Friday 1 October 2010

The Cube

Yesterday I was wearing a wet suit, due to the ammount of channel surfing I was doing, when I stumbled across "The Cube". I thought I was going to be watching the excellent horror film, until Phillip Scofield's near white hair appeared on the screen.

I realised my error and was going to continue catching the waves, still keeping with this surfing theme, when I saw that it was an awful awful gameshow. So I put my board down, and watched in awe at how bad televison has become.

The Cube, for those that have been fortunate enough to not see it, is a gameshow where a contestant has to do various skill games in an attempt to get £250,000, whilst inside the titular cube. The players have 9 lives for the duration of their program, and once they're in their glass case of emotion, they have to complete whatever challenge they're doing or they lose a life, and once their 9 lives are gone, all the money they've won up to this point goes into Scofield's back pocket. They get the chance to simplify the game if it looks to challenging and they have the chance to give it a trial run.

This all sounds interesting, until you see the actual skill games they have to play. One of the games, the contestant had to catch a ball fired at him from the other side of the cube. Sure there's a certain amount of skill involved in that. Another game a woman had to roll a disc through a narrow gap. Also, there's some skill involved in that. Infact It's not the skill of these games that I'm putting into question, there is a certain element of skill involved in these games, and I'm sure I'd fail miserably at most of them. However to me this show seems like a bunch of games you'd find at a village fete. What's next in The Cube, hook the duck? Knock the cans over with the baseball?

The producers of the show, obviously knew that these games aren't that thrilling on their own, so instead decided to employ camera techniques from The Matrix. At one point the camera will  almost do bullet time effects to increase the intensity of the game from nil to "a tow-sand percent" as Louie Walsh would say.

The ammount of pomp and circumstance that's added to this gameshow is cringeworthy!

Check this out and see if you agree with me, or tell me I'm talking shit. Of course you'd have to find me to be able to tell me that, wuhahahaha... ahem.

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