Hello, and welcome to the final instalment of my five-part series on my memories of working on Shafted; a short-lived Australian quiz show from early 2002.

Now, look… I am aware that in the previous entries I may not have presented the rosiest of all possible pictures of the whole experience, so I wanted to start this week’s entry by accentuating some of the positives…

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Firstly, I remember being really impressed by the show’s set; it was brilliantly designed by Mark Dyson at Pitch Design, and when all its multi-coloured, computer controlled lighting was fired up and swooping around, it really did look high-end, glamorous and exciting. During rehearsals, when the studio only had the basic worklights on, the set looked surprisingly grey and nondescript. It just goes to show the incredible difference that clever and exciting lighting design and execution can make.

Red, front and centre, on the show’s impressive set.

And then of course there were the six Dropping Chairs… You see, one of the memorable features of the show was that every time a contestant was eliminated, Red would pull the big lever on his lectern…… and the chair of the unfortunate ex-contestant would drop through the floor! (with the contestant still sitting on it, obviously). You can see examples of this happening in an episode here, at 6:37, 13:20 and 20:49… (Although, I don’t know why the director stays on the close up as the drop begins, and then cuts to the wide shot during the drop; surely the drop would read better if the whole thing were just shown in a wide shot?) During rehearsals, I got to go on set and have a turn in one of the Dropping Chairs. I suspect it was much more fun for me – with nothing at stake – than it would have been for a hapless contestant who’d just been shafted.

And it was while working on Shafted that I first heard of a “technical event”. This is an industry phrase for jazzing something up when it’s essentially pretty static. So the next time you spot pulsing lighting, throbbing music and swooping cameras distracting you from the fact that you’re really just watching a couple of people standing, or sitting, still… you, my friend, have just witnessed a technical event. It’s a way of convincing a viewing audience that there’s so much dynamic movement here! And action! And excitement! When in fact nothing is happening at all. Now that’s what I call marketing.

Auditioning contestants.

Part of my role on Shafted was interviewing and assessing people who wanted to be contestants. We’d assemble them in the studio and ask them a number of general knowledge questions, including a few of Shafted‘s special ‘split questions’, since they were a feature of the show. Those who scored high enough on this test would then proceed to the interview part of the process, where a few members of the production team interviewed them, to make sure they had enough personality and confidence to go on TV. I’ll never forget one of the would-be contestants coming up to be interviewed by me (after she’d passed the general knowledge test), and opening with: “Gee, these questions are stupid, aren’t they? No really they are. They’re stupid, aren’t they? Because how is anyone supposed to get that one right?”

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Shafted, Part IV: Remembering the Post Turtle.

Hello! I’d like to start today’s instalment of my Shafted PatentedHowToWinGameShowsBehindTheScenesReminiscence with an old joke…

A farmer is talking about politics with a young man from the city. The farmer compares a politician to a ‘Post Turtle’. The young man’s unfamiliar with this expression, and asks him what a ‘Post Turtle’ is.

“When you’re driving down a country road,” says the farmer, “and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a Post Turtle. You know he didn’t get up there by himself. He doesn’t belong there; you wonder who put him there; he can’t get anything done while he’s up there; and you just want to help the poor, dumb thing down.”

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Last week, I mentioned one of our bosses on the show insisting on shoehorning an irrelevant, and slightly mean-spirited, clip into one of our two media launch episodes. This was a typical example of his style of leadership and decision-making, I’m afraid. As I recall, everyone else working on Shafted was great; the writers, the contestant co-ordinators, everyone in the office, the executive producers, the host, the floor crew… everyone.

But this honcho, who’d been brought down from Sydney to get the show up and running… well, he was a Post Turtle.

Alarm bells started ringing the moment he introduced himself, by saying “I’m single… But looking…”, as he eyed a few of the younger female members of the team. Erm – was that appropriate?

