Rather excitingly Rache was selected to be part of Simon Cowell’s new £15m TV gameshow on ITV called “Red or Black”, to be hosted by Ant and Dec. Top prize on the live show was going to be £1 million! This weekend was the start of the elimination rounds to cut down thousands of contestants to just the lucky seven people who over seven nights on live TV would get a chance to become a millionaire … simply by choosing red or black on a giant roulette wheel. The chances of Rache getting through were pretty small – there were ten of these stages to get through!!

The lead-up to the giant roulette wheel was that contestants would have to choose from one of two outcomes on a series of challenges – one would be marked black, one red in keeping with the concept of the show. The challenges are supposed to be fun and exciting and exhilarating and involve celebrities.

I was very happy when Rache asked me if I wanted to be part of the audience (contestants get to bring along a guest) and of course I jumped at the chance. It ended up being a very very long day! Fun, but long. I’ve been to my fair share of TV recordings so shouldn’t have been surprised at the level of disorganisation there was today. I guess we have to be slightly forgiving in the sense that this was the first day of the whole program so there were bound to be a few teething problems. But my biggest nitpick with today’s event was the lack of communication – not only a lack of it actually, but also the total mis-communication. For example, telling us we needed to be in seats or at the arena by a certain time (10.15) but actually they didn’t start moving us in until 11.30, or when there were delays in the stunts we were told there would be sweets and prizes distributed and that delays would only be a moment (when in fact in most instances the delays were over an hour), etc. etc. They didn’t even really ever tell us what we could expect during the day which was really annoying.

The way it worked today, from how we worked it out and from gossip amongst various people, was that the contestants were separated from their guests and sat in various sections of the Arena. This was so when they were filming who got chosen to choose red or black it would seem like random blocks of the audience when in fact people had been pre-selected. We had to practise the cheering and contestant selection a few times.

There were actually a couple of thousand contestants who came down to Wembley for today’s event (with several more thousand coming later that tonight and more tomorrow) and from speaking to everyone around me found out they’d come from all over the UK including as far away as Scotland (like Rache.) There were about four “groups” to get through in the day session we were attending. Luckily Rache was in the second group – because of how long the day took with all the pauses, re-shoots etc. she didn’t get done with her bit until nearly 5pm … not sure what the other two groups are going to do!

It was lucky I was sat around some pretty friendly +1s – from what they were saying the majority of them were professional game show applicants – having applied for every game show there was to enter! Ha ha. One of them even knew a person who won £0.50 and another who won £30,000 from Deal or No Deal.

The first “challenge” featured the “celebrities” for the day: Jedward. I know. I was like really? Well, I guess they have links to Simon Cowell and, say what you want about them, they certainly have plenty of energy and are great for getting the crowd going. The event was Twinball – which basically involved each of them getting into a human hamster ball and running around an obstacle course with little tippers batting them back like they were in a pinball machine. It was absolutely hilarious. I don’t think they really practised with the balls before hand because it ended up being a lot tougher for the twins to get through the obstacle courses than producers imagined. Unfortunately one of the twins, Jonathan, actually got injured so had to get stretchered off. Oops! Too bad for the people who chose his colour!

Rache’s challenge was Overdrive which basically involved two stuntmen on top of the roof of cars who then have to race to the end of a straight course whilst jumping and ducking under various poles. They were going to run a few practise runs in front of the contestants but changed their mind and got the contestants to leave before they did their runs … which was probably a smart move because the practise run said everything. One guy was terrible! The rumour goes that one of the original stunt men had got injured the day before so his replacement hadn’t had a chance to refine his skill …

Rache, pictured below, unfortunately chose Black, who was the replacement stunt guy. It wasn’t quite the wipeout that we were all expecting it to be … though one suspects that was a bit of a ploy by the producers to make it a little bit more interesting (the race was best out of five.)

Ah well … guess she’s gotta find another way to make £1 million …