ITV has really hit the jackpot with Ant and Dec and Graham Norton: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews weekend TV
Wheel of Fortune / Ant & Dec's limitless victory
The large pottery throw
There's no doubt about it: Saturday Night belongs to ITV. The biggest stars, the most beautiful shows and the most colossal cash prizes are all on 'the other side'.
With game shows making headlines either side of ITV's surreal celebrity talent show, The Masked Singer, Auntie isn't even a contestant.
Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly returned with Boundless Victory (ITV1), which promises that one pair of contestants will take home a million pounds this series. Ant and Dec are the channel's figureheads, but much more surprising is the face now fronting a revamped Wheel of Fortune (ITV1) – one of the Beeb's highest-paid presenters, Graham Norton.
What did BBC1 have to offer with that line-up? An FA Cup match, two everyday celebrity quizzes in The Weakest Link and Pointless Celebrities, and hospital drama Casualty, now in its 38th series. Meanwhile on BBC2 we had five hours of Shirley Bassey, which is a lot of Hey Big Spender.
It's almost thirty years since Norton presented Channel 4's sex quiz Carnal Knowledge, an experience that seemed to put him off presenting game shows for a living. However, he has a comedian's natural rapport with the audience and easily became confused with the three players.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists copied from classic quizzes including Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and play your cards right. In less capable hands its complexity could overwhelm it, but Ant and Dec take advantage of the voluminous rules by inciting the players to non-stop chatter and excitement.
Wheel Of Fortune is an American format, just like Jeopardy! (which also launched on ITV last week, starring Stephen Fry). It has been tried before in Britain: Nicky Campbell presented it in the 1990s, before it was passed on to others including Bradley Walsh.
Television historians may even remember a 1970 version hosted by Michael Miles in which contestants could win an electric food mixer or a year's supply of eggs.
The mischievous Graham offers more than just eggs in the show he created with game show 'Wheel Of For-Choon-Ah!' The winner collected more than £35,000 and a spa holiday after solving a series of word puzzles that look like half-finished crosswords.
However, the format feels dated, with players taking turns spinning a giant wheel, more of a carnival gimmick than roulette, to win prizes or, if they're unlucky, lose out. It didn't help that one competitor took an early lead and held it throughout.
Limitless Win is more complicated, a guessing game with twists copied from classic quizzes including Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and play your cards right. In less capable hands the complexity could overwhelm it, but Ant and Dec take advantage of the voluminous rules by inciting the players to non-stop chatter and excitement.
Tracy and Tina, sisters who described themselves as 'two old birds from nowhere', made $100,000 – helped by the hosts, who provided answers about the number of seats on a plane to Australia. Well, they would know.
During filming at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke, presenter Siobhan McSweeney (beautiful as Sister Michael in Derry Girls) manages to find the right balance between pottering around and supporting the amateur potters.
Judge Keith Brymer Jones' scoring system is on The big pottery throw (Ch4) is cruel: any piece of pottery that does not meet his approval is dumped into his 'bucket of doom'. That's like Paul Hollywood throwing someone's showstopper sponge in the trash.
During filming at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke, presenter Siobhan McSweeney (wonderful as Sister Michael in Derry Girls) manages to find the right balance between strolling around and offering support to the amateur potters.
We learn more about the backgrounds of the participants than with similar programs, such as Sewing Bee or Bake Off. But that is because the spectacle itself is less varied: we see clay moving around on the wheel, clay drying, clay glazing. . . In fact, only at the final assessment is there anything else to look at other than clay.
All very nice, but it lacks tension.