The Con Test
Television
Sandwiches and wraps on a table with water bottles sporting no labels at all and the crowd waiting to be in the audience of a new quiz show wait on and on. A chilly atmosphere of diodes, flickering lights, freezing vapours and a lot of black. Chairs are rigid, the kind to come from a school looking to right set a kid's back with due force.
Hosts Andrew G and Bridget Duclos take their sweet time hitting on the stage to even get the party started. Warm up with the dead voice makes with the jokes that score thinly on the laughs.
Questions on the whole are simple general knowledge posers. The kind a pub or bar trivia stocks, but without the overt bent toward being shouted out. Set problems need all manner of gaffa tape to fix up and the crack from the technician on scene blinds everyone, Andrew G riffs on the sight and it's all the more curious as to why the pants never do sling all the way up.
Nothing but technical difficulties straight on from walking on to the set. Three hours turns into five and along the way, one side of the audience disappears progressively throughout the night. Two by two they go, never to return and to not pick their hands in the raffle of the Westfields gift voucher at the end of the night.
Most of the game play is reliant on the ability of the contestants to psyche each other out, bluffing and making the other nervous about who really has more of the money score in their favour. No scores are shown at all during the night, all a guess game of sighted tricks and blind answers.
Marius is all talk and runs away with his pittance in the first shot. Major tongue lashing from Brad works the barbs and keeps the energy and spark of the show all throughout. He rules the scene but loses out and walks away empty handed as the third loser. Between the final two, the supposed cop and taxi driver, the cop won't get off the topic of Russell Crowe and The Ordinary Fear Of God and the taxi driver doesn't know how to deliver a joke with any proper strike.
Slow from start to middle of the end and the wrap up of the final minutes of the show explode with a force to rush out and clear the set. All too little momentum, the audience weary from prolonging their hype over the loud and non-confrontational music.
Walking out and away from the ABC Studios dead late in Ultimo, more raiding of that food table keeps the mind scouring for a way to satisfy the hungry stomach with nothing more than sleep postponed.
Soon Van - Tuesday, 19 December 2006 - 13:20
Thoughts...
*Optional and not kept. Read the privacy policy for more.
Previous entries on Television
- Power Rangers: Time Force - Singled out
- Power Rangers: Time Force - Quantum mechanics
- Power Rangers: Time Force - Follow the light
- Power Rangers: Time Force - Future imperfect
- Power Rangers: Time Force - Personnel issues
- Atlantis under one third of a Siege
