Seven’s Big Music Quiz show a ratings hit

Seven’s new prime-time entertainment game show The Big Music Quiz launched last night with an overnight metro audience of 1.22 million. It was the biggest non-news show for the night, trailing behind Seven and Nine’s news – with only 18,000 between the new game show and Nine News.

The Big Music Quiz lived up to Seven’s expectations that it would be a cross-demographic family appeal show. Of its viewers, 533.000 were in the 25-54 age group, 461,000 in the 18 to 49 group and 265,000 in the 16 to 39 group. In all of these demos, the new show ranked at #2, beat only by The Block in each.

With a Sunday 7pm to 8pm slot, The Big Music Quiz is a glittering big-budget wider appeal cousin to the ABC’s Spicks and Specks and SBS’ Rockwiz.

It is faster moving, celeb-based and Top 40 oriented. Result: a lot of sing-a-longs, clapping and dancing around by guests and studio audience alike and, presumably, the viewers at home.

The first episode featured comedian and writer Lawrence Mooney, actress and comedian Emily Taheny, actress Melanie Vallejo, model and former athlete Kris Smith, former competition swimmer Giaan Rooney, actor Alec Snow, as well as singers Dave Gleeson and Ella Hooper. All have TV experience, all knew how to deliver the fun.

The appeal of The Big Music Quiz is that the panels – and viewers – must guess the identity of the songs and/or the original artists, while the viewers play along.

Some segments disguised the recognisable songs. As with last night’s “Unlikely Covers”, you haven’t lived until you heard Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere or Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know performed on bicycle bells or Foreigner’s Cold As Ice on a tinkly toy piano.

With the game-deciding “Twisted Tunes”, the songs were sped up or scratched. So much so that Dave Gleeson, who’s been singing with The Angels for five years, had to cheerfully bear the embarrassment of a rival team member identifying a heavily disguised Take A Long Line rather than he. He quipped that not only had he lost the game for his team, but he probably would get booted out of the band.

The Big Music Quiz was created by the French affiliate of global production company Shine. It was originally aired there (as Le Grand Blind Test) as a number of two-hour specials on the TF1 channel. But it was such a success that it quickly became a regular series.

When Mark Fennessy, Executive Producer of the show, and CEO of its production company Endemol Shine Australia, first saw an early version of the French show, he immediately knew it would translate in Australia.

He told Mediaweek Australia, “It is one of those unique little shows that come along every now and then and right from the beginning it’s a feel-good experience. We all had a ball making this show and the audience was singing and dancing and clapping along. It’s a high-energy show in that sort of sense. You have a full house of people who were on their feet the whole time. It’s like having your own house party.”

He added: “Australians are a cynical lot and we’re not that fast to get out of the seat, but on this show you couldn’t help but get caught up into it.”

This kind of celebrity-battling format has worked really well abroad with Lip Sync Battle and Hollywood Game Night. Both have been nominated for Emmys, and both have sparked 11 international versions each.

Lip Sync Battle, now in its third season in America and a pop culture phenomenon, got such strong ratings in Australia – between 1.124 million and 1 million – that a local version is heavily rumoured.