[Neil Jones]

For me Strike It Lucky was the format to take to a full series - thought it suited Alan Carr well. Yes, fleshing it out to an hour was a problem especially as the original half hour was already padded out with chatter but that's just something you have to accept nowadays.

Yes but that's a problem with the format, not a problem with the show itself. If there was no chatter the entire show would have been be over in less than ten minutes. You only have to look at the US version I posted a few pages back. Take all the commercial references and all the other superfluous crap you find in these US shows out, and what you have left is not very much at all.

Thames did make a few minor changes when they bought the format which mostly worked well (such as only having one person answer questions and one doing the screen striking, as opposed to the US show where they both did both things), but I suspect Thames already knew it needed a copious amount of padding to fit 25/26 minutes, and the easiest solution was probably find somebody like Barrymore who was very good at filling time, especially having been a Redcoat previously as that's part of that role.

Most of these gameshows though weren't intended to be stretched out to an hour, and the lazy option is just to repeat the same rounds again (if Bullseye ever returns properly and becomes 1hr, I'll bet you any amount of money all they'll do is repeat the first two rounds twice, then have a play off to go through to the prize board and assuming they keep the original end game, 101 in 6 darts (and not that silly end game incarnation used on the Epic Gameshow)).