Limitless Win: will Ant and Dec’s gameshow drain the entire planet’s finances?

Given their decades-long ubiquity, it’s weird to realise that Ant and Dec don’t actually make a lot of television shows. Just three really, at the moment: Saturday Night Takeaway, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Britain’s Got Talent. In TV years, all three are positively ancient, with the first two starting in 2002 and the third in 2007.

With hits as perennial as these, it’s little wonder that Ant and Dec don’t choose to branch out more, especially when their efforts to host new shows tend to flounder and die in the space of a year or two. Anyone remember PokerFace? Push the Button? Red or Black? In all honesty, probably not.

Which brings us to Limitless Win. On the face of it, this is a shiny-floored Saturday night gameshow like any other. There are questions. There’s a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire-style money ladder. There are absurdly chipper contestants. On the face of it, Limitless Win is utterly anonymous. It could be presented by Bradley Walsh or Nick Knowles or Davina McCall or the ghost of Bob Monkhouse or a photofit of a horse.

So why have Ant and Dec chosen this to be their first new series proper in a decade? Probably the format. Limitless Win is, with the exception of a few bells and whistles that we’ll come to in a moment, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The more questions you answer, the more money you win. But, as the title suggests, there is no upper limit. On Millionaire, you answer 15 questions and go home a – well, millionaire. But here, you can just keep going until you lose. That might be when you reach a thousand pounds. It might be at a million pounds. The onscreen money ladder goes all the way up to £12m, but it doesn’t stop there. In theory, a genius could take part on Limitless Win, and be its only ever contestant, and slowly drain the entire planet of all its financial reserves.

That is unlikely to happen, of course – largely because Limitless Win suffers from the annoying gameshow trope of slowing everything to an agonising crawl wherever possible. We meet the contestants. We see them backstage. We get to watch them debate every single possible answer to every single question, at length, in real time. Maybe I’m the only one who finds this sort of thing infuriating. Maybe the general public is crazy for watching couples passive-aggressively bickering about the number of sails on the Blue Peter ship like the world’s worst dinner party guests. Who can really say?

On the subject of annoyances, Limitless Win also seems to be the recipient of several gratuitous complications. For instance, the answer to every question is a number. You lose lives depending on how much your answer varies from the correct answer. You gain lives in a quickfire 60-second round. You pick the number by twisting a dial. There are also lifelines, which come at random and are so numerous that each has to be explained at length every time. If you want to use a lifeline, you have to hit a button. There is another button for when you want to cash out. It is all so unnecessarily complicated that, when your auntie inevitably pulls the home game edition out of the cupboard three Boxing Days from now, she’ll get three lines into the instructions before your entire family loses their minds with rage.

And yet, despite all this, Limitless Win resides in the upper echelons of gameshows. The reason for this, of course, is Ant and Dec. As hosts, they are absolutely effortless. They can explain the rules without battering you over the head. They can chat to the contestants like old friends. When the prize amount starts to gain altitude, they ramp up the tension like a pair of pantomime dames, clutching their temples and pulling faces at the crowd. The thing is, they sell all this like a dream. Another host might be tempted to overdo it, plunging the show into the realms of insincere melodrama. Not Ant and Dec: theirs is a perfectly weighted performance. It doesn’t show off their skill set perfectly – that’s still I’m a Celebrity – but it’s beautiful to watch nonetheless.

Are they enough to keep me watching Limitless Win? In all honesty, probably not. Once you’ve seen one episode, the only reason to stick around is to see how much money the contestants will win, and you sense that the press will make a lot of noise about the big episodes ahead of time. Still, this is Ant and Dec’s most effective new venture in probably two decades and, as such, you shouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an ITV mainstay.