Mainly a list for me as I’ve been out of action for the last four days or so (without going into details it has so far involved an overnight Hospital visit and now my electronic scales don’t recognise me and will involve a camera in the next few days) but Likely Of Interest to you as well:
- De Mol in Thailand officially starts next week on Sunday 23rd on Flanders’ Play4, but I believe the contestants are getting revealed on a special Club De Mol tonight. For all De Mol chat I direct you to #molchat in the Discord, which is where any English subs will likely turn up.
- Jeopardy! UK series 2 starts tomorrow (Monday) at the new time of 3pm. The first series was very dull. A clip going around suggests the new series might be a bit more… kinetic? They’ve got a buzzer sound anyway. Also a seventh category for each board and Paul Farrer music beds. It’s more stuff, but is it more stodge? Discussion post is here, you might as well use it.
- Last One Laughing UK starts on Amazon Prime on Thursday. Jimmy Carr challenges a fairly stacked cast of comics to stay in a room and not laugh. Amazed it’s taken this long for the Documental format to happen here given previous international success really. A Show Discussion post will go up in due course.
- 99 to Beat starts Saturday at 6pm on ITV1, ten minutes into the first Gladiators semi-final which feels like absolutely nonsense scheduling. We’ll see how that works out for everybody, they’ll be a Show Discussion post in due course. FOTB Tom F (who is also a contestant) is writing some brilliant pieces about the Dutch show that’s been running for ages, and the Flemish original, on his blog.
- Joko and Klaas’ Ein sehr gutes Quiz (mit hoher Gewinnsumme) (A Very Good Quiz (With A Very High Prize)) starts a four episode run next Saturday night as well on Pro7 and we’ll probably watch the first one in the Discord but I’m not committing to more than that as there are too many lengthy German quizzes flying about and I like to do other things occasionally. This was successfully piloted as part of J and K’s Pro7 24-hour takeover day and it looks like it’s going to keep lots of the same things – it’s live, it will travel the country, they won’t reveal the location until the morning of the show, people can turn up and audition that afternoon. Premise: three people work as a team answering multiple choice questions, but one person must buzz and be responsible for the answer. If they’re right, the team carries on. If they’re wrong, they’ve eliminated themselves and get replaced by the next person in the queue. Nobody buzzes in after 90 seconds? All three are replaced. Whoever buzzes in with the correct answer for Q25 wins €100,000. LIVE.
- Stretching the definition of “in the next week or so” Million Dollar Secret with Peter Serafinowicz starts on Netflix Wednesday 26th, looks like an amalgam of lots of different shows but despite that also looks like it might be quite fun.
Million Dollar Secret was already on my radar after your last post about it, but now adding Last One Laughing UK to my list as well, that sounds like worth a go for sure.
There’s an Irish version with Graham Norton on Prime already who you might recognise some of the contestants on, if you want an idea of what it might be like.
Genuinely intrigued by this Joko and Klaas format. Did it do well in the “pilot” version?
It did, it was commissioned days after. We pondered if the entire live 24 hours stunt was basically a pretense to get eyeballs on and roadtest the format specifically (everything else that day mainly cheap clip shows or J and K out and about with cameras) and see how it went down with an actual audience.
Also they’ve been getting people to write in with location suggestions so it will be interesting to see if they go somewhere unusual – the adverts for it are certainly playing into that, so it will be a bit disappointing if the first one comes from a warehouse in Berlin.