Australian audiences will know actor Rodger Corser for his TV roles in Underbelly, Doctor Doctor and on stage in the musical Rent, but less well known is his talent for pub trivia.
He has had a stellar career in television, theatre and film but like many actors turned his hand to all sorts of jobs to make ends meet.
“As an actor, you’ve got to have a few other strings to your bow. I was a pub musician, I hosted pub trivia, I used to pull beers and work in cafés and I used to work on the docks,” Corser says.
He has been able to put his pub quiz knowledge to good use as the host of Channel 9’s new game show The Floor, in which 81 Australians face off in timed duels on a huge floor, competing for a $200,000 prize.
“Pub trivia has been a mainstay of Aussie culture for a couple of decades now, so I’m hopeful this will go well. It’s not a difficult show, there’s strategy and it’s pretty accessible.”
The game involves answering trivia questions correctly to take control of squares on the floor.
The show was shot in Holland with Aussie contestants flown in, along with some expats.
The format for the show was developed by the Dutch who have created the huge set, which made it more effective to travel to Europe rather than recreate the set in Australia.
“It’s a big bit of infrastructure. The floor is as big as a basketball court, pretty much in a square shape. And the screens, the stage and then a studio audience as well take up a lot of space.
“We have nine episodes. It’s big prime time stuff.
“If we were doing a five-day-a-week version of it then I think they would make the studio here, but for the big scale to fit in the 81 contestants, it wasn’t practical.
“Even the lighting rig over there was huge.
“It’s like a stage show. And they know it like the back of their hand. Any slight tweaks we wanted to make to the format were not an issue for them. It was quite seamless and easy to get a product done in pretty much a week, which is crazy when you think about it.”
Corser says the whole series was shot in eight or nine days.
“I think we shot our first episode on the Tuesday night and by Saturday night we were done.
“By about midnight we wrapped up our final episode. We crowned our winner and we all had a Heineken with the Dutch.
“We hit the ground running with their crew, because it was all their floor crew, and we just brought our producers over. The Dutch are used to having international crews come in, and they make you feel at home. It’s super slick, and you get on with it.”
Corser says it felt like home because there were so many Aussies there.
“As well as our producers, we had assistant producers wrangling the contestants, making them feel at home. All the contestants are Aussies. There are some expats there, but we also flew a bunch over as well. It was definitely a big Aussie contingent, but the Dutch are lovely. They work hard and they’re easy to get along with.
“We had some great contestants and because we shot this out of the country, all of them were on tour pretty much. It was like a school camp where everyone goes and has a great old time and bonds together. We’d shoot an episode or two episodes a night, then they’d all go home to the hotel and they’d all hang out, go to the bar together. And so we didn’t have to manufacture all their energy. The longer the show went on and if they stuck around for a few episodes, they got to know their neighbours quite well. And I think that comes across on screen with some great energy.”
Corser says the game is easy to play along at home.
“But I can assure you that when you get under the pressure of the studio lights, we had a few people crack under pressure and we were quite surprised how simple things get stuck on the tip of their tongue. They couldn’t quite get it out in time, so it becomes a pressure cooker quite quickly.”
He says contestants have to be a jack-of-all-trades because the twist to the show is that contestants have a specialist category, but once chosen, they have to pick a neighbour and battle in their category.
“You might have to play outside your own category for quite a while, so it’s the people who had a good knowledge of a lot of things who did well. People even bluffed their own category and started to say things like ‘you know I’m an astrophysicist’. Where that worked people maybe wouldn’t choose them in their category and they got to cruise through a few episodes without being chosen.”
“What’s good about our show, is hopefully families can take the airpods out and they can all sit around the one screen and we can all have a collective experience because mum and dad will probably not go as well as they think, up against even the primary school kids, because you’ve got your classic kind of geography and capital cities and sciences but you’ve also got a lot of pop culture things that mum and dad are not gonna know as well as your daughter. It’s a lot of fun.”
The Floor airs Monday and Tuesday at 7.30pm on Channel 9 and 9Now.