Then there was his habit of loudly complaining about his insomnia, to anyone who’d listen. And, as I mentioned last week, on the frantic day of the first record, with a million things still to do before the cameras rolled that afternoon, he strolled in two hours late, stretching as he luxuriously enthused “Oh, I had THE BEST SLEEP last night!” To this day, I don’t know how he expected us all to respond to that… “Oh, Congratulations”? “Oh, that’s nice”? “Oh, we’re all really happy for you”? FFS. Read the room, dude; we’ve got a show to make. At least have some vague concept of how it looks to your team, when you’re not there for the first half of the all-important first Record Day.

He was extremely condescending, too. I guess he thought it was amusing to continually address the hard-working, stressed production team as “kids”, or, worse still…. “Shaft puppies”. I kid you not. He actually called us that.

And when he threw his imagined authority around by yelling “NOW MEANS NOW, PEOPLE!”, it was almost comical to see how slowly the production team moved in response. At the start of each taping session, I suppose he thought he was being inspiring when he rubbed his hands together and loudly yelled “OKAY, LET’S KICK THIS PUPPY IN THE GUTS!”

Ugly. Just ugly.

He wasn’t there for long, as it turned out. His superiors were aware of his performance, his “leadership”, and the negligible respect he commanded from the team. Within a month, he’d been replaced. And as the new recruit’s style – and skill – became apparent, everyone in the office breathed a huge sigh of relief. But having that Post Turtle gumming up the works at the start wasn’t helpful. This gig was proving to be hard enough already….

Often, when working on Shafted, I’d feel quite dispirited at the end of the day. Time and time again, it became clear that we were empowering our contestants to lie to each other, betray each other, cheat each other and just generally behave poorly. We weren’t exactly celebrating humanity at its best here. As per the UK version of the show, whenever time both finalists shafted each other (resulting in them both going home empty-handed), it was feel-bad television at its most depressing. And I’m sorry to say that this was – by far – the endgame’s most common outcome. Both finalists would earnestly promise each other they’d share, before immediately going back on their word and shafting each other. It always resulted in two sad, ashamed, regretful people kicking themselves for being so nasty. They knew that if they hadn’t given in to their greed, they could’ve walked away with thousands of dollars, for half an hour’s efforts. And we were also watching them realise that they’d just presented themselves as mean-spirited liars on national television.

As the weeks drew on, we followed the show’s daily viewing figures very closely. They weren’t great….

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And that’s where we’ll leave Shafted this week. In next week’s final instalment, I look back at the positives (yes, there were some!), and at the contestant audition process, and I’ll relate the tale of Shafted‘s… well, shafting.

See you then!

Hello again, and welcome to the third instalment of this Trip Down Memory Lane…

Destination: Shafted!

Last week, we were gearing up for the launch of the show, and we’d just received the news that the original (UK) version of the show had been axed after just 4 episodes. With this news still playing on our minds, and with the show’s Australian premiere fast approaching, we now started preparing for the media launch…

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Usually, before a TV show premieres, the production will send critics and reviewers a preview disc that contains a few episodes of it. This gives those journalists an early chance to see the show, review it, and hopefully recommend it to their readers, ideally delivering more viewers to the show’s premiere. The producers of Shafted, however, had a different idea; rather than sending the journalists discs of completed episodes, they invited them to come along and watch a couple of episodes being made… with a select few of them being chosen as the contestants in those episodes! The idea was that this would deliver us the best of both worlds; some of the reviewers would be able to write about the experience of watching the show, and some would be able to write about the experience of actually playing the game; about what it’s like to be a Shafted contestant.

And, if memory serves, this concept worked pretty well. Graeme and Chris (the show’s two other question writers) and I were charged with ‘stacking the deck’ of questions for the launch episodes. For these shows, there’d be more questions about TV, entertainment and pop culture than there would be in a usual episode; we wanted the TV reviewers playing the game to be in their comfort zone during the question rounds.

The shows came together well; before too long, I’d written both episode scripts for the show’s host, Red Symons, and we had all the questions written, checked, signed off and programmed. On the day of the media launch, the entire production team arrived early, enthusiastic and raring to go. The entire production team that is, except for one of our bosses (who shall remain nameless).

