This week’s instalment of my chat with Family Feud studio host and audience warm up man Russell Fletcher includes one of the best strategic tips you’re ever likely to get for playing Family Feud. It’s just below, and highlighted in blue bold, as all the best tips on this site always are.

See if you can spot it…

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SH: Any words of advice – or warning – for anyone who’s keen to go on Family Feud?

RF: It is really fun coming in to the studio because you will actually pick up on some of the nuance that we try and coach people about and that’s all about just staying focused and relaxed. And dealing with nerves, maybe possible strategies. Some people are learning the strategy of getting the top answer and it is a slightly difficult question, they will know the question will be difficult so they pass it over to the other side, in the hope to have time to consult. Because the only time you get to consult with the rest of your family and chat about the answers is when the answering contestants are on two strikes. SO you have that little moment to huddle together and brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm… That one! That’s the good one. 

SH: Does that often work or is it just 50/50?

RF: Steals often work. We get very few clean sweeps of questions, very seldom that Grant would be asking a question and they will get all the answers out in one hit. Very seldom.

SH: That would make sense. 

RF: Quite often a team that’s attempting to steal will also fail at stealing. There are always one or two elusive answers that people cannot get from a survey of 100 people; “Name a famous Australian desert”.

SH: The Simpson Desert.

RF: 43 of 100 people put down “Pavlova“.

SH (LAUGHS) Ha! That’s great!

RF: Yah. So some questions we can’t put to air.

SH: But that’s in the writing, not in the spoken.

RF: That’s right. That is in the written answers to the survey.

SH: But if Grant was to ask that question verbally it would be a different answer because he wouldn’t be pronouncing “dessert”, he would say “desert”. 

RF: “Name something that comes in a carton”. 

SH: Milk. 

RF: Yes. SpongeBob Squarepants…. comes in a cartoon.

SH: Oh, for goodness’ sake.

RF: Bugs Bunny.

SH: Really?

RF: Yeah. So the hardest part of the show is writing questions because I am not  a fully skilled question writer like your good self, it is a muscle that you have to adapt and you have to develop techniques for writing questions. What is going to be fun to play with? What is topical? What is going to capture the zeitgeist? It is a really inexact science. Questions that are going to be fun for Grant to ask and fun for the contestants too. Sometimes you’ll get Fast Money questions which are so easy for that family, and sometimes you go “wow, that was a hard set of questions”. And that is a really hard judgement call. I write 500/600 questions per year and that is the hardest thing to do. 

SH: Also to make it answerable enough, and not too hard and not too easy, and not too accessible and not too inaccessible. 

RF: Yes because it’s not a factoid. There are no facts, it’s not trivia. 

SH: It’s not right or wrong, it’s not yes or no. 

RF: People will answer and say the most reasonable things and it won’t be there on the survey.

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… which all just goes to show how much thought, effort and care goes into the questions you see on the show. Family Feud, like all game shows, is very much an “iceberg proposition”; we only see the 10% that’s “above the surface”. So many hours, days – even weeks – of work has already been done by the time the network delivers that half hour of TV content each night. Which I think’s really cool. 

It also goes to show the reading levels of many people auditioning for the show. Is that also cool?

Not so much. 

See you next Tuesday!

 

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