Fruit Machine Chat

Posted: **Sun May 07, 2006 9:45 pm**

Not a quiz game yet , however would be interested to hear comments about THE MINT. Presenters probably most annoying on tv. Everyday they say "I think its going to go tonight" . Any winner " What are you going to do with your winnings ?"Quite often the reply " pay my ****ing phone bill ". " Not bad for a 60p call" & what about the hundreds they made before they got through? Now they are extending it by allowing only 1 or 2 guesses a night. After having made a small fortune in phone calls and my phone temporarily blocked by BT ( actually agree with BT ) I can say that THE MINT will leave the majority of its viewers well and truly skinted!May be a rare result- the swp quiz game being better than the programme (deal or no deal - yuk)#BIT ****ing ad lib

Posted: **Sun May 07, 2006 10:21 pm**

you actually ring up?

Posted: **Sun May 07, 2006 10:55 pm**

Every year do a real gamble. 1 yr SHARES Marconi went bust! 1yr LOTTERY stake £104 won £10.1 yr COMP MAGAZINE won very little.I know I should stick to quiz machines!

Posted: **Mon May 08, 2006 5:06 pm**

The whole idea of those TV games seems wrong to me - there is no real skill involved as you are either

(a) answering some very easy anagram or picture quiz or
(b) trying to second guess someone else's incomplete list of answers to a particular category

This was certainly the case for The Mint's predecessor Quizmania and from the odd bits I've seen of The Mint they may even have got rid of that first type of question altogether so you are left with something like Name a British Male Singer, and you are asked to guess which 10 of the 100s of possible 'right' answers are on the list. After they have given out a few of the lower prizes and had enough unanswered phone calls at 60p a shot to ensure their profits they start giving out clues which eventually get easier and easier until they are basically telling you the answers.

The only time I have ever phoned up was for Quizmania, late one night stuck in a hotel somewhere when I couldn't sleep and it was the Jackpot answer to 'Name a Boys' Name Beginning with B' and after about a million wrong answers and continual insistence that the names were popular they finally had to say that it was four letters long and rhymed with 'MOAZ'! The goalkeeper for Hull City is I believe the most famous 'Boaz' in the world...

There may it seems have been something of a story involved with The Mint's replacement of Quizmania (which just announced one night that it was moving to ITV2 the next night) - I'll dig out the link if anyone is interested.

Basically these shows are the TV equivalent of the Lottery - preying on the vulnerable. Not like my favourite, Who Wants to be a Millionaire - now, will anyone on here admit to having been on that?

Posted: **Mon May 08, 2006 6:00 pm**

These new TV quizzes make fantastic viewing, only bettered by Deal or No Deal with Noel Edmonds.

Posted: **Tue May 09, 2006 12:22 pm**

Nil Satis wrote:The whole idea of those TV games seems wrong to me - there is no real skill involved as you are either

(a) answering some very easy anagram or picture quiz or
(b) trying to second guess someone else's incomplete list of answers to a particular category

This was certainly the case for The Mint's predecessor Quizmania and from the odd bits I've seen of The Mint they may even have got rid of that first type of question altogether so you are left with something like Name a British Male Singer, and you are asked to guess which 10 of the 100s of possible 'right' answers are on the list. After they have given out a few of the lower prizes and had enough unanswered phone calls at 60p a shot to ensure their profits they start giving out clues which eventually get easier and easier until they are basically telling you the answers.

The only time I have ever phoned up was for Quizmania, late one night stuck in a hotel somewhere when I couldn't sleep and it was the Jackpot answer to 'Name a Boys' Name Beginning with B' and after about a million wrong answers and continual insistence that the names were popular they finally had to say that it was four letters long and rhymed with 'MOAZ'! The goalkeeper for Hull City is I believe the most famous 'Boaz' in the world...

There may it seems have been something of a story involved with The Mint's replacement of Quizmania (which just announced one night that it was moving to ITV2 the next night) - I'll dig out the link if anyone is interested.

Basically these shows are the TV equivalent of the Lottery - preying on the vulnerable. Not like my favourite, Who Wants to be a Millionaire - now, will anyone on here admit to having been on that?

its the biggest rip off going. some screen the answers so you have to say your original answer you rang in with so they can guarantee the prizes arent won until they want. There seems to be a lot of these shows popping up and i dont think it'll be long before the new GC do something about them.

Posted: **Fri May 19, 2006 6:00 pm**

If anyone is bothered, the Mint itself, i.e. the initial £100,000 jackpot that goes up by a £1 each minute, has gone. I didn't actually see it happen but I knew something was up when I caught the start of that night's programme to see The Cheeky Girls as guest 'presenters'! - they'd been taken on to open the Mint when it finally went. The next night the money was back down to £100,000 and a few quid.

Posted: **Wed Aug 09, 2006 6:56 pm**

One for the insomniacs only I guess...

If anyone does watch The Mint and sees them finally give out the prize for the 'numeric' question that has been running recently, please could you reply to this or PM me. It's a weird one in that all their other games are relatively easy to understand and time-limited, in that they award three or four of the seven prizes and then close the game before revealing the missing answers, but this one has been running for at least a couple of weeks. It seems at face value to have at most two possible correct answers but I'm sure the answer they have has been put together by the same people that used to write the 'riddles' on Ted Rogers' 3-2-1 - "It's got four wheels plus a steering wheel, it has four doors and you drive in it to get to places so you are guessing that this is the car whereas in fact a bin can have four wheels, you can drive a bin to get to places, .... etc".