When he did show up, roughly two hours late, he realised that one of the journalists playing the game today had appeared in a show he remembered from 20 years ago. He thought it’d be funny to reference this during the show, play the footage, and have Red tease her about her appearance back then. To this day, I don’t know why. The old footage was unremarkable; just her, wearing what everyone wore back then, doing some work in an office. But on the day, for some reason, it became my job to source this footage, go and physically retrieve the tape from the archive, bring it back and get it converted and ingested into the Control Room’s inserts feed, in time to be rolled into the show, when we started the record.

“But wait a minute, Hally, old chap… weren’t you the show’s Head Writer?”, I hear you ask. “Shouldn’t you have been working with the host on his material, ensuring he was happy, making any last minute changes to the script and/or the questions, making sure that everyone who needed a script had a copy, and just generally being across where the script for the show was at? Especially since these all-important, make-or-break, ‘first impressions’ episodes were about to start in minutes, rather than hours?”

Well, yes.

Yes, of course I should have. But this was that boss’s idea, and he was my… well, he was my boss. So I had to do what he said. And at the time I was a keen, relatively inexperienced 31-year-old, far too polite to say “Nope, not my job. Get someone else to do it.” I’d never do that now.

I remember SPRINTING down the corridors of Channel Nine with the tape in my hand, as all the journalists began filing into the studio audience… Since this clip was such a last minute addition to the show, I’d had no time to write anything for Red to say about it, no time to brainstorm it with him, let alone any time to incorporate it into the script that everyone – including autocue – would be referring to as the show unfolded…. how was he going to throw to this footage?

Footage which, by the way, had nothing to do with our show, and which that boss was including purely to embarrass (in public) one of the TV reviewers we were trying to get onside. Hm – an odd decision.

To say the least.

I recall getting the tape up to the Control Room with just a couple of minutes to spare. The show began, and the clip was smoothly rolled into the show at the agreed moment. The reviewer in question was predictably embarrassed, and there was a polite, awkward silence from all of her colleagues in the audience…. hardly the uproarious laughter I’m sure our boss expected. Red handled the moment smoothly and seamlessly, making its inclusion in the show as painless as it could possibly be. He really was an unflappable class act.

For those of you outside Australia, Red Symons has had a very long and varied career in the Australian entertainment industry, since first rising to prominence as a guitarist in the successful 70s band Skyhooks. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, he was a fan favourite on the high-rating variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday, in his dual role of house band member and “hanging judge” on the show’s talent contest segment Red Faces.

Red being interviewed on the ‘Shafted’set.

Red’s onscreen persona was that of the lovable, acid-tongued curmudgeon, always ready with a witty quip or a withering put-down. He’s an extremely intelligent and cultured man, is Red, and utterly delightful company. And when he’s on screen and in character, his confidence is utterly unassailable.

Which is handy, because for Shafted... it really needed to be. Back on Hey Hey, the live studio audience loved Red’s pithy one-liners, and their laughs were always long, loud and genuine. Shafted, by contrast, had no studio audience at all, and no canned laughter either – just wall-to-wall atmospheric background music. For a less confident, experienced performer, this could have meant a real crisis of confidence; “if I can’t hear anyone laughing, how can I go on selling the gags?”

But I never, ever saw Red fazed by this. Early on, we decided that we’d open each episode with a rhetorical question gag; “This is Shafted; the program that asks the question…. (insert gag here).” Here’s one:

I remember another one: This is Shafted; the program that asks the question ‘If you’re shooting a documentary about penguins, would you even bother using colour film?’

I had to write at least 40 of them (although Red came up with a lot of his own), which Red professionally delivered at the top of each episode, before segueing into his hosting duties. He bantered with the contestants, gently (and sometimes not so gently) mocking them. He congratulated them on their victories (which were rare) and consoled them in their defeats (far more common). For this particular format, for this particular show, I couldn’t think of a better person for the job.

