[Neil Jones]

The amount of actual gameplay time on Strike It Lucky/Rich seems to get less and less as time goes by. I've also seen people elsewhere say that the hot spots were only there so the game could last longer, which is nonsense. They forced contestants to decide to bank prizes or risk losing them.

For quiz nerds, it wasn't a show to get much out of but it wasn't intended to be. I don't think it was padded because the chat was just right and crucial to the success of the show. Barrymore also knew when to goof around and when to get on with things unlike hosts today who don't know how to and rely on format points which supposedly deliver tension (but fail to). Stop, start, stop, start, zzz... which didn't happen with Strike It Lucky/Rich.

It couldn't be stretched to 60 minutes without obvious padding unless they repeated the first round and swapped who is on the screens and who is answering the questions but then how do you decide who goes through to the final round? Convert prizes to money so it's luck more than anything, or just money as prizes and the show loses its humour and charm? Maybe that was part of the changes intended for Bullseye? The emphasis on money and cutthroat ways of going about it can ruin shows.

What the changes were for Bullseye is anybody's guess; they've never been stated. My best guess would be some sort of format change; much like what happened with Krypton Factor, which by 1995 looked nothing like it had in 1993. But that was its ultimate downfall. It probably speaks volumes that when Challenge picked up the revivial in 2006 it was (by and large) the same format as the original.

The Hot Spots replaced the Bandit in the original format of Strike It Rich, so that concept wasn't new, it was in the original (just done in a less silly way over here). Otherwise you'd just have four questions every time and shoot across the board in next to no time with absolutely no jeopardy at all.

Chat in earlier series (particularly the first series of SiL) seems a bit stilted; but this can probably be attributed to Barrymore still figuring out how best to handle this new vehicle.