By GREG DIXON
"Please note," commands the bold, capped type, "you may not be part of The Chair if you have any heart condition at all."
You have been warned.
Or at least wannabe contestants have. This heartfelt alert heads the online application form for Touchdown Productions' latest quiz show creation.
The clear task of the form's 11 pages is to discover whether possible Chair contenders have a dicky pump which might peg out at any given television moment.
The thing is filled with endless, probing questions on the matter, such as "do you have a history or have you been treated for any heart-related condition or stroke in the past five years?" and, oddly, "do you do yoga?"
But the best is saved till last. At the very end, the questionnaire asks applicants to rate their fear level on 18 different things ranging from "close scapes" (scrapes, one assumes) through to rats.
What is this? George Orwell's Room 101? Do you have to be called Winston to get on?
Well no, not quite. But a healthy heart is, well, at the heart of the matter on The Chair. The object of the game show, hosted by ex-rugby leaguer Matthew Ridge, is to answer questions while keeping your ticker's beats per minute under a predetermined level to win up to 50 grand of folding stuff.
While busy attempting this you're exposed - at least in the American version which went to air in January - to great balls of fire leaping around you at inopportune moments or alligators being lowered towards you.
(What might be the local equivalent of the alligator? A tuatara? A weta?)
For those at home, the contestant's poor, scared mug fills the telly screen along with whizzy graphics showing how much money is at stake, their heart rate and the "red line rate," which is the number of bpms they have to keep their heart rate under.
The catch - and with up to 50 Gs in the purse there has to be one - is that if contenders can't keep their bpms under the red-line rate, they can't answer the question, win the dosh, move onto the next question or stay in the chair.
If it sounds rather complicated, it's not really.
What it is, according to Touchdown boss Julie Christie, is an attempt to do something different.
"We decided about 18 months ago that we wanted to make reality television brainy, it had got so dumbed down.
"This idea had been bouncing around as, 'How do we do a quiz show that shows what is happening in the brain on the screen?"'
And the heart too, one assumes.
Certainly the show, the biggest single investment made by the company that brought reality television to New Zealand, must have given Christie palpitations.
She seemed about to blow an aorta when I visited the set in December.
She was midway through the last day of shooting pilot episodes of The Chair when the power to the studio died.
Computers and lights flickered off. The show's enormous plate-steel colosseum - the largest television set ever constructed in New Zealand - was plunged into blackness. And panic buttons were being pushed, rapidly.
Christie and her company, having invested six figures just to make this pilot, were on a short deadline to deliver the thing to American network ABC, and nearly four hours without power was pushing her to the max.
It wasn't the last hiccup.
In the final weeks before the show aired (with John McEnroe as host) in the US, rival network Fox launched something which sounded suspiciously similar called The Chamber.
Touchdown sued Fox for copyright infringement, claiming The Chamber was a rip-off. Fox countersued, claiming Touchdown had sent a spy onto its set. Don't you love America? The lawsuits were finally settled, hush-hush and on-the-QT, about a week ago and at last the show, which has been sold around the world, launches here.
We'll have to see tonight whether The Chair is quite as heart-stopping as its own history.
* The Chair, TV2 7.30pm
In 'The Chair' the prize is only heartbeats away
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