{"id":488178,"date":"2026-05-16T19:54:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/488178\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T19:54:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:54:18","slug":"tv-goes-for-gold-with-wordle-and-golden-elevator-gameshows-but-will-it-hit-the-jackpot-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/488178\/","title":{"rendered":"TV goes for gold with Wordle and Golden Elevator gameshows \u2013 but will it hit the jackpot? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fingers on buzzers: At which point this week did I start to think I might be having a fever dream in which I was trapped inside a parallel reality and the only way to escape was to correctly answer a series of trivia questions and win the special jet ski that would transport me back to the real world?<\/p>\n

Was it (a) when NBC revealed plans for a show based on the puzzle Wordle, with Savannah Guthrie as host? Was it (b) when the BBC said it was bringing back Big Break after a 24-year absence of snooker-themed light entertainment from its screens?<\/p>\n

Or was it (c) when ITV announced that it had commissioned The Golden Elevators, a \u201chigh-stakes\u201d quiz show featuring \u201ctwo iconic elevators\u201d, Richard Osman and a penthouse?<\/p>\n

It might not be Catchphrase-worthy, but \u201ctwo\u2019s a coincidence, three\u2019s a trend\u201d is a media maxim that seems applicable here. <\/p>\n

Say what you see, Roy Walker always advised, and what I see is a great deal of weirdness. Inspired, so-wrong-it\u2019s-right weirdness or the plain baffling kind? All I know is that I heard someone refer to a \u201ctsunami of failure\u201d on air the other day, and these wild gameshow ideas do little to disprove the suspicion that the television industry has never been more vulnerable to one.<\/p>\n

The Wordle show is in a class of its own, as it\u2019s the child of the American entertainment machine, which has long been adept at taking simple pleasures and expanding them into bloated time-sucks. The concept of a Wordle-based gameshow seems like one of those pitches that should have been left in drafts, but in these IP-hungry days even online obsessions from the dark days of Christmas 2021 are TV gold dust and cannot be let live on quietly as one of the freebies on the New York Times games app.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Trump\u2019s World Cup has a strong whiff of the last days of RomeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The deal struck by the media group, which acquired Wordle from its inventor, Josh Wardle, in 2022, suggests that the producers, who include the late-night host Jimmy Fallon, will attempt to reimagine a brief and solitary daily reflex \u2013 solving a five-letter word-guessing game \u2013 as a \u201csupersized battles of smarts, speed and fun\u201d in which \u201csquads\u201d of players go head to head in something called the \u201cWordle arena\u201d. Talk about scaling up.<\/p>\n

Guthrie\u2019s role inevitably lends an unusual personal dimension to this endeavour. Wordle was a point of connection between the NBC Today Show anchor and her 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie, who has been missing since February and is believed to have been the victim of a kidnapping. The case remains unsolved. <\/p>\n

The presenter says it is \u201cstrange to say that I\u2019m going to do a gameshow\u201d when her heart is broken, but that everything is strange for her right now.<\/p>\n

The return of Big Break carries some sadness of its own. The trick-shot player on the original series, which ran from 1991 until 2002, was John Virgo, who died in February. Viewers had been listening to his comforting voice on the BBC\u2019s snooker coverage for decades. It was the sound of the very particular form of fascination and total relaxation that is watching balls being potted.<\/p>\n

The new Big Break will feature Stephen Hendry in the Virgo role, which is fine, but he\u2019ll be teamed with Paddy McGuinness, erstwhile presenter of short-lived reboots of Top Gear and A Question of Sport. <\/p>\n

McGuinness is one of those TV presences who chime with some British viewers, but far from all of them. It might not matter. The old Big Break was on Saturday evening on BBC One. This version will be on daytime on BBC Two. It seems designed as a companion piece to actual snooker, making it the kind of sport-adjacent japery that surfaces when TV executives get unnecessarily twitchy about the appeal of sport itself.<\/p>\n

The Golden Elevators, which will be filmed in Belgium, is the biggest swing here. It\u2019s set \u201cin the lobby of a towering skyscraper\u201d. Every question has two possible answers, each represented by a shiny gold-plated elevator, aka a gaudy lift. Players who step into the correct lift move closer to the jackpot stashed in the penthouse. Players who choose the wrong lift will be \u201cplunged\u201d back to the lobby and eliminated. <\/p>\n

It will shock you to learn that the format hinges on a \u201cpsychological battlefield\u201d of persuasion, deception and betrayal and that the experienced producers behind it are also keen to find a home for it across the Atlantic too. But will ITV viewers love this apparent homage to Trump Tower? Answers on a postcard.<\/p>\n

My feeling, to borrow a phrase from Walker again, is that it\u2019s good, but it\u2019s not right. Still, it\u2019s part of the industry playbook to push buttons \u2013 literally, in the case of The Golden Elevators. It\u2019s best to hold out the possibility that all three shows are examples of late-stage television genius in disguise.<\/p>\n

But, if they are, it\u2019s a very good disguise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fingers on buzzers: At which point this week did I start to think I might be having a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[3412,18,117,19,17,2770,154698,4436,23220,16257,14168,213017,181714],"class_list":{"0":"post-488178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-itv","14":"tag-john-virgo","15":"tag-laura-slattery","16":"tag-nbcuniversal","17":"tag-paddy-mcguinness","18":"tag-richard-osman","19":"tag-roy-walker","20":"tag-stephen-hendry"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116586012172515456","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}