This adaptation of Robert Sheckley’s 1958 short story “The Prize of Peril” perfectly captures the inane and shallow manipulations of television producers and personalities, whilst also commenting on the fraudulent nature of most documentary film production. The film shows vain presenters ad-libbing to cover unscripted breakdowns and over-worked gallery staff managing impossible edits within a vérité framework, much like the pre-arranged stage direction that litters many modern documentary or reality TV programmes. Made at the time when the mass audio-visual media was only just starting down the cul-de-sac that it’s currently trapped in, this should have been seen as a warning to media professionals against their own egotistical and devious choices in the creative process, but it fails to offer alternatives and in part buys into the same contrived, inhibiting values that the majority of the MAVM learn at university or apprentice level.

With British television enjoying a surge of ‘event’ programming – read a little about that here – this German film exposes the exploitative nature of such scheduling: the event is a transitory and throwaway experience that’s elevated into something of importance and relevance by pre-broadcast advertising and the show itself, its producers aware all along that it will be replaced next month by something even more ‘important’. This constant up-scaling of temporary material into ‘events’ of life-changing credibility is here taken to its logical conclusion, with a contestant in a game show literally risking his life every cycle of the show – something which seems laughable and unthinkable in reality and should therefore be viewed as a metaphorical connotation. The MAVM is too concerned with maintaining its saleability and broad range of audience appeal to risk anything so extreme, thereby isolating a large portion of its audience share, and, as this film consciously reminds us, modern media professionals aren’t evil dictators presiding over mind-control gladiatorial games but misguided and badly educated bores trying to please their bosses.

Das Millionenspiel at the IMDb