‘Celebrity Playtime’s’ unique viewing proposition

CRAWFORD. The new show he hosts features difficult and inventive games and quizzes.

NEW TV shows are launched practically every week these days, but many of them look and feel that they don’t have the unique viewing proposition to take them to the end of their first season. An exception to that desultory rule appears to be “Celebrity Playtime,” which debuted on ABS-CBN last Saturday.

The new game show, hosted by Billy Crawford, pits two teams of four starlets or stars apiece against each other in challenging, time-based contests that tests various skills.

For instance, an “alternative spelling bee” has two opponents sequentially but alternatingly providing the letters to a long Filipino word with a confusingly repetitious use of vowels, thus making it really difficult for the players to keep from making mistakes—and losing!

The “mental calisthenics” involved are truly challenging, so viewers end up being impressed with the celebs who do manage to pull them off.

Another test of weird performing and communication skills has players enabling their teammates to correctly name a song that they hum without lyrics—while “singing” like birds or goats or pigs.

Most difficult game

The most difficult game requires contestants to identify the titles of two songs, usually one local and one foreign, that sound confoundingly alike! We ended up admiring, not just the players who got the titles right, but also the show’s staffers for so adroitly combining otherwise unrelated songs to form witty “duo-medleys.”

The winning team was made up of singers Karla Estrada,

Nyoy Volante, Melai Cantiveros and Edgar Allan Guzman won by a wide margin over the competing group of comedians. In future, therefore, players should make it a point to be musically savvy—or suffer the consequences.

With this new show, Billy Crawford has emerged as one of the busiest TV program hosts around, with the daily “Its Showtime” and weekly “Your Face Sounds Familiar” also on his work schedule. What makes him so in-demand? Like another popular host, Luis Manzano, he looks good, talks fast, makes sense and is savvy enough to keep a game or variety show perky and exciting.

Unlike other “hosts” who rely completely on scripted spiels written by somebody else, they can ad-lib to save their performing lives—and do so with winking wit, to boot!