I’ll be living in Germany for the next three months, and at the hotel I’ve been catching a little television in the evenings. I don’t speak the language well enough yet to get most of it, although I do recognize the occasional Perry Mason and Dynasty reruns. But there’s one channel that has me mystified.
It looks like a game show of some sort, but with viewers calling in to answer a question. There’s a presenter who reads the question, gives the phone number, and takes calls. The questions seem to take two basic forms; math, and matching up pictures of people’s lips to famous sports stars.
My questions are:
How do they make any money on this? It looks like the phone calls are not free, like 976- numbers in the U.S. But that still doesn’t seem like it would cover the costs of the payouts. They’re showing jackpots like 17,000 Euros. (Although that may just be a chance at a drawing for 17,000 Euros.) This leads into,
Is there some trick to the questions? At least one of the math questions looked very easy to me, find the number that goes in the blank space to create a magic square. But I have never seen anybody get a right answer! And they seemed to be playing the same wrong-answer recording over and over. Hosting this program has got to be the hardest job in show business. One guy looked like he was really going to lose it, “fier-und-dreizig is nicht richtig!” And how many ways can you keep restating “which of these lips belong to David Beckham?”
By far the most annoying TV trend of the last year.
e.g. on “9live” each call costs EUR 0.49. According to magazine articles, it pays very well. The production costs are extremely low. While lower prizes are relatively common, you will notice that four-digit and higher prizes are very rare in practice. According to rumors they deliberately don’t let callers get to the actual show while the host waits for answers. I guess their official position on this is different, but nonetheless they have a huge number of failed (but paid) dial attempts.
Often the questions for the lowest prizes are absurdly easy. Questions for higher prizes are a lot harder. Many require a lot of luck. The rules are kept vague and IMO very misleading. Some are outright ridiculous. Often they imply an easy solution but add a secret little twist to the rules that makes the problem almost unsolvable.
Thanks, kellner. I guess the next question would be:
How long does it take for something to actually happen? This show is appallingly fascinating for the first ten minutes or so, but it never changes. This guy wanders around a vaguely kitchen-looking set, gets a call, gets the caller’s name, asks for their answer, then tells them they’re wrong and clutches his head like he’s trapped in the studio until somebody answers this incredibly easy question. Then repeat.
I’ve never seen anybody get a question right. I’ve never seen them retire a question and move on to a new one. So, I don’t know if there’s a tricky answer, or anything. Does anything different ever happen?
The payout for the magic square question was EUR 2,000, and it’s only single digit numbers in the square. A third grader could answer this question. And still nothing happened.
Hardly anything happens at all. There are occasional easy questions in order to prove that “everybody can win”. Some questions are finally retired, after half an hour or more. Some games, especially those with a limited number of answers within a known range - like that bizarre lip game - are actually solved correctly.
Of course the game has to look attractive at first glance. They appear to adjust the level of the questions, so that in the long run they pay a steady but not too high sum of prizes per hour.