BBC 1 Studio

BBC Television Center!  (Left to right: Helen, Dave, Me, Beatrice)

Beatrice, Me, Helen, and Dave in front of the BBC blocks. 

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Waiting for Helen in the cafe.  The building was like an airport!  So many stores and security of course.

Brendan recently found this website where you can enter a lottery for tickets to be apart of a studio audience for various BBC shows in the UK.  It's free to apply and if you get them, the tickets are also free!  Anyways, my friend Dave (from near Manchester) also happen to find the website and invited me to come along with him to see Pointless, a BBC 1 quiz show, today!  Brendan is hoping for tickets to Top Gear but he also got tickets to see The Voice (UK) which we're going to on Sunday.  Pointless was awesome though!  Dave, his friend Helen, my friend (from Silver Spring, MD what upp) Beatrice, and I all went and it happened to be a celebrity night.  Of course Beatrice and I had no idea who any of the stars were.  There were two sportscasters who were former football players (soccer), two weather people (one guy kept getting made fun of because apparently he once said there wasn't going to be a storm this one day and then a record breaking storm hit I guess), two people from an ice skating show who are married, and two comedian women who did some show about two old women?  Anyways, Dave knew six out of the eight right away and it was fun regardless haha.

The way the show works is they have teams of two and the host asks a question that has already been asked to 100 random people.  The people guessing have to guess an answer that the fewest people got.  For example: People were asked to name as many teams that participated in the 2011 rugby world cup as they could in a minute.  Let's say a team guesses New Zealand.  Since 93 people said New Zealand then that is their score and they are going for a low score.  If they guess something that no one answered, then it's "pointless" knowledge and they... win?  Not sure what happens then haha.  As a part of the audience we had to make a certain ahhhhhhhhhh sound each time the tower (starting at 100) went down to the score.

So anyways, one of the categories was New York City and so the contestants chose which of six questions to answer (the 100 random had to answer all of them) and when asked "Which baseball team comes from the Bronx?" only 16/100 people had answered New York Yankees!  When the score was going down, down, down, Beatrice and I were doing the ahhhhhhh and it slowly turned in to a "whhaaaaaaaaaaaaattttt???"  But then for the question "What European city was NYC originally named after?" 26/100 people said Amsterdam.  I didn't even remember that.  haha.  Dave unfortunately missed this part because he had a bloody nose and left at half time (bumping into the celebrities! haha) where he was greeted by four A&E guys (accident and emergency--like ambulance guys) haha.

In the final round the celebrities were playing for 2,500 pounds to donate to a charity of their choice.  They had three guesses for European capital cities south of London.  If they guessed a "pointless" city then they got all 2,500 but otherwise each team would get 500 pounds to donate to a charity of their choice.  They guessed Lisbon (20s), Athens (20s I think), and Valleta which is the capital of Malta.  The "tower" went down, down, down and then stopped at 1!  I feel bad for that one guy if he ends up watching the show haha.

The set was awesome though with about 200 different pieces of equipment like lights hanging from the ceiling and lasers making the backdrop look cool.  Since it wasn't being filmed live once in a while the producer or whoever would ask the host on his ear piece to say things over again.  It was funny since they looked crazy talking to someone we couldn't hear or see.  Also, we were the last four people to show up so when they ran out of the three rows of chairs on the floor they put us up in the stands behind them and we could see everything!  Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures inside.  It was great though--really looking forward to The Voice.

This isn't a video of the episode we went to but it's the same hosts!  Just thought you might like a taste of it.  It's kind of hard to explain some of it hah.