Getting away with it (From The Northern Echo)

Getting away with it

6:28pm Tuesday 10th January 2012 in Tonight's TV By Steve Pratt

The Exit List (ITV1, 8pm)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (BBC2, 9pm)
Websex: What’s the Harm? (BBC3, 9pm)
Body of Proof (Channel 5, 9pm)

WATCHDOG’S Matt Allwright may be more used to chasing after rogue traders than presenting bigmoney game shows, but with new series The Exit List he’s out to prove there’s more to him than pursuing cowboy business types on his motorbike.

With £200,000 up for grabs, a pair of contestants will descend into a giant 24-room maze. Each room contains an amount of cash, but one room, deep in the maze, holds £100,000. The problem is, the farther the contestants go in, the harder it is to get out – because to escape with the cash, they must remember The Exit List.

In each room, participants must answer a question with four possible answers. If they get the question right, they pocket the cash. Get it wrong, and all four answer options go on the eponymous list. And the immediate way ahead is blocked.

“We spent so much time working it through and making sure that all the possible permutations are very exciting,” explains Allwright.

“It’s one of those ideas that is really simple when you look at it, but when you get into it you realise there are so many different outcomes that could happen from it. It just feels like it definitely has legs.”

He may be king of consumer matters on shows such as Watchdog and The One Show, but this series fits him like a glove. “One of the reasons I wanted to get involved is I am a massive quiz addict,” he says.

“I love general knowledge quizzes, and anyone that works with me knows that as soon as we get on the road or we get a hotel stopover or something, everyone has to write down ten questions. I’m sure they’re quite bored with it, but it keeps me amused anyway.”

With that in mind, you might think he went in search of a bigmoney game show to host, but not a bit of it. “It came to me,” he says.

“But I have been looking for the right quiz for a while because I do love general knowledge – also the appeal of standing there in a suit and hopefully giving lots of money to really nice people. It is a real draw for me because you don’t get the opportunity to do that.”

He is also thrilled that the show makes dreams come true for many of the participants. “We had a couple of contestants who, at the end of it, you end up just chatting to them, and they will just look at you and go, ‘I just paid off my mortgage.’ “It’s a real privilege to be in that position. If it was me I would just give them the money. Obviously you have to play the game, that’s where the deal is. Some of these guys work so hard and it’s really tough.”

NEW two-part drama The Mystery of Edwin Drood is wellnamed – Edwin Drood is one of the biggest mysteries in literature.

It was Charles Dickens’ final novel and was only half-completed at the time of his death in 1870.

Since then, scholars and writers have been trying to guess how the story – a sort of whodunit – would have panned out.

The latest person to bring the tale to a conclusion is Gwyneth Hughes, who has adapted it for this psychological thriller, complete with her very own ending.

Matthew Rhys leads the starry cast as John Jasper, a provincial choirmaster who has spent his life in the stifling cathedral town of Cloisterham.

However, he does have a few ways of breaking free from his dull existence.

One is through music, but he also has some darker outlets, including opium and his obsession with the 17-year-old Rosa Budd (Tamzin Merchant).

But Jasper has a rival for her affections in the shape of his nephew, Edwin Drood (Freddie Fox).

WHAT’S the easiest way for a channel to attract viewers?

Make a documentary about sex of course; that will leave punters turning on in their masses, before realising much of the content is rather dull and then opting for something with a little more substance.

The people at BBC3 deny its Sex Season is just a desperate attempt to win over the masses. “In essence it’s a serious, not salacious, investigation into the impact of the internet on our sex lives and relationships,”

claimed an online request for participants posted last June.

Websex: What’s The Harm? finds Nathalie Emmanuel investigating how the internet is changing the love lives of 16 to 24-year-olds across Britain.

She meets young adults who rely on social networking sites, the latest mobile technology and webcams, and discusses figures from an academic study that reveal what people do online.

Of course, much of the target audience will be doing just that before catching this on Iplayer.

DANA DELANY, fresh from playing Katherine Mayfair in Desperate Housewives, heads the cast of Body Of Proof as Dr Megan Hunt, a once brilliant neurosurgeon who quit her job when, following a car accident, she made a terrible mistake that cost a patient their life.

Now, she has started afresh as a medical examiner, and uses her surgical skills, alongside a well-honed instinct and years of experience, to uncover the secrets of people who were killed in mysterious circumstances.

Megan works alongside ex-police officer Peter Dunlop (Home and Away veteran Nicholas Bishop), but her successful professional life is in sharp contrast to her disastrous private life, which sees her separated from her daughter, Lacey.

In the pilot episode, Megan and Dunlop try to find out which of a dead jogger’s enemies had the strongest reason to kill her – and why marks on the body suggest she could have been killed via several different methods.