Review: 1000 Heartbeats

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t must be really hard to come up with a new game show – pretty much every basic concept has been used, and the novelty of throwing in a gimmick runs dry fairly soon.

Quizzes can be hard (like Paxman’s growling-fest, University Challenge); easy with extras tacked on (all the fun of arcade coin machines accompanies Handy Manny look-a-like Ben Shepherd in Tipping Point); based on manual challenges (as with Schofield and the American Horror Story’s Rubber Man in The Cube); or solely luck-based and nonsensical (as in Noel Edmond’s Schrödinger-‘em-up, Deal Or No Deal).

Quite what ITV’s latest offering, 1000 Heartbeats, brings to the table is unclear

The show is hosted by dopey everyman Vernon Kay. In case you don’t know Kay (and if you don’t, well done), he is a sort-of Geordie oaf. A shop window dummy, with emphasis on dummy. A charisma vacuum comprising only of hair and half-hearted showmanship, who would lose an intelligence contest in which he was the only entrant.

Its premise is fairly simple: the contestant starts with 1,000 ‘heartbeats’ on a timer, and must complete a number of basic challenges – answering true or false questions, identifying a word with the letters arranged as a circle, and so on. However, the timer is linked to your pulse, and you lose heartbeats as you go (i.e. you lose 100 heartbeats a minute if your pulse rate is 100bpm); the idea is to make people panicky, forcing them under pressure. Not helping the situation is a string quartet who sit in the background, supposedly playing at the same pace as your heart – although, aside from volume, there isn’t any noticeable difference.

Our first contestant was Cassandra from Essex, and Vernon chided her for not having a low enough heart rate. He introduced her to the plate – the contestant must step onto it to play – and then warned her that getting an answer wrong would cost her 25 heartbeats. (He says things like this throughout, as if he’s some kind of serial killer playing with his victims.) Cassandra used 210 of her heartbeats on round one, not thinking to answer the questions straight away, deliberating as though it were Sophie’s Choice. She won £250 on the round, with another seven rounds required to take home £25,000.

Photo: Flickr/radio1interactive

Vernon stands at the side throughout, pulling the face of a man who not only knows none of the answers, but can barely understand the questions. Or, even better, he advises players to “take some bpms to think”, although you get the impression that he was only recently taught the acronym by his production team. Meanwhile, each question is read out incredibly slowly, causing the player to lose a many heartbeats before they can even answer.

In the first show, Cassandra kept ducking out, unable to answer any of the list questions and taking an absurd amount of time to do so. Eventually, she elected to cash out, which required her to answer five true or false questions correctly in a row to leave with her £500. She didn’t.

After this, the cycle continued with a new victim – this time, it was George, a man with the heart rate of a dying turtle. After his first round, Vernon offered George some advice: “keep your heart rate low, and stop answering incorrectly”. The look in George’s eyes was incredible. In the end, George also cashed out with a grand, although Vernon insisted on rubbing salt in the wound by insisting that he should’ve gone on. The production team must edit out all the bits where the players go for Vernon.

After that was Roger, who followed the same pattern as the other two, and therein lies the problem: the thing gets repetitive fairly quickly, and you lose interest when it does. Going through a lot of contestants means you see the same rounds over and over, and there’s only so much celebrity jigsaw puzzling you can do before you get fed up.

I can appreciate that the situation is tense – indeed, that’s the whole point of the show – and as a failed game show contestant myself, I can categorically state that it is easier at home, but some of the things on this show were insulting. Watching contestants endlessly ponder a true or false question in a supposedly high-octane scenario is painful viewing. However, even if a contestant is good, as Roger was, then it is still boring to watch.

As a quiz show, 1000 Heartbeats is fairly crap: it’s the televisual equivalent of the bleep test, and who really wants to watch that?