WANTED - did you miss out?

        Sorry to be so magdalen (er, must get out of that habit - MAUDLIN) on
the first page of that GIT, but if you can't have a good old existential
angst whinge in your own subzine, then where can you have one, as I always
say. This even follows on quite neatly from me talking about the end of my
finals, too, as you'll soon see...
        GIT enthusiasts - all four of you - may recall that last time I got
an issue (or a close approximation thereof) in OMR I mentioned that I went to
see a pilot for the second series of WANTED. Since then we've had an eight
week series from start to end of the action adventure game show. Naturally,
it was the bee's knees (and the dog's bollocks, the pup's parts and so on).
The essential format remains the same. Every day for a week three teams of
two contestants each continue their journey around the country to a new
location and film themselves performing a stipulated outlandish task to get
themselves in the public eye while avoiding being filmed by trackers with
more resources who aim to catch up with them. Then, live for an hour, each
team must hide in a phonebox of their choice, hoping that they will not be
found by the tracker who only knows their location to within a 10km x 10km
grid square and is at the mercy of the audience of the TV show who may or
may not ring in to divulge their location. Avoiding capture in the phonebox
for the hour earns each team money according to their success in the week.
        The changes to the show in the second series centred around each of
the three trackers (one per team) gaining team-mates in the form of partner
trackers confined to the studio with a whole whupload of high-technological
gadgetry with which to conduct the search and explain to the viewers at
home the story of the detection process. The set changed to accom(m)odate
the extra trackers and the new Sunday teatime place in the schedules, being
bold, warm and inviting as opposed to the old, silver grey, slightly sinister
studio. A similar transformation took place in hosting duties as wackily fun
former MTV stalwart Ray Cokes took over from hard-nosed Richard Littlejohn.
        If we neglect to talk about the changes that took place that were
introduced as an experiment in show one, then very quickly abandoned, being
widely regarded as a failure, the game remained the same, and the show was
still compulsive viewing. In fact, seeing that we could follow the flow of
the game much more easily and the trackers applied actual detective skills
to the situation (though the show still remained, to some extent, a case of
"will people phone in from home or not? If they do, the team loses; if not,
the team gets away", though much less overtly so than last series), it was
a much easier show to watch.
        Best of all, though, was that the sense of community engendered
between the show's fans built upon what we started last series. Perhaps the
concept of community between fans of a TV show is a little alien; Wanted has
its own area on the main Channel 4 Web site. A regular hard core of fans
went to that web site daily (or more at times!) for discussion of the show,
all its nuances, what they thought of the people involved, and lots of our
own Web-site-inspired input. One such thing was the Prediction Pool that I
started. This was a game running in parallel to the TV series like a Bourse
to a Dip game; players (Web site readers) predicted how the teams on the TV
show would do each week, and earned points for making correct guesses. In
week four, when there were five minutes more than usual of show, they even
featured this live on the show, which was a right shock to my system. Having
made a perfect prediction the week before, I was leading, and Ray Cokes said
that he would send me a bottle of champagne if my prediction for THAT week
turned out to be similarly precise. Alas, it didn't - but I was close. It
was nice to get a live name check on air, at the very least.
        Getting to the point, the Sunday after my last final coincided with
the day of the last episode of the series. A big crowd (in the teens) of fans
from the Internet all went to see the last show being filmed live. It was
quite an event. Not only was it a real treat to get to meet the people who
we had been sending messages to (and reading messages from) over the last
two months, the show we turned up to watch was, in the end, one of the very
best of the series. (Not quite as good as the week before's, but I digress.)
-continued...-