Friday, August 31, 2007

50:50 sex split for winners on last nights show


Another detailed analysis of ITV’s Make your Play this time last night’s show – the presenters again were Ben Baldwin & Zö Christien.
This time the four hour show had eight winners taking away a total of £1,950 the winners were split equally by sex (four apiece) with call volumes dropping from a peak of around 650 per minute to as few as 55 per minute (at around 03:30 am).

The show had a total of 5 games with 3 snakewords, a stack (water was the word) and finishing with an unwon ‘criss cross’.
The number of calls taken on air was 144 which comes in at around 36 per hour. Of note on the show was that ’Crazy Nige’ got through three times, calls come through on a ‘random’ basis with call limits in place, Crazy Nige claimed that he was shortly going to Barbados for a holiday on his ITV Play winnings (he didn’t win on this show but here he is on YOUtube winning before Christmas)

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Mr Shaps on ITVPlay


Hot on the heels of results that emphasised the damage suffered by ITV as a result of the ‘premium rate phone call scandals” we’re told by Simon Shaps that ITV Play doesn’t damage the brand.
Speaking at the recent TV get-together in Edinburgh Shaps was unapologetic about the genre.
Alternative voices are less sure of the veracity of the claim made by Mr Shaps.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Another potential advantage


So the analysis continues and I’ve looked in some detail at the ‘Make your Play’ of the 25th July which was hosted (unusually) by two male presenters, they being Ben Baldwin and Russ Spencer.
Now the show that they characterised as a ‘boys show’ was dominated by the ladies with all four of the winners being female and the women callers outnumber the men by over two to one, I’m not sure if this was unusual but I’ll be looking at more transmissions to determine this
The show had considerably less ‘on air’ contestants than the previous nights one (I made it 149 for the show that aired 25th July as opposed to over 200 on the 24th July). I also reckon they gave away only £2,000 and that was all in the first hour and a quarter.
So the next important advantage for taking part in ITV Play to consider, is perhaps the advantage of being a woman.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

how to improve your chances of winning


So after a nice holiday I’m back in earnest on the research and have actually started going through the programmes ITV puts out in the participation slot in some detail.

The first ITV play I watched (night of 24th July) clocked in at a little over 4 hours, I was surprised at the number of callers taken on air (214) which averages at about 50 per hour, this gave 5 winners (40 to 1 odds for those who got through) but the number of callers varied between (around) 60,000 per hour at the start when about a thousand calls a minute were coming in to around 6,000 per hour at the end of the programme by my very rough calculation. This equates to a chance of winning between 48,000 to 1 and a much better 4,800 to 1, it seems to me that if you are going to play and want to win you’re better to leave it until the final hour of the programme when the number of calls being made is far fewer.
The total prize money given was £2,750 I’ll try and calculate an indicative sum for the revenue and let you know.
Comments please to itvplaysurvey@btopenworld.com