NFL Big Game Night

An attempt to jazz up American football, and do something interesting during the many ad breaks.

Channel 5 bought the rights to some NFL games. The problem is that NFL games have a lot of stops, while the American networks show adverts - and Channel 5 is limited in how many adverts it can show. Traditionally, live broadcasters have cut back to the studio for "analysis" or shown beauty shots of the stadium. Channel 5 wanted to try something different: a mini game show.

Two teams of three fans play, each team represents one of the sides playing in the main game. When the main game is the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Eagles, there will be a team of fans representing the Giants and a team for the Eagles.

Various games are played - kicking a football through some goal posts, throwing the football to the player wearing the correct number, spinning the ball so it stays upright longer than your opponent, that kind of thing. The bulk of games are very quick to set up and very quick to play, because they've got to be completed in one commercial break - just about two minutes.

Each game, or round within a game, earns the relevant team a ball in the giant Super Ball; after the final challenge, the week's special guest will pick out one of the balls in the Super Ball, and that's the winning team. They're later given a this-or-that question to earn a trip to a city in the USA.

Big Game Night doesn't neglect the game - Osi Umenyoira provides some studio analysis from time to time, especially as half-time approaches. The game segment finally concludes early in the fourth quarter, so the rest of the broadcast is a fairly straight presentation of the NFL game.

The show didn't attract huge viewing figures - weekly ratings of around 200,000 were less than the total ticket sales for that year's NFL games in London - but the show tried to do something very different, and certainly became more slick as the season drew on.

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