OK, here's a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of this challenge!Soooo... this was a rejected challenge from that Mole game I've been thinking of doing for years (but never have). I won't go into why it was rejected, but I thought it would work well as part of the "bomb challenge" in Spies 5 - where the contestants had to work together to perform various tasks to diffuse a bomb.
Anyway, Sam ended up not using it in Spies 5, but asked my permission to use it in this one instead, which I happily granted. If "Ellis" had survived long enough to take part in the challenge, I simply would've faked an urgent call or something and left before it started. (FTR I never once expected to be around long enough for that to happen after the first episode!)
It's based on a British gameshow, sadly axed, called "Win my Wage". There are some clips of in on YouTube for whoever's interested. It's hosted by Nick Hancock and the front-end stuff is decent, although because all the wage-earners do is sit quietly, there isn't a lot made of their personalities. It was a good show but competed with "Deal or no Deal" for the afternoon slot, and didn't stand a chance. (the British version of this show is FAR better than the American and Australian versions btw.)
Anyway, here's some YouTube clips:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQD_XnXqNvUwww.youtube.com/watch?v=IukDN6RT05gwww.youtube.com/watch?v=tX10-8tsz80www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsizW88y7tsLemme see... the wage earners.
First of all, Elsie was a top wage-earner on one of the shows. I thought she'd be nicely deceptive without being too hard to guess, so I used her as my top wage earner. Camden, Nicola, Mark and Russell were also wage-earners on the shows (and some of them are on the YouTube clips). A lot of the "facts" I had to get from the Internet, but they were all about real people with the professions listed there. All the photographs are of people with the correct profession, taken from the Internet; all the facts that weren't transcribed directly from the show were also taken from things like weblogs. I didn't make anything up!
The full list was made up as follows...
Rachel - someone I worked with when I was a librarian. (This one was the easiest of the lot to do.) Obviously, having worked and talked with her for months, I pretty much knew everything I needed, including the salary. I was surprised nobody got "librarian" - I thought her occupation was one of the most obvious of the lot. She even looks like she spends a lot of time indoors with books - she's fairly pale and obviously doesn't care too much about how she presents herself.
Mark - a wage-earner from the TV show. I've lived with more students than bartenders, but it wasn't hard to find biographies of bartenders on the web to take my "facts" from! Jason had Mark pegged from the beginning, saying outright that he was a "bartender". My comment on that - because I didn't suspect Jason then - was that he'd be great at the game if he was as good at hunting spies as he was identifying what people did for a living! Mark's picture was probably the most obvious of the lot - I google-imaged for "bartender" and this was one of the most characteristic results. (Of course, having spent a few years in University, I've met an awful lot of bartenders!)
David - not actually from the TV show. From time to time they had quite old people on the show - riding instructors, part-time piano teachers (Rose), etc. I couldn't find any bios of riding instructors that had the details I needed, but I did find a weblog from a lighthouse-keeper that I thought looked usable. I can't remember the link unfortunately, but it's an interesting read - the guy goes on nature walks with his wife a lot and describes what's involved in having a job like that. (He's very eloquent about the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside, so much so that I used one of his remarks in one of the clues about him.) He also talks about his time in the military.
Two other points about David: the point of his not shopping on the Internet, although it might have led the players to (correctly) eliminate him as a low earner if they'd have kept him around that long, was deceptive in a way - it suggested that he was computer-illiterate, when in fact he simply did his shopping by walking into the village nearby. The other point is that, like Mark's, I felt David's picture gave a lot of his occupation away. His windswept look and fairly nautical beard style suggested something like a fisherman (which is probably what I would've guessed if I'd have been a player in the game, especially as fishermen are often older men who are in good physical shape, which David was). It definitely suggested a coastal occupation anyway, which isn't too far from "lighthouse keeper".
Camden - this gay hair stylist was one of the more memorable wage-earners on the TV show.
It was funny how a couple of the players (Jenya in this case) were absolutely spot-on in their guesses as to what the people did. Camden's picture came from an advertising "still" of a hair salon that he (the man pictured) works at, and I thought it would be funny to include a blatant publicity shot for the one wage earner who works with celebrities! The fact that it
was a publicity shot might've generated some comment, I thought, but nobody remarked on that aspect of it.
Nicola - another memorable wage-earner because there were sooo many clues as to what she did - she was good-looking, well turned-out, young enough for a sales post and quite commercially-minded. I thought this would be an excellent one to put in and see if anybody could come up with "salesperson" or even "travel agent" (the "travel" information section could've given you hints that her job involved this kind of thing). Again, I took some of the facts from a web profile of an actual travel agent. Unfortunately it's not as interesting reading as a lighthouse keeper's weblog. It's probably the worst picture of the lot, but then what
do you associate with how a travel agent looks?
