We completely forgot to watch David Mitchell’s Outsiders that started on Dave last night, basically Taskmaster In Tents by the sounds of it, and opinions have run the gamut from “boring” to “OK” to “much better and funnier than anticipated”, so I look forward to catching up with that in due course.
Anyway for some reason it got me thinking about pretty good outward bound survival show Bare Necessities on BBC2 around the turn of the millennium, hosted by apparent patron saint of Bother’s Bar Ed Hall and Hugh McManners, where two teams of office worker-y types would be set survival/camping challenges and awarded points by survival expert McManners (usually they’d be docked points for self-inflicted wounds i.e. the reason they’re hungry is because they refused to skin a rabbit, that sort of thing), hoping to have a time advantage for a final challenge which would determine if their final night was in a nice hotel or once again in a tent.
Rather nicely, there’s an episode on Youtube look.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been enjoying the tweaks made to the format of ‘Winning Combination’ in its second run.
The ‘buzz in when 2 right answers come up’ strategy as the answers appear on the screen improves the show I think. On many shows, waiting for them to read out all the options on a board can be tedious, where as here, the answers being read and out revealed is part of the format and makes you pay more attention as a viewer. Fun that there can be more than two right answers available in the category too.
Still think it’s an underrated show!