Oh, and did I mention that he was delightful company?

That one time when we found a pith helmet in the ‘Shafted’ office. “Oh, I say… what’s that over there, Old Bean?”

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Cripes! This week’s post ran on a bit longer than I intended – gotta go!

I’ll see you again next week, when I regale you with further exploits of my punctuality-challenged ‘superior’. 

That’s right here, next Tuesday, as my PatentedHowToWinGameShowsBehindTheScenesReminiscence of Shafted continues….

Don’t be two hours late.  

Hello, and welcome to Part 2 of my PatententedHowToWinGameShowsBehindTheScenesReminiscence of the often-overlooked 2002 quiz show Shafted. And this week I’m looking back at the pre-production phase of the show.

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At this point, the show had been commissioned, the host had been cast, the production team had been hired, contestants were being sought, the show’s set’s were being designed and built… and this is when it fell to me – and my colleagues Graeme Rickerby and Chris Ho – to start generating the bulk of the show’s content (namely, quiz questions, and host scripts.)

And so the three of us were ensconced in an office in one of the Channel Nine bungalows, where we began writing. And as we generated questions for hours on end, the show’s bible* – and its truly MASSIVE, multifaceted, multiple-user FileMaker Pro quiz question database – slowly began to take shape.

For a few weeks, we toiled away happily enough; creating questions, and feeling pretty excited about the brand new show we were all about to be part of. And when the UK version of the show premiered around this time, I think the general feeling was that that would add to our momentum, and really help our version, once the brand proved to be strong… But then, just a couple of weeks before our show’s premiere, the news came through that the UK version of Shafted had been axed, after only four of its 20 episodes had aired.

For a taste of the UK show, and to see how… well, depressing…. its climax could be, have a look at these final moments from an episode where the prize pool up for grabs was a whopping £217,000.

SPOILER ALERT: As happened so heartbreakingly frequently on our version, both finalists ultimately decided to shaft each other, which meant that they both went home with absolutely nothing.

But never fear! The sensitive and compassionate UK host Robert Kilroy-Silk is on hand to comfort and console them… which he does by incredulously asking “How could you do that? You’ve blown it! How could you do it?”

‘Shafted’ (UK)’s host Robert Kilroy-Silk. Empathy personified.

A couple of mumbled excuses follow, accompanied by close ups of the contestants’ disappointed, self-loathing faces, before Robert cheerily signs off, looking down the barrel of the camera and saying “They should have shared, then they could have walked away with £108,500 each! Now they’re leaving empty-handed. And they’ve only got themselves to blame. G’Night everybody!”

Mm, now that’s true feel-bad television. How can that actually be classified as entertainment? What audience is that for?

After our Executive Producer told us about the axing of the UK version – following it up with a little would-be pep talk – we all exchanged worried glances. This latest development certainly hadn’t inspired confidence. Would our version of the show soon be following suit? Was it doomed before it even began? Of course, none of us knew back then, but I certainly couldn’t say I felt 100% confident we were about to put something good, wholesome and fun out into the world…

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And that’s where I’ll leave it for this week. Next week I’ll be digging deeper into some other aspects of the show, but in the meantime, I’d really value your feedback…

Whenever I write one of these PatentedHowToWinGameShowsBehindTheScenesReminiscences, it tends to be a slightly random grab-bag of whatever recollections I have from working on the show in question. What I’d like to know is… is that okay by you? Of course, I’m only putting down stuff that I hope you’ll find interesting. But… do you? And is it presented in an agreeable format? Are there any other ways you’d like to see these structured? Would you like them to have more flowing narratives, or are you happy with the sort of ‘point form’ way that I present most of them? Or would you maybe prefer the memories to be even more simply presented; in a list, as I did for my memories of You May Be Right? 

Any ideas or opinions you have would be greatly appreciated. As always, you can reach me at Stephen@HowToWinGameShows.com, or you can get in touch with me via Twitter or Facebook if you’d prefer.

