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Moneybags is a new weekday gameshow for Channel 4 hosted by Craig Charles (above).
Every week £1m travels down a conveyor belt, so how can you win this?
Okay, now the science bit: £1m has been split into 100 moneybags, of anything in size from £5,000 to £100,000.
Randomly they come along the conveyor belt, and there’s a series of questions/topics to which the answers are printed on the bags, e.g. “Capital Cities” and the bags say “Paris”, “Valencia”, etc. If it’s correct, you bank the cash and move into pole position. Get the wrong one, and you go to the back of the queue, and are frozen out of this round.
There are some very special bags – both good and bad, which will be announced as the show goes on.
Every round contains five correct bags across two questions, but you never know how many wrong bags there are.
As an example, the first question is: “Things that are taller than a Shetland pony”. The bags are labelled: Danny Devito, length of the Statue of Liberty’s fingernail, tallest dog ever recorded, and so on.
At the start, two players are randomly selected to go head-to-head. For the first two, if contestant 1 picks a bag of a certain value, then contestant 2 gets one of a higher value, the latter goes into pole position AND steals the money from the former. However, if the former gets a bag with ‘steal’ written on it, they steal the biggest value bag from the latter, and go into pole position, and there’s some chopping and changing going on. This is getting a bit confusing to describe, but if you don’t get through, you stay for the week, rather like BBC1’s Impossible.
Whoever does get through goes into the ‘triple-header’ in the penultimate round, so we have three rounds of pairs prior to this, and whoever wins that goes through to the final round with the amount of cash they’ve amassed so far.
In that last round, the finalist’s cash is split across four bags of increasing value. There are four questions. Get it right with the correct bag, and you win a percentage of your money. Get the wrong bag, and it’s labelled “bankrupt”, so YOU LOSE! You get NOTHING!
In the opening episode I saw, the first bag is worth 10%, then 20% for the second bag, then 50% and 100%. I don’t know if those percentages change depending on the episode, but based on what I saw for example, you don’t have to answer all four questions if you’re not happy with the answers, so rather like each safety point on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, if you want to stop at any point and have, say, answered three questions correctly, you’d be taking home 50% of the cash banked up to your previous round.
Naturally, no spoilers from me as to how episode one turns out. You’ll have to watch it, like I did.
Red Dwarf‘s Craig Charles makes for an affable host, so he’s perfectly fine, and if you’re watching live at 3pm on a weekday, then now Winning Combination has finished on ITV, Moneybags is a damn sight better than Lingo which has just returned… and that’s just awful.
Overall, Moneybags isn’t the greatest quiz show, but it’s better than Lingo. But then so is the test card.
Moneybags is on weekdays on Channel 4 at 3pm, and after broadcast, each episode is on All 4.
It’s unlikely to ever be released on Blu-ray or DVD. The trailer is below.
Director: Ollie Bartlett
Host: Craig Charles
Music: Dobs Vye
Series Editor: Mike Maclaine
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.