Last Thursday April 12, the 31 Questions team once again gathered at the television studios at RMIT University on fabulous Swanston Street, Melbourne for the taping of episodes 2 and 3 of our 13-show first season.
It’s a mistake to think nothing will go wrong. I really should stop setting myself up for disappointment.
This time we had corrupted video files. But that didn’t matter so much, because there was a problem with the VT (video tape) machine, which meant we couldn’t play the clips anyway.
This mainly affected the “Word on the Street” segment, where we play contestants vox pop footage of people on the street talking about a particular topic, without saying the name of that topic. The contestants then need to identify what the folks are talking about.
Of course, without the ability to PLAY the footage, the segment doesn’t really work. However, we found an ingenious stop gap solution…
I threw to the footage as usual, then my trusty sidekick Anthony McCormack simply read a transcript of the vox-pops. We’ll just insert the vox-pop footage in during editing and no one’s the wiser!
This is community TV.
I recall Rove McManus’s first appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno in 2007. He mentioned one occasion in the mid 90s when he was hosting “The Loft Live” on Channel 31 – which was a LIVE show and broadcast from the very same studio – where they were forced to go to air with no audio. So he was at the desk writing things on a piece of card and holding it up to the camera so he could communicate with the viewers!
This is community TV.
Thank God we’re pre-recorded.
And that wasn’t the only thing that went wrong. There were problems with the electronics that controlled the buzzers, lights kept blowing out, crew called in sick, there was no audience warm-up person and there were various breakdowns in communication.
But we’re so lucky to have a damn good bunch of people working on this show. There’s a few who stand out immediately and I know they’ll have illustrious careers in television.
Now what is really remarkable is that we somehow overcame all of the problems, kept our cool, pulled together and shot two complete episodes, which I have a feeling should come out of the editing process pretty damn well.
To be honest, yesterday when we put the studio tape in the machine and watched it back for the first time, I was so relieved there was any recorded footage AT ALL, it could have been 45 minutes of a goat licking a sugar cube and I would have been happy.
They mystery of how such goat footage made it onto the tape would be another matter.
It was a small studio audience. Probably only 10 people or so. But we actually managed to get some pretty big laughs out of them. In a way it was lucky we started with a small crowd, because it didn’t matter so much we were still ironing out the bugs.
We’ve also established a new convention on the show. If neither contestant knows the answer to a question, I’ll throw it open to the audience. There’s a great atmosphere in that studio. It really is a very powerful format: the TV game show.
And our four contestants were great. Good general knowledge and best of all, they played along with our silly gags! And they seemed genuinely amazed they walked away with ACTUAL PRIZES! Granted, they’re just things with my face on them, but still… turns out these props are pretty expensive to get printed up… so they’re worth at least the cost of the materials.
We’ve still got 10 shows left to go and we’ve got some pretty hilarious things planned, so if you can’t wait til June to see it on TV, come on down and join our studio audience this Thursday evening. Seats still available!
And don’t forget to subscribe to 31 Questions on YouTube (We’ll have some sneak peak behind the scenes footage up there for you soon!).
Kind regards,
David M. Green
31 Questions: The TV game show where YOU get to be the viewer!
