always been the case, but is there a reason why they've started mentioning it now?

The contestants never has a choose of the final questions, it seems this started with the new series yesterday.

I'd imagine there has been a suggestion the Chaser always gets an easier set of questions. So they're doing it for transparency, I suspect.