Rylan being chased by Ratings Bear is the stuff dreams are made of.

– David Bodycombe

Unfortunately Rylan isn’t into bears. This particular bear is into him though. Here they are going wild in the aisles, will Rylan be able to get to the checkout (episode 20 of Supermarket Sweep) without running into the massive stack of beans (slot average) whilst being persued by Bother’s Bar Mascot Ratings Bear, fresh from hibernation?

It’s not looking good! Here are a few caveats though:

• We don’t have much data for week two. This sort of thing is much harder to come by these days and we thank our suppliers for the numbers we do have.
• If you ignore the number for the first night the trend graph will likely be a bit flatter, so might just escape.
• ITV will likely be more interested in the numbers for the 16-34 demo (the point of ITV2) than the raw overnights, the figures for those we don’t have much of, but it feels like about 20% of the audience is In The Demo going by the numbers we *do* have. That would suggest 50-60k nightly at the moment which doesn’t sound great, but we don’t know.
• It might add 10 million in 28 day officials. It won’t, but it might.

My position hasn’t changed since week one – it’s a decent show with some easily fixable issues that shouldn’t have been scheduled the way it has, and if it was shoulder peak weekend on ITV1 would probably do OK. We have discussed the show here.

It was piloted with Justin Lee Collins over a decade ago. It was more recently piloted with Lee Mack. There was an unsuccessful Italian version. But now, NOW is the time…

Clever logo, to be fair.

Knock yourselves out:

Good luck, and tell them we sent you.

To celebrate the return of The Circle last night (tl;dr – they’ve Big Brothered up the presentation, it did 1.3m from the Bake Off lead in, it all feels a bit like the next Rising Star, if you enjoyed it last year no reason to assume you won’t this year, I expect I will follow it but not bother tuning in) I wanted to do a “joke” with a video where all the contestants sit in a circle.

Except I couldn’t think of a show that does that (other than various foreign forms of The Inheritance). Shows with contestants in a semi-circle are ten a penny. Can anyone think of a circular show?

Here’s some fun, this channel has started uploading episodes of Challenge TV’s 2001 non-hit Stake Out.

If you don’t remember, Stake Out was the show where people staked £250 of their own money in a “ruthless” quiz. Winners could keep winning and turn it into thousands.

That was the plan. Unfortunately, so legend has it, production discovered before filming that this would be illegal under the gambling rules at the time and had to put up all the money themselves. Too late in the day to change the concept, evidently, so they went with it and pretended anyway.

Hi ya! A quick reminder that there’s no Bother’s Bar commentary for the 21/9/19 episode as your commentary team are running round London solving puzzles and/or are on holiday. Normal service planned to resume next episode.