Things we’ve just discovered on old-school linear television (alright, Grandad) this lunchtime when my internet went down:
- The new series of Bother’s Bar surprise fave I’ll Get This started last week and continues on Tuesday nights at 10pm.
- I watched Curiosity for the first time, currently being repeated on BBC2 at 1pm. Antiques not really my thing (although I love an auction, obviously), but thought this was quite a neat show – like an Antiques Crystal Maze (Paul Martin’s got the personality to carry it off, and he even has Richard O’ Brien style asides to the camera, mainly informational, some fun) as people go into themed rooms and complete pricing/dating/odd one out style challenges. Not must watch by any means, but I absolutely appreciate what they’ve tried to do within the confines of a BBC daytime budget. And Baxter (played by Maggie) probably the best gameshow dog since The One Off The Great Antiques Hunt with Jilly Goolden.
Edit: it sounds like there was a Taskmaster coming soon advert after Countdown today (although it can’t be that soon, surely?). With apologies for comment jumping on this post:
And finally (with all these tweets this feels like a Daily Express article):
So there we are.
Meanwhile, Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Thames is piloting a lockdown version of Family Fortunes that would be airing on ITV, with the families and the host all in different locations.
I can’t see this working. Although I’m intrigued to see who they’re getting to host the pilot.
It’s The Main Event for the noughties!
I assert that the most fondly-remembered round of British The Main Event was the one where the team at home went on a scavenger hunt in their own house. Well, now you can play a scavenger hunt in your own house as part of an online Zoom game show! Some of the suggested tasks sound a bit The Button, which is by no means a bad thing.
Sixty minutes, £34 – but that’s not £34 per player, it’s £34 flat rate for the whole game, which could be played by as many as four households of four players each, so that sounds like potentially very decent value if you can get a whole crowd in. Or, rather, four small crowds in.
I’m trying to figure out what shows could work in a lockdown….
You could do Wheel of Fortune- the host spins the wheel from the studio…
Countdown could work…
Blankety Blank/Match Game would be interesting..
Actually, a number of Apterites are producing episodes of ZoomDown, which is basically Countdown on Zoom: http://wiki.apterous.org/ZoomDown.
There was some ‘woken up randomly in the middle of the night’ entertainment last night – 1000 Heartbeats with someone kindly providing sign language in the bottom right, you wouldn’t believe it but the sign language for ‘heartbeat’ seems to be tapping your own heart to check it is still beating, which the poor lady had to check almost 1000 times herself due to how many times the show uses that particular word!
On the Taskmaster thing – apparently this ran last week as well – didn’t see it myself but was noted on TVForum and was run after Countdown last Tuesday. It was Alex setting the latest “at home task”, however as the tasks close at 3pm on Tuesday and Thursday maybe was a little late to be running the ads.
I would like to apologise if I made a mistake in any details during my tweeting about this. I was trying to communicate key information as quickly as I could after having seen it and gone back to rewatch it; and I may have misread the end slate due to being more focused on the task announcement itself. Still, I thought hearing Alex Horne on Channel 4 setting at-home tasks would be something that would interest everyone in any event.
Nothing to apologise for, it is in itself an interesting thing.
One Mike P of this parish has made it to the final three of the Red Bull Mind Gamers music challenge, which is a public vote. Please consider voting for Mike P’s “It’s a Brain Thing” submission, which is so pun-heavy it might knock Dan Peake over, which takes some doing. As well as being an occasional poster here, Mike was the captain of the Cosplay team on The Crystal Maze t’other year who declared one of his teammates to be a disappointment, and a rare contestant who was able to give Richard Ayoyade a run for his money. Mike has other puzzle credentials: he set a puzzle for DASH a couple of years ago and is responsible for the Crystal-Maze-like Crack It Bolton escape rooms, so he’s a good egg who deserves your vote.
Incase anyone missed it Twitter-side; Judge Rinder is teasing on Twitter quite openly that he’s doing a Weakest Link reboot. Jon Briggs also joining in so it could still really be going either way,
I only really have one issue gnawing away at me at the format of Curiosity:
If you lose a game you pick an item for the other team – the implied strategy being you pick the lowest value item. But in the final round you steal an item from your opponents, so potentially you’ve opened up a moral hazard – lose game, pick big ticket item for opponents, swap it into own collection at the end and there’s nothing they can do about it. I know it’s a relatively gentle show but this doesn’t feel quite right.