The TV Dreams Game Rules

On Monday 16th February 1998, Camelot launched their 39th Instants scratchcard called TV Dreams, which costs £2 instead of the more usual £1. You are advised to read the Game Information Leaflet page before this one.

To accompany the aforementioned leaflet, Camelot also released a TV Dreams ^TM '1st Series' Games Rules and Procedures booklet, from which I've extracted the most relevant info that wasn't on the leaflet and paraphrased it below.

Approximate odds/prizes/number of scratchcards

Instant Cash Win

You rub off three like cash amounts and win that amount [once] instantly. There are 86,235,900 scratchcards in the game.

Prizes (£)     Odds       No. of prizes   Prize pool (£)
      2    1 in       8     11,211,024    22,422,048
      4    1 in      19      4,742,796    18,971,184
      6    1 in     100        862,359     5,174,154
     10    1 in     101        862,002     8,620,020
     20    1 in     200        431,358     8,627,160
     50    1 in     800        107,883     5,394,150
    100    1 in   4,011         21,505     2,150,500
    200    1 in   9,565          9,016     1,803,200
  1,000    1 in  48,123          1,792     1,792,000
  Total    1 in       4.7   18,249,735    74,954,416

This means that the average Instant Cash Win prize is £4.10 and 43.46% of the stake is returned in Instant Cash Win prizes.

TV Home Play ^TM

There are 11,857,506 scratchcards which have three TV symbols on them [remember this doesn't mean you've won - you've still got to match at least one number in the TV show and in the right order !]. This means there's a 1 in 7.3 chance of playing along at home if you've bought a TV Dreams scratchcard. Once you've scratched off the three TV symbols, here's your odds of winning an actual prize:

Approx. odds   Combined odds   Prize  (£)
1 in       7   1 in        51        10
1 in     129   1 in       938        50
1 in   3,808   1 in    27,694     1,000
1 in 148,500   1 in 1,079,994    50,000

The combined odds are simply the odds in the first column multiplied by 7.3 (the odds of scratching off three TV symbols) to give the true odds of you actually winning the prize. Yes, it's worse than a million to one that you'll win the £50,000 jackpot - that's something they don't put in the TV adverts !

To win at TV Home Play, you have to match (in the exact order drawn) one or more numbers that are drawn on any of the 16 TV shows:

Number  Picked from
 1st        1-99
 2nd        1-20
 3rd       21-50
 4th       51-90

To prevent a scratchcard winning more than one TV Home Play prize, the first number is removed from the 1-99 1st number pool of all future draws in the TV series.

Studio Play ^TM

There are 961 scratchcards with the three star symbols on them, which gives you a 1 in 89,736 chance of appearing on the TV show.

The TV show

The maximum number of Studio Play winners invited to each TV show will be the number of Studio Play scratchcards (961) divided by the number of TV shows (16), rounded up to the nearest integer (i.e. 61). The actual number invited is determined at 12pm, 10 days before the show is to be broadcast and must be a minimum of 8 people otherwise the show will be cancelled. Of those people invited, 40 (or a multiple of four if less than that) will actually compete in the TV show, whilst the rest sit in the audience, don't play and receive £1,000.

The 40 (or possibly less) Studio Play winners competing in the TV show will be randomly allocated to four teams (i.e. normally 10 players per team). Camelot will randomly allocate a "Champion Pair" (a celebrity and a charity person) to each team. There are 5 "events" for the contestants to play.

Event 1

This is split into two parts:
Part 1
Each team has to answer a question and then drive a car into a "car wash". If they get the answer right, they stay dry. If they get it wrong, they get soaked in water and incur a 10 seconds time delay penalty for the start of the second part.
Part 2
Four lifts ascend every time a question is answered correctly. Teams answering wrongly receive a 10 second time delay penalty. Three questions are asked and when the lift reaches the top of the platform, the team members must dive down a chute and return back to the start.

Each member of the losing team after this event will be awarded £2,000 each and they go home.

Event 2

Celebrities (usually videotaped) ask a set of questions and the answers are presented multiple-choice style or as an anagram puzzle. Correct answers gain points for the contestants.

The losing team members here get £3,000 each here and are also kicked out of the game.

Event 3

Some physical contest takes place (changes each week), often outside the studio.

The losing team members get £4,000 each and leave the game.

Event 4

A "safe" is brought out into the studio. There is a circular dial attached to the front of the safe and it displays alternating photographs of the two members of the remaining team. An arrow attached to the centre of the dial is spun. The losing team member (the one the arrow didn't land on) receives £5,000.

Event 5

Six boxes hide varying figures of money: £0, £5,000, £10,000, £15,000, £20,000 and £50,000. The team member can select five of these boxes and they are "blown up" to reveal the amount won, the total of which can therefore be between £50,000 and £100,000.

All of this means that a Studio Play contestant has a 1 in 40 chance of winning the jackpot. Multiply that by the chance of actually being a Studio Play contestant in the first place and you get staggeringly long odds of 1 in 3,589,424 to win a maximum of £100,000. In other words, a very bad bet...

Expiry Dates

There's a lot of fiddly expiry dates with TV Dreams, so I thought I'd mention them explicitly.

12pm, 7 days after Studio Play forms posted by Camelot to winner
A Studio Player must return claim forms and their winning scratchcard to Camelot no later this date. Note that it's the Camelot post date, not 7 days from when you receive the forms. This is a ridiculously tight schedule if you ask me ! If the post is slow or you don't check your post for 2 or 3 days, then it could be "game over" before it's begun...

Game Closure Date: Saturday 26th September 1998
Camelot stopped issuing TV Dreams scratchcards to retailers on this date.

3pm, 31st October 1998
Studio Play claims must be registered by this date - failure to do so will forfeit any potential prize that might have been won (will be added to the Good Causes fund presumably).

11pm, 25th March 1999
Instant Cash Win and TV Home Play prizes must be claimed by this date. Again, any prizes will be forfeited and added to the Good Causes.

Notes:

Camelot changed the Studio Play rules for their TV Dreams scratchcard and have set up a reserve pool of winners of the £1,000 Instant Cash Win prize. This reserve pool will be used as an additional source of Studio Play winners - Camelot were concerned that not enough Studio Play winners had come forward.
If you're a Studio Play winner, but can't make the TV show, you can choose someone else (a "nominee") to play in your place (you still get the winnings, not the nominee !).
The rules booklet and promotional literature doesn't make it clear that the TV show is recorded exactly one week in advance (i.e. the previous Saturday to it being aired).
Camelot have tried to cover themselves with this amusing clause: "a player or nominee will forfeit participation in the TV show if he/she exhibits dangerous, disorderly, drunken, obscene or otherwise unacceptable behaviour". I also dread to think what sort of tabloid stories we'll get about the winners (thieves, murderers etc. could all appear on national TV).
With typical weekly scratchcard sales of around £14m, all the TV Dreams scratchcards should be sold after about 6 weeks (i.e. somewhere around the end of March 1998 - about the time the first TV show is aired in fact).