As for the other games on there, we could start a comedy thread on here listing the answers that no one gets on either this or its close cousin Quizmania before they choose to reveal them. Recent classics have included:

BIG ______

where the missing answers included 'BIG APPLE CIRCUS' (a world famous circus in New York apparently) and 'BIG BOO' (a baddy from Super Mario)

and SHORT ______

where it seems amazing to think that no one was able to guess 'SHORT SPERRIN' (a post-WWII jet-bomber) and 'SHORT REAM' (the technical term in the printing industry for 480 sheets of paper).

Posted: **Wed Aug 09, 2006 7:29 pm**

Nice idea Nil Satis.

Gladly, I don't have cable TV, otherwise I would probably watch it a lot more than I have. Luckily, I'm only glued on watching it, and not phoning it. It is amusing when steamers phone in and can barely speak when giving their answer. Although they cut off their call AS SOON AS they give their answer and it's wrong (for obvious reasons), occasionally you hear comedy gems, like when they don't realise they've got 2 guesses, and after getting the 1st wrong, give a foul mouth rant about the amount of times they've had to top up their mobile to get on the f**king show.

Watching it recently, you had to guess ____ CITY. The easy ones were away, such as INNER CITY and NEW YORK CITY.

The one eveyone missed ... FUGACITY (?).... given that were a million other city words like simplicity, velocity and audacity, you could be forigven for not getting that. Furthermore, upon browsing wikipedia, it appears to be initially a hard concept to grasp since it was completely invented.

Safe to say I'll never be phoning this up!

EDIT: Just read what it's all about, and it actually explains why puddles evaporate on a warm day, so it's not entirely useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugacity

Posted: **Sat Aug 12, 2006 1:30 am**

Bloody Hell this game is depressing. The presenter looks like an ugly Michael Jackson and she just talks shit for ages and plays stupid noises. Now it is High......

So far they have had about 12 callers in 30 minutes and they have all been idiots until she said it rhymes with Pies and it is High ... Flats. Then it took 4 minutes until they took a call.
Some fool got it in the end.

I can't believe there are enough idiots in this country to pay for this programme.
Now they are playing recorded wrong answers. It is so obvious because she does not ask their names or has a stupid chat with them.

So far it is High...

Definition
Noon
Rise
Fidelity
Voltage

Every single time she speaks to someone she says OOOOOOOOOOOOH good answer. Then the screen tells them what a looser they are to call.

Why don't these people waste their money on quiz machines instead of premium phone numbers?

Bloody idiots!

I'm going to bed.

Posted: **Sat Aug 12, 2006 3:30 pm**

Channel 5 is worse.

If anyones seen it it will have something like

"20 cats invite 40 dogs to a coctail party, they invite 4 dogs who invite 7 geese, they all sip on a kitty cocktail" and theres a pic of a cat

and it says add up the number of animals.

Biggest fix ever, as its clearly a total con.

I started a new job today hence couldnt sleep... and watched with increasing bemusement as guess after guess was wrong.

Someone guessed 1, someone guessed 33,000 odd.

Plus they offer people £200000 if they get it right only to bring it back down to £10k, how these shows are allowed to operate is beyond me.

Posted: **Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:37 pm**

A classic from Quizmania last night - the £15,000 answer which no one could get to complete LIGHT ______ was LIGHT SPORTS AIRCRAFT!! God, there's something thickies out there...

Posted: **Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:51 pm**

Lee Baldry was on it a while back. Puzzle was HAND___.

The inevitable first caller - "Handjob?" :P

Posted: **Sun Feb 25, 2007 4:06 pm**

Thought I'd dredge this topic up again...

Was reading about the Government clamping down on these scam quizzes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6190674.stm

If you can't be arsed reading the whole thing, this quote stands out

However, committee chairman, Tory MP John Whittingdale, said some of the questions were dubious.

He said one programme had asked viewers to name items found in a woman's handbag.

The winning answer, Mr Whittingdale said, to laughter from the committee, was "rawlplugs".

Apparently, another of the answers in the same quiz was ... Balaclava!

Posted: **Mon Feb 26, 2007 12:50 pm**

What is amazing with these shows (apart from the obvious - that they can make so much money out of so many gullible people) is the turnover of the shows themselves. I can't believe they have been going more than say 18 months on ITV1 but they are now on to at least the fourth incarnation - Quizmania, The Mint, Make Your Play and now Glitterball, which last night was boasting about their "massive" £250-£500 prizes, while asking you to guess the name of a male film star. So only about 10000 obvious ones to choose from then...

They also proudly boast that they set a limit of 150 calls per household per day, i.e. they think that (at 75p minimum per call) £100+ a day is reasonable for someone to spend on fruitless phone calls.

For anyone who drives late at night, there is also a radio version (Cashcall). The last time I drove back from Goodison they spent two hours without getting a single 'correct' answer to the question 'Name a film with a single word in the title' (although 'Gone With the Wind' and 'The Mummy' were good guesses I thought

). The winning answers were the classic answers that are valid but that no one will guess - Shattered, Amistad, Cursed, Electra, ...

I wonder if the fall-out from the Richard and Judy show will affect these charlatans.