Raise the Roof (game show)

Raise the Roof was a British television game show which ran from 2 September 1995 to 13 January 1996 for ITV and hosted by Bob Holness.

History and gameplay

Raise the Roof was one of the first game shows to exploit the lifting of the Independent Broadcasting Authority's prize limits, by giving away a large, valuable house as the star prize. The format featured several rounds of questions which progressively whittled the contestant pool from six to one. The final round offered the house as the grand prize, with cash amounts awarded as consolation prizes at each stage of the competition.

Format

Round 1: The Lucky Seven

Six contestants competed in a round that contained seven true-or-false questions. Contestants had to answer these questions correctly to earn money, depending on the question. Any incorrect answer took away the contestant's money earned up to that point. The question values were £50, £55, £60, £70, £80, £85, and £100. A contestant could earn as much as £500 in this round. The three highest scoring players advanced to round 2 and got to keep their money; the other three contestants were eliminated.

If any contestants were tied for the second-highest or third-highest position, the tie-breaking criteria went as follows:

• The contestant who had the most correct answers advanced to round 2.
• If all tied contestants had the same amount of correct answers, one final true-or-false tiebreaker question was given among the tied contestants. The contestants who answered the question correctly in the fastest time advanced to round 2.

Round 2: Bid and Break

The three contestants who advanced from the first round were given a stake of £500 to bet on six toss-up questions (however, contestants could only wager up to £100 on each question). A player who buzzed in first with the correct answer has his or her wager increased, while the other two contestants' scores were reduced by the same wager. Incorrect answers reduced the contestant's wager and opened the question to the other two contestants. At the end of the round, the contestant with the lowest amount of money was eliminated; the other contestants advanced to round 3 and got to keep the money they earned in the first two rounds. If a tie for second place occurred after this round, one final toss-up question was given.

Round 3

The two contestants who advanced from the second round were given a stake of £1000 to bet on five questions in five categories (however, contestants could only wager up to £200 on each question). Both contestants were placed in isolation booths where they could not hear each other. On each question, both contestants had to determine their wagers once the category was read. After the question was read, both contestants had to state their answers. Correct answers increased the contestant's wager, while incorrect answers reduced the contestant's wager. The contestant who had the most money at the end of this round advanced to the final round; the other contestant was eliminated. If both contestants had the same amount of money after five questions, one final question was given.

Endgame

The contestant who advanced from the third round picked five categories from a board of 54 categories; each category contained one question. He or she then had 60 seconds to answer those five questions; the clock started after Holness read the question and stopped when an answer was given or a question was passed. Getting four out of five questions correctly won the house, while running out of time or getting two incorrect answers resulted in the contestant leaving with the money from the first three rounds plus a consolation prize.

Ratings

The programme made little impact with the public and was not recommissioned after one series of 17 episodes. A typical audience was 6.1 million viewers as opposed to 13.8 million for BBC One's Casualty. Raise the Roof has since been described as the last example of the era when it was seen as "vulgar" to give away large sums of money and more appropriate to give away prizes of the same value instead. Another criticism was that the questions were too easy to generate real suspense, and the pacing was too slow to keep viewers interested.

Early editions of the show had both a sponsorship deal with Express Newspapers and a viewer competition where gamecards could be collected freely from all major newsagents and viewers could play along with the show for the chance to win a new house of their own. By the time the series finished however, both the sponsorship and competition had been discontinued due to the poor reception of the show, resulting in the final few episodes being heavily edited to remove all traces of the competition.

External links

• Raise the Roof at the Internet Movie Database
• Raise the Roof at UKGameshows.com