{"id":3244,"date":"2015-10-27T22:26:51","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3244"},"modified":"2015-10-27T22:26:51","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:26:51","slug":"watch-with-father-4-kerwhizz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3244","title":{"rendered":"Watch With Father #4: Kerwhizz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I’ve written about three shows I more or less like, it’s time for some balance. \u00a0The opening credits of\u00a0Kerwhizz\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0provoke involuntary\u00a0flinching\u00a0and\u00a0a sense of mild dread. \u00a0The show is a decent idea\u00a0on paper. \u00a0It could\u00a0have been a great show. \u00a0But those quiz segments. \u00a0Oh god, those quiz segments.<\/p>\n

Kerwhizz<\/em> was made in 2008. \u00a0It was a major commission for CBeebies at the time – it was their first show to be made in HD – and it was hyped accordingly. \u00a0It was described as the first game show for pre-schoolers, which it really isn’t. \u00a0The BBC press release<\/a>\u00a0is a pile-up of bygone buzzwords\u00a0– by the end of the first paragraph, the show has already been billed as a “mixed media pre-school quiz show”, and “a brand new breakthrough multi-platform entertainment format aimed at 4 to 6 year olds”. \u00a0(Quite how it can be both\u00a0<\/em>a pre-school quiz show\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>aimed at 4 to 6 year olds, when most British kids start school at age 4, is not readily apparent.)<\/p>\n

What made it a “multi-platform entertainment format”? \u00a0Well, it had a website. \u00a0With a podcast and a game and everything. \u00a0Look, it was 2008.<\/p>\n

So here’s what\u00a0Kerwhizz<\/em> actually is. \u00a0It’s a CGI animation in which\u00a0three teams of pod\u00a0racers have a pod race. \u00a0Every episode’s track has a\u00a0different, gimmicky theme. \u00a0The duos are all driver-and-sidekick pairings – Twist and Snout, Ninki and Pip, and Kit and Kaboodle. \u00a0And before they get to the actual racing, they\u00a0first compete in a quiz to win “pod mods” – power-ups to use in the race.<\/p>\n

It’s a perfectly good idea, and it ought to work. \u00a0And there are plenty of things it doesn’t reasonably well. \u00a0For a start, the\u00a0actual pod racing half of the show is\u00a0perfectly watchable,\u00a0even if it’s formulaic. \u00a0It’s basically a parade of eccentric mishaps with everyone using then\u00a0their pod mods to get out of trouble.\u00a0\u00a0The point of reference\u00a0is pretty obviously\u00a0Wacky Races<\/em>, though that’s\u00a0not a comparison that exactly favours\u00a0Kerwhizz<\/em>. \u00a0But these\u00a0segments still have some life to them, and the writers are pretty good at using the two-lap format to set up things\u00a0for a pay off\u00a0on the second lap.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0anime-influenced character designs are pretty good. \u00a0If you’re interested,\u00a0that side of the show’s development\u00a0is\u00a0very\u00a0thoroughly documented, since there was a law suit alleging that the characters had been\u00a0copied from another pitch. \u00a0The claim failed comprehensively – the judge described\u00a0that other pitch as “not especially memorable” – but\u00a0some of the concept drawings can be found at the end of\u00a0the judgment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0three main characters\u00a0have some charisma, even if they’re not\u00a0especially\u00a0well distinguished from one another. \u00a0The kids doing the voice acting are really quite good. \u00a0So all this\u00a0is positive.<\/p>\n

But then you get to the quiz segments. \u00a0Those are brutal.<\/p>\n

For a start, there’s\u00a0Kerwhizzitor, the show’s only live action character, who serves as\u00a0quizmaster and race commentator. \u00a0He’s scripted with the sort of\u00a0dreadful jokes that\u00a0really call for a magnetic performance. \u00a0There are people on CBeebies who could probably have got away with it. \u00a0Jacob Scipio is not one of them. \u00a0His unremittingly\u00a0stilted performance is a sight to behold, but only in small doses. \u00a0To be fair, he would have been fifteen at the time this was made,\u00a0and he’s been\u00a0working consistently enough to suggest that\u00a0he was just hopelessly miscast in a role that does call for some fairly specific skills. \u00a0But he’s still a seriously challenging watch.<\/p>\n

Then there’s\u00a0the quiz itself, which is designed for the kids to play along with at home. \u00a0As such, it consists of very simple multiple choice questions, with long pauses for you to answer. \u00a0Up to a point, this\u00a0could\u00a0be one of those unbridgeable gaps between the kids and the parents. \u00a0In order to challenge the pre-schoolers, you have to pitch the quiz at a level which the adults will find intolerably boring. \u00a0Fair enough. \u00a0But it’s hard to imagine some of the questions posing any real challenge to anyone old enough to understand them in the first place, and it’s also painfully repetitive, built around endless variations on a fairly small number of question types.<\/p>\n

There’s a structural problem here too. \u00a0 Ostensibly, the whole point of the quiz is to win points in order to get first\u00a0choice of pod mods. \u00a0In theory, this is supposed to give you a huge advantage. \u00a0But because the races themselves work on\u00a0Wacky Races<\/em> logic, most of the pod mods are so weird and arbitrary that you have no idea what help they might possibly be, and quite often they end up simply clearing the road for the benefit of\u00a0everyone anyway. \u00a0That’s fine as far as the races segments are concerned, but it means that\u00a0there’s precisely no sense that winning the quiz actually\u00a0makes much difference in terms of your chances of winning the race. \u00a0Which makes the quiz seem even more boringly futile than it already does.<\/p>\n

And this is half the show. \u00a0To the adult viewer, it’s a wasteland of tedium. \u00a0And surely even the kids must regard it as the\u00a0dull bit before the racing starts.<\/p>\n

Why is the quiz so underwhelming compared to everything else in the show? \u00a0One answer might be all that “mixed media” and “multi-platform” stuff I mentioned at the start. \u00a0You can still play the\u00a0Kerwhizz<\/em> game<\/a>\u00a0on the CBeebies website, if you\u00a0want. \u00a0Basically, you sit through a quiz section to earn points to buy pod mods, then you do races to earn points to buy more pod mods, then you do another quiz… you know the drill. \u00a0It’s an upgrade grind. \u00a0The race sections of the game are pretty lame. \u00a0But the quiz – the quiz is faithful to\u00a0a fault.<\/p>\n

And perhaps that’s the problem. \u00a0Maybe they were so busy\u00a0trying to make a multi-media phenomenon that they ended up hobbling the quiz segments by restricting them to stuff that could be easily replicated in\u00a0a 2008 browser game.<\/p>\n

Kerwhizz<\/em> makes a hash of the\u00a0game show format, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea in principle. \u00a0Next time, the 2015 take on the pre-school game show:\u00a0Swashbuckle<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I’ve written about three shows I more or less like, it’s time for some balance. \u00a0The opening credits of\u00a0Kerwhizz\u00a0\u00a0provoke involuntary\u00a0flinching\u00a0and\u00a0a sense of mild dread. \u00a0The show is a decent idea\u00a0on paper. \u00a0It could\u00a0have been a great show. \u00a0But those quiz segments. \u00a0Oh god, those quiz segments. Kerwhizz was made in 2008. \u00a0It was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-watch-with-father"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3244"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3247,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions\/3247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}