Endemol UK is an independent company based in London
and they produce a large number of programmes for terrestrial
and satellite broadcasters. The Eliminator was a very
successful children’s quiz show, first transmitted
on 6th January 2003, which Endemol produced for ITV1.
The initial brief was verbal and Endemol submitted
an initial proposal in response to this prior to winning
the commission.
The idea was first developed in the Spring of 2002
and it is possible a second series will be commissioned.
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Working to a brief
We wanted to convey a sense of the structure of the show, which
is the most important thing in a game show. The one very difficult
thing about selling a game show or quiz show is that they don't
sell themselves when you read them, it's a lot of logic, it's a
lot of rules and you actually don't really understand it until
you see it played out. So we went into the rules within the original
proposal which we sent into ITV, but the key was selling the atmosphere.
We were trying to change the way that kids shows were perceived.
Kids shows are normally very loud, lots of gunge and lots of running
around and screaming.
We wanted to bring some of the tense atmosphere
of prime time game shows into kids shows, so there was real tension
and there were
moments of silence and kids really worrying and really trying
to work out the questions. In terms of the feel of the show, that's
what we tried to convey through the proposal which we sent ITV,
but the key to it was that we didn't just send in a proposal,
we
had a run through that the channel were able to watch.
ITV actually
came to us to say that we want a quiz show for kids, so it was
a very specific brief that they were thinking about...
having something that could be repeated a lot of times and
could replicate some of the success of some of their prime time
game
shows within a kids slot. So we were quite aware from the start
what was required and there was a deadline to that, so we basically
were responding to a very specific request of ITV's and then
we started thinking well what game shows, what quiz shows will
really
work for kids?
We had about a month to develop the format to
make sure it really worked as a game, to play it through. Once
it was pitched,
we
then had a few months when we played it through a number
of times for
ITV in different forms and played around with appraisals,
and then on the base of this ITV commissioned it and it was about
half a
year between then and the delivery of the show. We have a
regular
creative team that kind of developed the initial format.
Understanding the audience or user
We didn't undertake audience research as such in any kind of
focus group sense. With any show you have to have an intuitive
idea of whether it's going to work or not and if you don't have
that, any amount of research isn't going to really help you,
but we did get a number of responses from kids in schools, who
we've got relationships with, about whether or not this show
would be something that they'd watch. So we already played it
out in front of the target audience quite a lot so we had a good
idea what was going to work and what wasn't, even though prior
to the show we didn't do any actual kind of substantial statistical
research.
It got very good ratings for its slot. I'm not sure what
the average was over the series, it was around the one million
mark. The key was that in every show it built over the
course of the
half hour, so the audience built from the audience inherited
from the day before it, and gave ITV a growth over that half
hour. It did well against the competing children's shows
on the other channels, so we ourselves and ITV were very happy
with
the audience figures.
Research techniques and methodologies
The key to a quiz show is getting the structure or the format
right, and getting it nice and simple, especially for a kids audience
so that they completely understand exactly what happened. In that
respect we actually went out to various schools and played the
games with the kids at the schools and there's no better way to
work out exactly what works and exactly what doesn't. So we built
a very simple structure around just playing it, we just had a board
that conveyed what the set would be, conveyed the different stages
of the set and literally played it with different kids, played
it with different combinations. We tried it with an individual
as a contestant, we found that that didn't really work because
you lost a lot of the interaction. Also kids on their own of that
age, these kids were 9, 10, 11 or 12, they really didn't open up
if it was just them on their own. So that's how we finally settled
for three players because you could get much better interaction
between the kids arguing about the right answer, the wrong answer
with three, whereas with one you weren't able to bring out that.
That was all found out through research actually in the schools
with real kids.
We actually had some researchers who wrote the questions
for the main show. When we were doing the dummy shows, it was
ourselves essentially, the development producers who were working
on it.
The way The Eliminator works is there's easy questions, medium
questions and hard questions. The easy questions get you one
space, the medium two, the hard three spaces, so there's a tactic
to whether
you choose to take hard questions and each question's in different
subjects, so we did have to make sure we played it out again
with kids with each of the questions, because what might seem an
easy
question to ask in politics would actually be quite a hard question
for a kid. In the same way, what might seem absolutely impossible
in pop music to us, would turn out to be really easy for kids,
so the key was setting the levels of the questions. The questions
were quite simple and easy to come up with, but setting the levels
was a bit more difficult and we did make sure we had an idea
where the kind of kids' level would be for that.
With any kids show,
the key thing is our relationship with schools and we basically
have good relationships through the number of
shows that we've done with a number of different schools in
different towns around England and the UK. So we initially go to
them and
the key is that we actually need people who can talk, who are
good characters, who can give a quiz show a real go, ie have
got reasonable
general knowledge and that they won't just clam up. So really
for a kids show like this we work with the teachers, we ask
them who
are the real characters, who's going to work best on this show
and that's the initial thing and then we screen test the kids
and make sure they are the right people. It was getting the
right cast
of three, because it was always three kids together, so you
want three different characters who have a bit of conflict and
have
some arguments, but also have a range of knowledge so that
they wouldn't be stumped on any of the questions.
