Woah.
- The BotherSOP Game 5 (8pm UK/1500 ET, Sunday, Full Tilt): You know the drill. The page for discussion and results is here.
- The Amazing Race (Sunday, CBS)
- Only Connect (8:30pm, BBC4, Monday): It’s the grand final! Who out of The Gamblers and the Strategists will win the coveted trophy? It is interesting that the finalists are all associated with gaming. Well, it’s not that interesting.
- The Gameshow General Election (Monday, Bother’s Bar/UKGameshows.com): the actual general election is brilliant timing for us because it coincides with the necessary four years in between All Time polls. I like to think Gordon Brown had us in mind when calling the date. Let’s hope it’s not a hung parliament in real life, or we’ll probably have to do this all again in a few months time. Details and voting form up on Monday.
- Double Cross (Monday, Buzzerblog): the world’s first podcast gameshow, hosted by Buzzerblog’s Alex Davis. I’m intrigued, if nothing else!
- Survivor (Thursday, CBS): I’ve been really busy this week so I’ve not had a chance to watch the last episodes of The Amazing Race or Survivor, but I confidently predict they’ll be a bit like the previous episode but with one less person or team in it.
- Fort Boyard (5:31pm UK assuming they take that into account on the website programming grid, Friday, TV5Monde): Thanks to Iain for alerting us to this, FB’s twentieth season gets a showing on TV5. Expect a spanky new titles sequence, remixes of old adventure tunes that are a bit hit and miss, no actual new adventures, a pointless state of play board, and something that looks like an element of gambling in the council but no-one stops to wonder how they’re going to scoop out 15 seconds of tiny balls when they lose that game. First episode with Eva Longoria I really enjoyed, the shortcomings of this series reveal themselves gradually over the course of the series. Still though, it’s going to be completely different for season 21 – I’m keeping my fingers crossed (if anyone’s going to make it work it’ll be the host company for the host nation), but on the basis of other two team versions I’m not especially hopeful. Still, 20 years is good innings it has to be said. And they said The Crystal Maze was outdated, tch.
- Postcode Challenge (8pm, Friday, STV): Yes!!!! With a new look, new format and a new host in Angus Purden. For 40 weeks.
- The Whole 19 Yards and Britain’s Got Talent (7pm, Saturday, ITV): Forgot all about these in the original post, sorry.
- The BotherSop Game 6 (8pm UK/1500 ET, Next Sunday, Full Tilt): You know the drill.
Who Dares Wins this week…
(SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW)
Jon was paired with Margaret to challenge Cascada – I mean, Cassy – and Clint, and I have to admit I took something of a dislike to him almost immediately, when he said that C & C had won enough already. They’d only played one game… and did he not realise how much £25k meant to Clint? And heaven knows what he might have thought of James and Daniel, the stars of the last series, who racked up a whopping £75k each.
After much bidding, J & M gained control of the first list, and Jon rather showed off in naming 17 Eddie Murphy films. Much bidding took place for the second list, too, and Cassy and Clint got three airlines that fly into Heathrow before saying “Fly Emirates”. The disallowance of this answer was harsh, but right.
Even though they only won one game, one would surely still consider them the first pair to leave with a perfect record on the money list.
Jon and Margaret’s knowledge of singers with five or more UK number 1 singles was worth £10k, and of course there was some discussion on the Bar and DS as regards Elton John not being on this list. They then wasted no time in winning their second game, breezing through European countries with sea borders, followed by characters from Star Wars episodes IV, V and VI – and like at the same point last week, the latter list also really had only one outcome, as Laide and La’Verne knew very little about SW.
J & M named three male tennis players to have been ranked number 1 in the world, played on, got two more, and considered some good options in Bjorn Borg, Lleyton Hewitt and Rafael Nadal. But Jon didn’t make himself any more endearing, eventually bypassing all these options and saying “I’m sure Greg Rusedski was number 1, let’s go for him.” Bye bye £5k.
Mind you, it must be very rare that money is lost as a result of getting between three and 14 right and then giving a wrong answer.
Looks like Someone trying to overadvertise the poker game.
So if it’s the other way around, that is, we have a parliament after the election, but the gameshow poll is inconclusive, that means we have to do them both in November again, right?
Willing to bet my bottom dollar the results will be completely different if we have a poll on two separate occasions this year!
Either I am wrong but isn’t The Whole 19 Yards the latest Endemol show to air on ITV primetime since Shafted?
I think For The Rest For Your Life’s Endemol, but nobody really wants to remember it.
It was also on in the afternoons, so not really primetime.
Oh yeah, that.
Shafted was 2001 – but Judgement Day (Endemol programme dropped after 2 shows, and thus the end of Brian Coneley’s ITV presenting career) was shown in 2003..
Anyone want to open a new market on Betfair that TW19Y will last the same amount of time?
Thanks for the podcast mention. I hope some people like it. Ended up being more challenging than I figured but extremely fun to do. I’m hoping the results end up getting us a second season.
And more than anything this is a UK production. I’m the only American working on it. QuizQuizQuiz has been more helpful than you can imagine and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how great David Bodycombe is but he helped with the format so I owe him a ton. There are a few things I’d alter next season but overall it ended up better than I frankly expected.
Dan Peake helped a bit too, mentally, because I didn’t think a tiny indie game show could make it until I saw Accumulate. I probably wouldn’t have attempted this without the success and popularity of that.
I confidently predict they’ll be a bit like the previous episode but with one less person or team in it.
One of these days you will say this and the episode you haven’t seen will turn out to have been a non-elimination episode.
Hilarity will ensue.
Man, will I look silly!
It is interesting that the finalists are all associated with gaming.
There’s definitely something to that; a lot of the subject material pinged my “this is my sort of geekery” geek-o-meter, with subject matter like busiest airports and dice probabilities. Basically, all manner of stuff that I would back myself to know, even though I couldn’t beat the contestants to the answers (either measured by time or by confidence) in practice. It seems to me to be counter-intuitive to say “try to make sure that the question material has less of the stuff that I care about”, but I know David tries hard to represent question material across the board and I have a vague sort of feeling that a little too much of it was a little too skewed in my – our? – direction.