Rose - this is a combination of one of the show's wage-earners that I remember because she was so polarizing, and my old piano teacher (who was the same age and had a similar background). I particularly remembered this wage-earner on the show because she was so polarizing - on the one hand she didn't
look particularly wealthy, but on the other hand she lived in a substantial house with a garden, had a lot of academic qualifications, etc. I think a lot of the people watching might have thought she was the
highest wage earner, not the lowest. Unfortunately she wasn't nearly as deceptive to the Spies players, who outed her first. (Boris was spot on here - saying that she was retired and that the $8,000 was what she made "on the side". 100% right!) I liked the picture of Rose, which again was an ex-teacher turned part-time piano teacher after her retirement. Looking up information for the wage earners, it was quite odd how so many retiree piano teachers were actual teachers before they retired!
On a funny note... Casey was convinced that Rose was the highest wage-earner. We were talking without him knowing who I was - I posted the chat transcript in my confessional afterwards - and just for fun I started to goad him: "They're gonna regret eliminating Elsie. I mean, just look at her, does she look like she's poor?" Casey wouldn't have it, convinced that Rose was the highest wage earner. What he couldn't know at the time was that on the TV show, a lot of people thought the same thing, and the contestant kept her in the game almost to the final three!
Russell - there was a marketing exec on one edition of the show who I think was the second- or third-highest wage earner, and I combined my memory of that with some facts from an online profile of a real-life executive. (Marketing execs are always self-promoters so this was the easiest one to find things out about!) I very nearly didn't use Russell. The hardest thing was finding facts that
didn't point to him as highest wage earner, since he was so obviously wealthy and I wanted the game to be fair. In the end I had to slip in a really, really obvious clue for the final round - I had no doubt he'd still be in the game at that point, unless the players had taken leave of their senses - about him not having reached the peak of his profession. The picture is that of a real-life marketing executive with his own web profile, which is also where I took some of the facts from - in particular the ones about his boat and his family. Again, I felt this picture was one of the most obvious in showing what occupation the person actually had.
And finally
Elsie - I played
scrupulously fair with this one (and anybody who says I didn't clearly hasn't read the clues!) I thought Mark, Nicola and perhaps Rose would be out really early on, so Elsie would easily survive to round three, by which time the contestants would have had two HUGE clues. The first one was that her husband was a businessman - and I was amazed how this one was misinterprited. Elsie is obviously not a "trophy" wife, so she probably met her husband because they were in the same social circle. Given that he's a wealthy businessman who's often away from home, what does that make her?
The second clue of course was the "fine food and luxury hotels" statement, which should've sparked alarm bells in people's minds (and probably would have if they'd have left Elsie around long enough to
get that clue!) People actually thought that Elsie's wealth came from her husband, or that she was retired (I don't know what the retirement age for a woman is in America, but 57?!) and he was the main wage-earner. Guys, the contest is called "Guess my salary", not "guess my husband's salary!" There was also a weird fixation by some of the players on the cat-phobia thing, which is odd considering that some of the other equally useless clues that round (David liking the smell of the countryside, Mark being claustrophobic in elevators, etc) went completely uncommented.
As for Elsie's picture... yes, it's that of a shop owner. I chose the one that I thought looked the wealthiest out of the usable ones that I could find, and again I was surprised that the contestants didn't seem to pick up on this. Then again, often they seemed to read far more into some of the clues than was intended (which I guess was inevitable). The people who
looked the wealthiest from their pictures actually
were the wealthiest, which is what had been intended all along!
It was a real shame that the players eliminated Elsie so early on, because in many ways they were spot on. The next three highest wage-earners, Camden, Rachel and Russell, all survived until the end. I was surprised they left Mark - who lives in lodgings with his friends - as long as they did, and equally surprised that they'd think there'd be
two low-earning older women. But if you ignore Elsie's early dismissal, the players did really well in working out what each person might do for a living.
A few days before the challenge aired, I suggested to Sam that he might have the players "earn" the information by trivia about each others' thoughts, or something similar. He was quick to veto this idea, which I think was definitely the right decision because 1) it would've taken way too long and 2) the challenge was pitched just at the right difficulty already IMO without adding another element to it. This is why Sam's the host and I'm only the comedy sidekick!
Finally, a bit of weird unintended symmetry:
Two oldest women = lowest earner (Rose) and highest earner (Elsie).
Two youngest men = 2nd lowest earner (Mark) and 2nd highest (Camden).
Two oldest men = 3rd lowest earner (David) and 3rd highest (Russell).
Two youngest women = 4th lowest earner (Nicola) and 4th highest (Rachel).
None of which was ever intended. Weird how these things turn out!
It's amazing. David played as spies1Gerta, spies2Tyson, spies3Reicheru, and spies4Martha and helped me host a challenge in Spies 5. He actually made this game for Spies 5 but I didn't have a place to fit it in, I appreciate his one year patience until we found the right time!