It's always difficult
filming with children legally. We had the parents on board and
obviously it was during the day, there
was
no over night and it's the kind of thing that parents quite
enjoy their kids doing well at so it wasn't as legally difficult
as
some of these shows can be. You have to gain the trust of
both the parents
and the schools and so it's important that you keep them
informed the whole step of the way to make sure that's the case.
Design methods
and practical development
What we do with these sorts of shows is that we get a set designer
in and rather than a storyboard, they'll do a mock up of what the
set will look like in miniature so you can then get an idea of
how to film it and how it's going to look on camera, so that's
what happened with this.
We just have a director in the studio who
will storyboard camera positions and work out exactly how the
piece is going to be shot,
but for a quiz show there's quite traditional ways of shooting.
The one difference with Eliminator compared to maybe traditional
adult quiz shows is that there's a physical movement on the set,
so we're following the kids around as they actually move around
the set and so that's one difference that the director needs
to take on board and capture.
We had a number of brainstorming sessions
with a group of about five or six of us, and we basically wanted
something that would
work as simply as possible but still have tension right to
the end. The key concept that we sort of wanted to base this on
from
the start is that this would be difficult. Most kids shows
almost everybody wins, but this would actually be that hardly anybody
would win, that maybe we'd have two or three groups of kids
win
by the end of the series, so that it'd be a real sense that
if you can defeat The Eliminator, it's a real sort of bonus. We
based the concept on that and we involved this idea, which
was
actually
something we were thinking about for an adult quiz show originally,
but we suddenly worked out it could really work for this, the
idea of a journey across a number of stages, being chased by
something,
so if you answer the hard questions you move fast, you move
three steps at a time, if you answer the easy questions you only
move
one step at a time, so you've got The Eliminator behind you
all the time.
What we wanted to do was build in a real sense of
increase of pace as you went on, increase the difficulty, so
we divided
our
kind
of journey into three zones, the first of which The Eliminator
only moves one step each time, the second of which he speeds
up to two steps and the third of which he's up to three steps,
so
even if you're really ahead when you move into zone two,
suddenly The Eliminator's going a lot faster, so it always feels
like
he's just behind you. That was the kind of tension that we
wanted to
bring right through the show and so once we had that as our
sort of initial core idea, it was just a case of working
out logically
how that could work and what the different rules would be,
but that was just sitting round a table working out the logic
of
it and then playing it out with the kids.
It's funny actually
how scared the kids were of it in a kind of fun way, but sometimes
he'd leap up behind them and all
three would
just jump. It was great TV.
The way it worked was again
slightly different from the average kids show. Each show worked
Millionaire style,
ie you could
get kids only getting to the second place, getting caught
by the
Eliminator and then instantly the next set of kids would
come on, so there
wasn't one whole show involving one set of kids, it could
be quick fire it could be much longer if the kids survived
for
longer. In
that way we can make as many as we liked. ITV commissioned
us for fourteen and a half hours, so that's what we delivered,
but
there
wasn't any sort of end of series show as such, it just
continued as long as it did basically.
Creation and construction
Once it was fully commissioned, we'd worked out much of the format
by then and so the production process was a case of turning our
initial thoughts about set etc into a reality and what we went
for in the end was a sense of coming from the underground to the
outer world. So zone one in The Eliminator set is like the underground
zone; zone 2 is lower buildings; and zone 3 is kind of high rise
and you have a sense of escaping The Eliminator's clutches and
escaping upwards, but that was the set designer bringing us a number
of ideas of how to convey that.
The main other content was the
questions, and we had question researchers coming up with loads
of different questions. Then it's a case of
working them into an order, how they'll work in a show and then
you're kind of ready to do the show really.
Presenting and gathering feedback
A channel is involved at every step of the way, both before they
pitched it, coming along to run throughs in the office, with kids,
with real prizes involved so they're as close as possible to what
will actually happen and then they get final sign off on the set.
They come along obviously when we're actually in production and
they come along to the edit, so in a way they've kind of seen it
the whole way through, but when you finally do your edit at that
point the channel signs off the finished product and normally that
isn't a problem, as it wasn't for this, because they have been
seeing it the whole way through so they know what they're going
to get.
The real evaluation comes from the audience figures, which
for us was good and then from our point of view we start thinking
about
how it might change for a second series and that's the kind of
process that's continuing really. There are a number of things
that we would change for a second series even though the core
of it really does work, but that's a kind of ongoing process with
the channel and will really depend on how they decide their schedule
sort of moving forward.
Basically the channel just agrees that
this is what will transmit and that's fine, so it's not as formal
as that but basically
they sign off then and say yeah we're happy with that, we don't
need
you to do anything.
If we've delivered for that particular budget
then if they do want any changes obviously it needs to be considered
whether
that needs
additional budget to do so. Because they're so involved,
if they
suddenly want new changes right at the end, normally they
have to in some way pay for it. I remember there was one show which
they asked us to change the title and it was a letter taking
the S off the end and then after we'd gone through the entire
post
production they decided they wanted the S back on the end
and
that cost the channel £20,000 because we had to go back
in and put that S on. That was a different channel, but if
it is something
at that stage because they've been so involved within the process
and could have said at any stage before, normally they don't
have to pay if it pushes us over budget. |
