Weaver's Week 2025-06-29

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Contents 1 99 to Beat – a (continued) analysis 1.1 Episode 5 1.2 Episode 6 1.3 Episode 7 1.4 Episode 8 1.5 How does all this fit into the Task Taxonomy? 2 In other news

99 to Beat – a (continued) analysis

Earlier in the spring, we said that we'd have a good look at 99 to Beat, the ITV show testing – well, pretty much everything. The winner would prove to be an all-rounder, but what would be the key skills they showed? And what stories were told on the show? And did the winner get lots of airtime; could we tell the champion from the early episodes?

If you are intrigued by our review back in April, or our analysis of the same four episodes last week, but somehow want to go into the second half of the series without major spoilers, then read no further.

We give a brief discussion for each of the challenges on the show. What was in the challenge, how does it fit into Twil's Task Taxonomy? Who went out, how many times had they given a piece to camera?

Our terminology is "contributions" and "spots". A "spot" is one challenge, or the sections between games where players talk between themselves; players either talk or they don't. A "contribution" is a piece to camera, either in the arena or in a side room, where the contestant is captioned; the speech doesn't have to be continuous, and can cut back to the arena, but no other contestant speaks to camera. A player can have more than one contribution in a spot. "Contribution" must be in one of the side-conversations or be formally captioned; we hasn't attempted to record every time a contestant speaks in a game, that would be unmanageable.

Episode 5

We begin the episode with 36 continuing contestants. Eleven of them are yet to speak to camera. The most contributions have been from Duval, Charlie J, Courtney, Joán, and Omali: surely most of these will go far in the contest.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots
36	Name the decade of some pop hits	Social	Jake	3	1

The producers really wanted this to be a test of knowledge (Mental in our taxonomy), but forgot the first rule of Runaround: follow the pack unless you're absolutely sure they're wrong.

Team game next: balance a tray with one finger so as to keep it level and an egg on the tray. Worst of seven teams leaves.

Eliminated	Conts	Spots
Omali	11	6
Jess	8	5
Beth	0	1
Yasmin	4	1
Stephen	6	3

We categorise this game as Physical (use your body), Social (encourage each other), Dexterity (react to the moving egg), and two parts Fortune (there's an element of luck). Beth was credited on screen during this game, but didn't address the camera. To last into the second half of filming and not be heard on the show feels wrong.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots
30	Skittles with a recycling bin	Co-ordination	Lydia	3	1
29	Cut a rope to 13.7m	Mental	Kieran L	13	6
28	Pull a drawstring through waistband with a safety pin	Dexterity	Jay	6	2
27	Pop balloons with a cactus	Co-ordination	Poonam	4	3

Lydia's the last player whose first contribution is in their last game. Measuring the ropes took an absolute age on screen, we could have had an extra game in there.

Kieran L is a carpenter, and he had struggled with the tape measure game in episode two; as a carpenter, he was a bit cocky about his chances in both games. 99 to Beat combines two of its signature moves: pride going before a fall, and developing characters through the series.

Episode five had 90 Contributions from 53 Spots. Two of the remaining 28 players haven't been introduced at all, and one has been captioned but is yet to speak. Duval and Charlie J get loads of screen time, while Sarah and Bella emerge from the crowd to speak a lot here. Of the other contestants getting a lot of screen time, Omali went out in the team game, Courtney and Joán spoke in one challenge.

Episode 6

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots
26	Find a dummy in jelly using mouth, while blindfolded	Dexterity	Karl	4	3

Rather gross, this. Looking like you're eating jelly off a concrete floor may not be wise.

Team game next: unplait a rope by jumping over each other. Worst of five teams out.

Eliminated	Conts	Spots	Notes
Bella	10	6
Fred	4	1	Didn't contribute here; all contributions from the champagne corks game in ep 4.
Duval	30	12	Star of the show, had contributed on all shows except ep 2.
Ashley	8	6
Derek	4	3

For our categories, we have this as Physical (moving your body), Social (working out who moves next), Dexterity (moving while there's a rope tied to a belt on your waist), Co-ordination (don't fall over and be prepared to go under), and Fortune (unlucky if you're in a team with five leaders).

Another of the favourites falls in a team game. While this is the best team game of the series – a proper challenge involving all players, one that tests teamwork more than any other skill – we're very uneasy that team games as a whole meant so many players go without really speaking to us.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots	Notes
20	Use a ball in a sock to propel a tin can	Co-ordination	Finlay	6	2
19	Put out a candle by firing water from a syringe	Co-ordination	Ashton	10	3
18	Catch a potato on a fork	Co-ordination	Dani B	13	9	Pairs until one pair remains; they have spuds chucked by a safe player of their choice.
17	Defrost ice and blow a whistle embedded	Physical	Robin	11	7

Three co-ordination games in a row? Part of that is our categorisation (others might call Tin Cans a "Physical" or "Dexterity"), but it's not brilliant.

Episode six had 74 Contributions from 48 Spots. Just 6 contributions in the opening Dummy game, and only 9 in Tin Cans which occupied a whole segment of the show. Nancy – who hadn't had a contribution before this episode – gets more than any other player, and previously-silent Nicola is introduced during one of those for-the-camera chats. Quite incredibly, although they've captioned Caitlin, we still haven't heard from her!

