We are so over 2024, what have we got to look forward to in 2025? Well we’ve scoured the ticket sites, this is what we’ve found thus far:

• Love Takes a Village – although I don’t know which particular village (it’s filming in Dagenham), anyway it looks like Rick Edwards off of Fighting Talk is set to conquer the States again hot off the back 2022 non-hit The Courtship, alongside one of “Hollywood’s most beloved figures” (if it’s a mystery it’s usually Alfonso Ribeiro), as 100 people with opinions help someone find love. Game Show Network about a decade ago did a dating show called It Takes A Church, I suspect this is a secular version of a similar idea. It’s filming 27th and 28th January, tickets SRO.
• The Winner Takes It All – I don’t know about you but I just love gameshows are “not like any other”, especially when the description of that show suggests contestants will be answering questions for money and prizes. The people behind Limitless Win and Sing On invite you to Salford on 4th February to stand around for 90 minutes (standing is annoying, but if it genuinely ends up being a 90 minute record then that’s fast) and watch a show hosted by two of Britain’s best-loved comedians and entertainers. Someone on the Discord suggested Rob and Romesh and that seems like a good shout, but we don’t know. Tickets via Lost in TV.
• Wisdom of the Crowd – From the makers of The 1% Club, a show that asks how many jellybeans in the bottle for big cash prizes, the fact that it’s an eight hour record and you’re not getting paid expenses to take part suggests the wisdom of this particular crowd isn’t going to be very high. It’s for the BBC. The rehearsal day is Monday 27th January for the pilot recording on the 28th. Tickets/applications SRO.

Of course The Wisdom of the Crowd, the idea that if you average out the guesses of loads of people it tends to be fairly accurate, is as old as time and has been used for things variously for years. Here’s a pitch tape for a format that went round about a decade ago, this new show probably isn’t it, but there’s only so many ways you can dress up the idea.

The voting for the UKGameshows.com/Bother’s Bar Poll of 2024 has now closed. Thanks very much for all your votes.

It will take a week or two to collate everything and write it up so look out for the results in due course. For expectation management, we probably aren’t going to be able to do a live Youtube results show this year for various reasons, but we hope that you look forward to the write-ups nonetheless.

Extremely sad to hear about the passing of Laurie Holloway at 86, those of us of a certain age will know him for his absolutely iconic foot-tapper theme tunes such as Game For A Laugh, Beadle’s About, Blind Date, but as is tradition we always like to illustrate with something a bit more obscure and this is a theme with Holloway written right through it like a stick of rock, We Love TV.

We’re three episodes into The Traitors and it’s as entertaining as it ever is, we’re three missions in and they’ve done a bold thing of tying them into the game a bit more – one involving the Traitors having to sabotage in order to murder which is a great added frisson except the producers will contrive to have five people for the final anyway so actually completely pointless – you’ve tried to solve jank with jank! But more irritatingly, the other two have both involved self-sacrifice – who will knock themselves out – or be convinced to knock themselves out – so that everybody else will live and possibly earn money?

This comes off the back of current Amazon non-hit Beast Games where it feels like 80% of the challenges are self-sacrificing ones. Who will knock themselves out for money? Who will knock themselves out for no money but for other people to survive? Who will knock themselves out for money whilst also knocking out other people who will win nothing? Who will give their coin to someone else who might give you a helicopter ticket but if not enough people do nobody goes to an island? It feels like every possible combination of the self-sacrifice formula has been played out to death and there have only been four episodes so far.

I’m over it. There is absolutely a time and place for the drama of it, but even Squid Game: The Challenge understood its power is in using it moderately and with an element of risk/reward. As it is, as TV challenge design it’s just become very tired, very lazy, very quickly. Where’s the range gone? Ultimately we want winners who have strived for something, not just fell into a good place because they they don’t want it the least.

Using the new fangled (it’s been here all the time) sticky post feature to annoy you into voting, the 20th running of our annual poll is now open! Details under the cut, you’ve got until the evening of Sunday 12th January to vote.

Alright let’s get this bit out of the way – you need a VPN and you need to sign up for a TF1 account – you should be able to figure out how to do the latter, it doesn’t ask for an address but it will ask for a ZIP Code, 75000 for Paris will do. Here’s the direct show page.

And this is an interesting prospect, this isn’t a revival for the French, they never had their own version in the 90s, which may explain why the opening episodes tanked a bit against the extremely popular Death in Paradise last night. They have looked to us for inspiration – in fact they’ve copied our stylings pretty much wholesale, same theme (in English!), same titles, practically the same set (it’s filmed in the ice-rink in Pergy rather than Sheffield, but it’s got all the lights and screens and pizazz), though there is rather a strange mix of fonts – our long and thin one used for most of the event graphics, and a sort of He-Man inspired thick font going around the screens and for their explanation graphics. They’ve even got the locker room cameras for post-game Glad chat.

The Gladiators themselves are great fun in the main (and let’s be honest, extremely attractive) – Apollo is their version’s Legend, constantly playing up to the crowd. Furie’s a curious one, comes across as petulant and childlike when I was expecting her to blow up (hence Fury). But even without French you can quickly work out their personalities. The audience don’t have Glad Hands but have been given giant cardboard faces of the contestants and Gladiators to wave about.

Being a French show the tournament set-up is, of course, weird. Each episode is actually a set of two episodes around 70 minutes each (or rather, as has been pointed out, one episode cut in half so they can claim better ratings for one of them). At the end of the second episode, the two male and two female winning Eliminator times are compared, and only the faster one goes through to the final, like an instant-run-off second round. I hope the actual Final doesn’t work like that as that’s going to feel like a massive anti-climax. Each match is four games and an Eliminator. If that sounds drawn out, yes it is a bit, although I didn’t feel it as much as I could have.

Of the games there have been some unusual choices made – Duel is only twenty seconds and takes longer to explain than to play, The Edge called Vertigo here is 40 seconds (but still 3pts a crossing 18pts maximum, turns out 40 seconds is still more than enough time). Course Poursuite aka The Wall is a ten metre wall off to the side of the Arena not next to the doors, and I’m not saying it’s easy but one of the guys got up there in 10 seconds. Also they don’t have to get up and over, just hit a buzzer. More positively, Passenge en Force aka Gauntlet didn’t feel like a walkover – 14m and four Glads and the contestants were given a bit of trouble – whether this is better Gladiating or what feels like a less wide pipe I don’t know. Curiously the French will be using events we aren’t using – in the previews it looks like Whiplash, Suspension Bridge, Tug of War (very old school) and Earthquake are all still to come.

However there’s a lack of killer instinct in the production and the editing. There’s no in game music – even if ours is a disappointment compared to the 90s original it still helps drive the action, there are some countdown horns ticking off the last five seconds of a game but that’s it. Most of The Edge is a static side on shot of the grid with the occasional cutaway, didn’t feel very dynamic. No real attempt to make Duel look like it wasn’t happening about two feet off the ground. Using Another One Bites The Dust for every Gladiator win and Stayin’ Alive for every contender win gets quite old quite quickly. And one other weird thing is that when one challenger has completed the Eliminator, they’re not especially bothered if the loser completes it or not, which doesn’t sound like a big thing but having the loser at least complete the course is part of where the soul of Glads comes from. And going to a break to advertise the viewer competition during the Eliminator is a bit rude, frankly.

So overall: a bit weird. Not bad, and without having nostalgia driving it they’ve certainly tried. Normally when the French do their adaptations you can understand why they’ve changed things and sometimes I can agree with them, I can’t quite see why they’ve done certain things here.