If you were as obsessed as I was with Netflix’s Floor Is Lava, or even if you remember 90s kids shows like 50/50, I can understand why you’d think game show contestants go out in a misery of slime, never to be seen again.
But seeing as you can’t actually leave contestants to their gooey fates ― and given that most game shows miss the vile vat altogether ― we’ve got to ask where contestants really go after elimination.
Luckily, telly veteran Richard Osman had explanations on This Is Entertainment, a behind-the-scenes showbiz podcast he hosts with Marina Hyde. In a recent episode, the Thursday Murder Club author said there “are two different answers, really”.
Which are?!
Well, he says that in “lots of shows like Pointless, you’re on the next show anyway, so you can go back to your dressing room and get your next clothes on” (telly magic, eh?).
However “by and large, if that’s you off the show, you can go,” meaning eliminated contestants are generally free to leave the building.
Richard added that in some shows, there’s a mass pick-up of contestants at the end, meaning you’d have to stick around until then.
“I think Fifteen to One does that, because there’s so many camera shots in that, they’d have to pick up lots at the end,” he recalled.
You can’t even watch the show as you wait, the former Pointless co-host revealed.
That’s because the “ringmain” ― where all the monitors show you feedback from the studio ― is switched off “anywhere contestants might be because you don’t want them to see rehearsals before the show”.
Predictably, the rules are different for celebs
As if “stewing in your own juices about your wrong answer” (as Marina put it) isn’t enough, Richard says contestants also sometimes have to re-film the answer they got wrong if the crew didn’t get a good take the first time around.
But things are different for the rich and famous, it seems. “On a lot of celebrity shows, you get to go straight home because, you know, celebs won’t stick around.”
Richard shared that he had recently Kate Thornton on his show House Of Games, and she claimed that she’d had to get knocked out of The Weakest Link by round two in order to fulfill a prior engagement.