UK Format Updates: ITV Picks Up “High Stakes” and “Holding Out for a Hero”; BBC to Drop “Don’t Scare the Hare”

While new shows like Still Standing, It’s Worth What, and 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show are coming to America soon, our British friends have a few things to look forward to.  Or at least something that, if you’re a fan, you’d better look forward to it for the brief amount of time it remains on the air.

*Broadcasting Now is reporting that BBC’s Don’t Scare the Hare is on the fast track to cancellation.  The show has never been able to attract much of an audience, seeing less than two million viewers on average.  Entertainment controller Mark Linsey told Broadcasting Now, “Obviously Hare is not going well. It was a huge risk we took – it’s co-hosted by an animatronic hare – and while it’s proved successful with children, we were hoping there would be enough knowingness within the show to draw in the adults. There wasn’t enough of that, which is where it fell down.”

It was an unbelievably bizarre, strange show so this isn’t a big shock.  While we made fun of the show, I’ll at least applaud them for trying something very strange and off-the-wall such as Don’t Scare the Hare.  You won’t see anyone in America doing that.

*ITV is going to be picking up seven episodes of the ITV Studios show High Stakes.  I hate to be overly negative out of the gate, but it’s brutal.  I don’t think there’s been a show that’s more, “Pick a square and win money,” than this one.  You can read the full pilot write up here. However, simply summarized, there’s a grid of numbered squares, each with an increasing number of Fails.  You stand on a square.  If it’s safe you win money.  If it’s a Fail, you slowly lower beneath the stage (you don’t drop).

If you don’t want to blindly guess they’ll give you a clue, and the answer is the location of one of the Fails.  However, you only get 11 clues all game so a vast majority of this is going to be blind luck.  Sorry, I know people that helped with it and came up with concepts of it, but this show is the definition of brutal.  It sounds like it’ll have a nice set, but the game is completely void of content, excitement, or life.

*ITV Studios has also announced the pick up of @12Yard Holding Out For a Hero.  The show is a giving-based quiz show where people play for others that are in the studio at that moment.  It’s similar in theme to ABC’s pilot You Deserve It!, but we were told by sources that, despite the PR campaign for that one, Hero was developed first.  You can click here to read more about that one.  Good luck to them.  Sounds a lot more interesting than High Stakes at least.

Sources :

C21 Media: http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=4&article=60683
Broadcasting Now: http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/broadcasters/bbc/bbcs-hare-set-for-axe-as-viewers-switch-off/5027297.article