Thanks so much in advance for your input, and I’ll see you back here next week! 

* A show’s “bible” is part rule book, part blueprint and part user manual. It’s generated by the producer and / or executive producer, and can be used as a template for anyone producing a future iteration of the show (should its format be successful enough to sell to other territories).

The ‘Shafted’ title screen. Why is it all lower case? Why is there no capital S? I guess we’ll never know….

Hello, and welcome to my latest Patented HowToWinGameShowsBehind-The-ScenesReminiscence!

And this time, it’s about my tenure as Head Writer on Channel Nine’s short-lived 2002 quiz show… Shafted.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; I was there for the ENTIRE eight weeks. What follows are a few choice behind-the-scenes memories of the whole experience. But first, in case you don’t remember it, here’s a brief introduction to the show…

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Shafted was an adaptation of a brand new format from the powerhouse production company Endemol, that debuted in England in November 2001. Although it was primarily a quiz show, Shafted‘s gameplay also featured contestants betraying each other, and lying to each other, as they competed to be the two finalists facing off in the show’s central dilemma…

SHARE OR SHAFT?

If both finalists choose to SHARE, they split the entire prize pool.

If one finalist SHARES and the other SHAFTS, then the shafting finalist gets the prize pool.

And if both finalists choose to SHAFT, they both walk away empty-handed.

Another unique feature of Shafted‘s format was its use of ‘split questions’. The idea here was that the contestant would hear the first part of the question, and then decide how much of their cash total they were willing to risk for a chance to answer it. (The idea being that the more confident they were of knowing the answer, the more money they’d bet). But the split questions almost always took an unexpected turn. Here are three examples from the show:

Which controversial blue…

(“Place your bets…”)

Which controversial blueprint for the Nazi movement was written by Adolf Hitler in 1924?

Manhattan is one of…

(“Place your bets…”)

Manhattan is one of the films by which director?

Which major planet…

(“Place your bets…”)

Which major Planet Hollywood investor played the lead in the 2000 remake of Get Carter?

I remember explaining this gimmick to my mum at the time, and as I enthused about how nifty and ingenious these questions were, I also remember the deeply unimpressed look on her face. In retrospect, I think I was probably trying to convince myself of the novelty and cleverness of the format as much as I was trying to convince her.

AND now that I think about it, that ‘split question’ format was the whole ethos of the show in a nutshell; it was deliberately designed to mislead you, to hoodwink you, to take advantage of your trust and your good faith. Hmm.

In commissioning the Australian adaptation of this format, the assumption was that audiences still wanted that mean and nasty vibe of The Weakest Link, which was successful at the time. (The catchphrase “You’ve been shafted!” was intended to be our version of “You are The Weakest Link. Goodbye!”) So it was green lit by Channel Nine and scheduled for 7:00 PM weeknights, as a replacement for $ale of the Century, which, after a 21-year run, had not been renewed for 2002. This show couldn’t have been more different to its predecessor.

You can actually watch an episode of the Australian version of Shafted right here.

I don’t remember all the details of how I got the job, back in late 2001, but I suspect my manager at the time had put me up for it. By this stage, I’d already written for the game show All Star Squares, and I’d also worked on three shows in at Channel Nine – In Melbourne Tonight, Russell Gilbert Live and Russell Gilbert Was Here – so I’d been around the place a bit, and knew a few people in there.

And so it was that, in early 2002, I found myself in an office at Channel Nine with two other question writers – Graeme Rickerby and Chris Ho – writing questions and scripts for the show’s host Red Symons….

My ‘Shafted’ writing credit – blink and you’ll miss it, as the credits go flying past….

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Next week, I move on to the show’s pre-production period, when the dropping of a bombshell makes us fear  the show might be doomed before it even begins…

See you then!

* For those of you playing along at home, the answers to the three split questions are: Mein Kampf, Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone. (And THERE’s a combo you don’t see every day…)