Episode 7

We finally hear from Caitlin in the introduction prior to the first game.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots	Notes
16	Balance group on a see-saw; losing group halves and plays until one loser	Physical	Nikki	12	7	Second and final whittle of series.
15	Suck a lollipop until it fits into a bottle	Physical	Courtney	20	9
14	Wriggle across the floor in a sleeping bag	Physical	Sarah	19	13	Contributed just once in the first four eps.
13	Cut 42 onion rings.	Dexterity	Clinton	13	6

The formal numbers don't show how much the camera loved Courtney. Whenever anything unexpected happened, we'd get a shot of Courtney with her mouth wide open in astonishment. Whenever someone was eliminated, Courtney would lead the charge to console them.

Sarah had the ultimate series of two halves, racking up all her contributions in the space of three episodes.

Pairs game was to wind a spool of rope from one player to the other, without stepping out of the box. Worst of six pairs leaves.

Eliminated	Conts	Spots
Nicola	9	5
Ryan	13	9

Nicola hadn't spoken until episode 6, Ryan just once in the first four episodes (but he was the last surviving player to speak in episode 2).

Very narrow loss, one player was just outside the playing box when the task was completed, which allowed the other team to signal that they'd completed. We're classing this game as Physical and Social.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots	Notes
10	Pack up a pop-up tent into its bag	Physical	Huseyin	13	9
9	Curling with rolling vacuum cleaners; best in each round is safe	Co-ordination	Charlie J	35	18	Most contributions of any player.

Vacuum cleaner curling? Worth the price of admission. Charlie J brightened up the series, a flamboyant and expressive character.

This episode had 96 contributions from 58 spots. Including the game at the end of the last episode, that's six eliminations out of eight we can class as "Physical", which feels imbalanced. Perhaps a little shuffle of games would have been in order. Grant and Libby – who had barely appeared before this episode – make more contributions than any continuing player.

Episode 8

And if you don't want to know the series result, look away now.

Round	Game	Category	Eliminated	Conts	Spots	Notes
8	Catch a red butterfly from a sea of gold ones	Co-ordination	David	12	9
7	Stack boxes, adding new ones at the bottom	Dexterity	Libby	19	14
6	Sharpen two pencils to the half	Physical	Grant	19	14
5	Run an obstacle course while keeping a ping-pong ball aloft with a hairdryer	Physical	Nancy	30	17	First spoke halfway through ep 6.
4	Toss a cone through 360 degrees to land on another cone	Co-ordination	Joán	25	14
3	Three-point turn in a golf buggy in a very narrow space	Co-ordination	Jason	24	17
2	Throw a swingball to knock cans off targets	Co-ordination	William	34	19	First spoke in a chat before Bin Skittles in ep 5.
1			Caitlin	26	16	First spoke in introduction to ep 7.

Joán spoke a lot about how autistic people can do things; he proved that one autistic person (himself) can do pretty much everything. Across the series, 99 to Beat showed us almost all of humanity: students and civil servants and paramedics, people with all sorts of body shapes, skin colours, outlooks on life.

And, in the event, the prize went to the very last person to address the camera. If the producers are supposed to tell the story of the winner by including them in the edit, then nobody actually bothered to tell the producers, because Caitlin couldn't get on screen for three-quarters of the series. The theory that there's a "winner's edit" is bunk, and we're glad to have demonstrated that it is bunk.

How does all this fit into the Task Taxonomy?

Putting all these numbers in, we see:

Category	Eliminations
Fortune	26
Co-ordination	24
Dexterity	20
Physical	15
Social	9
Mental	4
Memory	1
Scares	0

Apart from the over-emphasis on Fortune, we're broadly happy with this ration. Co-ordination and Dexterity are reasonably easy to test, and made for some of the best television. Physical is more difficult to test (differences in body strength and age need to be controlled in a simple way), we didn't feel any of the challenges were unbalanced. A bit less Mental than we might schedule, and Memory was only tested as a tangent to the musical instruments game in episode 4. Nothing on Scares, darkness was used so that contestants had to rely on other senses to complete the challenge.

If there is going to be a next series – and we very much hope there is – can we have a bit more time with the winner. And fewer team games would be nice, a lot of the eliminations weren't earned by the contestants but imposed by others.

Should time permit over the summer, we may repeat aspects of this exercise for a series of De Alleskunner, the Dutch original.

In other news

Jean-Pierre Mitrecey has died. He was one of the co-creators of Les Clés de Fort Boyard, later brought to television over here.

Sorry to hear that Dermot Murnaghan is receiving treatment for prostate cancer. We wish him all the best for a good recovery.

Very pleased to hear that Gladiators is back for another run on BBC1. Eleven episodes and a celebrity special; the press release is silent on new Gladiators, not that there are going to be many vacancies just yet.

Throughout the week, the BBC has wet blanket coverage of The Wimbledon Umbrella and Rainwear Exposition (Incorporating Cagoule '25). It's the only event capable of shifting Pointless and House of Games from their space in the teatime schedules.

Winners are found on Strongest Man Live (C5, Sun), Popmaster tv (More4 weeknights; final Thu), and Taskmaster (C4, Thu). concludes. A new series of Countdown begins (C4, weekdays), and Love Island continues (VM2 and ITV2, all week),

Celebrity Puzzling continues (C5, Tue-Thu, with Sinha vs Williamson to close the series). And we see repeats of seventies comedy show Joker's Wild (Rewind TV, from Wed).

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