Fingers on the buzzer, is Lorraine a winner on new show?
As TV’s daytime queen tries out The Cash Machine...
EVERY gameshow needs a shtick. Family Fortunes had that frequent ‘uh-uh’ buzzer to remind us not all of its contestants were sages.
Blankety Blank cornered the market in prizes so underwhelming they were liable to be left on the back seat of the taxi home; Ted Rodgers was pretty good at doing 3-2-1 with his fingers.
The Cash Machine? Well, it is early days, but it almost has a catchphrase.
‘Remember, if you want to win, you’ve got to crack the PIN’. More memorably, perhaps, it has daytime TV queen Lorraine Kelly debuting in the game show format some 35 years into a television career notable above all for her unfailing niceness.
How would she play it? Mean like fellow journalist Anne Robinson on the Weakest Link? Impatient like Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge? Or smiley, chatty and instant bezzie mates with all of the contestants?
No prizes for guessing. No prizes at all on The Cash Machine, actually, just the promise of lots of the folding stuff straight out of the ‘world’s most generous ATM’.
First, however, we must learn the rules of the game which, given that they surely involve cracking PINs, already have me longing for the simplicity of a Play Your Cards Right or a Blockbusters.
‘Here is how this is going to work …’ begins Lorraine, a couple of minutes in.
‘In this round I’ll put £1,000 into your accounts. To crack the PIN you’ll have to answer four questions...’ Great. Let’s play!
‘… The answer to each question is a number in that PIN code …’ OK, fire away.
‘… and you need to be quick because your money drains away while you are playing, and it only stops when you answer correctly...’ Hmm, I’ll try to remember…
‘… Get a question wrong four times and you’ll be locked out of your account …’
MARRIED couple David and Donna, who had been rash enough to leap in with a correct answer at the top of the show, suddenly looked regretful. Might it have been wiser to keep their powder dry until someone in the studio besides Lorraine Kelly understood the rules?
Viewers at home at least have the option of forgetting about the rules of overcomplicated quiz shows and focusing instead on the epic wrong answers.
One bloke on this show reckons Robert the Bruce was crowned at Balmoral Castle. Another, on the foreign currency round, thinks a Krona rather than a Punt is more likely to be a flat-bottomed boat.
‘Nobody go punting?’ ventures Kelly, momentarily thrown by the ignorance. ‘Punting? On a river?’ David and Donna look blank and, because she is nice, our
question-mistress stops doing the punt paddling mime fairly quickly.
There are several more rounds in The Cash Machine – at the conclusion of each of which we have to say goodbye to another couple of contestants who, in fairness, seem pretty happy to go.
‘That’s so saaaad,’ says our hostess as she waves them off. There’ll be a cuppa, some jammy dodgers and a chinwag later, though.
At last we are down to two and the chance to play for ‘serious money’. How serious, you may wonder. Well there’s £4,510 in contestants Gemma and Aly’s account – enough for that New York shopping trip they both hanker after – but remember, the money keeps draining away until they give a correct answer.
Indeed, of all the many silly and instantly forgettable rules of The Cash Machine, this one is easily the most fun. ‘The money’s draining away!’ trilled Kelly, somewhat mischievously, I thought, as the players’ brains turned to jelly. ‘Quick, quick, quick…’
Disappointingly, no one tells her to wheesht while they hear themselves think.
In the end, by dint of subtleties in the game show’s small print too multifarious to explain in this lifetime, Gemma and Aly walk away with £1,395. ‘Wow, how are you feeling?’ asks Miss K. ‘Snoozy,’ I answer, before I realise she is talking to Gemma and Aly.
‘Ecstatic!’ says one. ‘Amazing!’ confirms the other.
Yes, well done to the pair of them – and remember, if you want to win, you’ve got to …’ We will see in episodes to come whether the studio audience ever shouts the rest of that sentence back at Lorraine Kelly. Or whether, like me they have that familiar ‘uh-uh’ buzzer going off in their heads.