“Hey, here we go!” Graham Norton beams from the top of the shiny staircase that divides the audience in the plasticky Wheel of Fortune studio. The crowd cheers and claps and Norton begins to carefully trot his way down the glowing steps.
“Great stairs,” he muttersquietly during his descent. “Great stairs.”
A few seconds later he reaches the bottom, bounds across the stage to his podium, raises his hands triumphantly above his head and confidently declares, “Here I am!”.
Yes, there he is indeed, wearing a tasteful blue suit, a restrained shirt and a beaming showbiz smile.
“Hello and welcome to a brand new series,” he smiles. “Wheel of Fortune Australia”.
Norton is the only reason I’m watching Australia’s reboot of the enduring game show Wheel of Fortune. The show started in America in 1975 and simply never stopped. I don’t know about Australia, but we’ve had a couple of cracks at it here over the years. First in the mid-90s where it lasted a respectable five years and then again in the mid-noughties where it flopped after just one year.
Wheel of Fortune started in America in 1975.
The format is pretty simple. As Norton explains, “it’s a game of spinning the wheels, solving puzzles and racking up prizes, including that possible fortune of $50,000”.
But I was curious what new spin Norton would put on the old show, what sparkle he could bring to its dusty format, what reinvention a showman of his calibre could bring to its tired old boundaries.
After all, he’d successfully blazed his own trail in the comedy chat show genre with his long-running, massively popular The Graham Norton Show. While it didn’t subvert the genre, it did find new ground to stake out in the crowded space with Norton revelling in cheeky innuendo, soliciting risque stories from his guests and wrapping it all up with a bright, colourful and flamboyant presentation.
All of which is missing in Wheel of Fortune Australia. The show feels stuffy and dated and there’s a slick glossiness to it that just looks cheap. In every regard, it very much feels like a relic from the olden days of television when we only had three channels to choose from.
Disappointingly, Norton brings nothing new to the table. He hardly brings himself to the table. All the good bits of his schtick have been sanded away. He doesn’t quip or zing, his innuendo is out, his winking off-the-cuff one-liners replaced by a strict script and ad-libbed benign words of encouragement to the three contestants.
Unlike The Chase, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or The Weakest Link, which all give their hosts massive leeway to lean into their personalities, Wheel of Fortune Australia simply neuters Norton. He gets no opening or closing monologue. He gets no opportunity to improvise or banter. He has no room to move. It’s such a crying waste of his talents. If you’re not going to let Norton be Norton then why hire him in the first place?
Unlike The Chase, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or The Weakest Link which all give their hosts massive leeway to lean into their personalities, Wheel of Fortune Australia simply neuters Norton.
Seriously, you could swap him out for any old generic TV host and the impact on the show would be less than zero.
As for the game part of the show that’s still firmly stuck in the 70s. The “fun” as a viewer is in trying to outsmart the contestants and guess the gradually-revealed mystery phrase first, but in this modern age of the smartphone that hook isn’t anywhere near gripping enough to keep you from seeking distraction. And then there’s the audience, whose constant “Wooooo”-ing every time someone spun the bloody wheel had me reaching for the mute button.
Wheel of Fortune Australia has simply had its day. It’s old school in all the most boring ways. It is not O for Awesome. But the show’s greatest misfortune is that Norton is the perfect fellow to zhuzh up its staid formula. If only they’d let him.
