This week’s big news is that it’s being reported that Ben Crabbé, longtime host of of Belgian TV’s favourite Tetris-based quiz Blokken, is calling it quits after 33 series and over 7,000 episodes, his last series will begin in August. Whether he will be walking sideways into another job is not known at present. Interestingly the VRT news article suggests Blokken is the world’s longest running daily quiz programme at 32 years, which might come as a surprise to fans of Jeopardy! and Questions Pour Un Champion (although not for a while), but there we are, but it’s certainly an exceptionally long run. He will be replaced by Sven de Leijer who began his career as Blokken’s warm-up man, which represents an exciting start of a potential Only Connect question, as new host of Fort Boyard (starting July 4th) Cyril Feraud started his TV career as an intern on Fort Boyard.

In other news Gladiators tickets are now released, recording end of July/beginning of August as expected. Best of luck to everyone on Big Break which starts filming tomorrow and over the weekend, turns out Red Hot isn’t just the name of the opening round. I tried but failed to get a ticket, although seeing the temperatures over the next few days and the inevitable train problems I may have dodged a bullet. Pity, though! There’s certainly some decent people working on it and you’d assume it will be difficult to mess up, the real test is seeing if McGuinness/Hendry have the right sort of chemistry – I’m sure reports will come out in due course.

Meanwhile Richard “The Golden Elevators” Osman talks about bad titles with a completely straight face during this week’s Rest Is Ents Q and A podcast. Hmm.

Bullseye is returning for another eight episodes, great news for fans of Luke Littler, procedure, lack of theatricality and incessant clapping. You can apply now but something caught my eye on the application page, that potential candidates will be going to Darts Camp, hopefully followed up by Bully’s Houses and a series of live shows. Nothing massively outrageous about this – you do want your Throwers (can we all agree that “Throwers and Knowers” is vomit inducing) to be basically skilled at darts, although I think the penalty shoot-out bit without a lot of warm-up is always going to be quite low scoring anyway. Anyway, the name made me laugh.

Big Break films in Maidstone next weekend, there’s still tickets going for the Thursday afternoon session at time of writing. Hopefully the studio has air con.

That just means we need The Full Swing to be a going concern to complete the set.

This week’s excitement actually started yesterday on Netflix, but thanks to work I’ve not had a chance to start watching it yet, it’s Outlast: The Jungle, the humidity-filled follow-up to extremely addictive survival competition Outlast (normally set in Alaska where it’s cold).

Outlast sees 16 people made of outdoorsy-dads and ladies who typically prefer to work alone have to survive in teams – that’s important, you must be in a team to stay in the game – if you choose to leave one (or if you get kicked out) you’ve got 24 hours to have a different team accept you or you’re eliminated. Also if it all gets too difficult you can “flare out” at any point. The idea, as given, is that the team that lasts the longest splits $1m between them, but it sounds like about a month into the first series production got bored and decided the winners by a race, which is a bit of a swizz but doesn’t stop the rest of it being dramatic and entertaining. The first series has lots of incredible behaviour (both questionable and good) throughout, the second series is more of a slow burn, but don’t let that put you off. I ended up chain-watching the first one in a day. Looking forward to getting the chance to watch this!

Not my words! Well some of them are my words. Those of an ITV Press release out this morning.

Easy to laugh, and we sort of are, but it’s basically free money for ITV certainly compared to ITV Be. The cremation companies that do all the ad bumpers and breaks will also be thrilled I would imagine.

All four series.

Interesting tactic. Obviously reality imports do quite well (The Traitors, Married At First Sight), not sure how much call there is for this, but I’d rather have it than not, and The Floor UK did really good young demos – far beyond ITV’s usual Saturday/Sunday night quiz fare, so this might be a way to drive them towards ITVX. I do ponder if the first Aussie series might be a better initial fit though.

Sorry this apparently slipped through the net we’d have been all over it otherwise – it looks like Muff Murfin’s Gladiators Theme EP got a (re?)-release in March, I think the theme on it sounds *slightly* different to the one on the original Glads album, although that might just be more clarity. It also has the theme tune instrumental which is fun, but likely of interest is the theme and Eliminator theme with Murfin taking lead vocals. Come on Muff! Get on with releasing the full soundtrack!