I think there is some quite exciting stuff on this week, but in actual fact I’m about to go to Shropshire for the weekend and forgot to put this in until the very last minute. Um.
Anyway I’ll be back later today by the time you read this, so what’s exciting between now and next Saturday?
Edit: The results are in, and the spelling mistakes have been corrected.
- It’s new American Season day! (Monday, various channels in the US): New Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy begin today. And probably some other things, I don’t know.
- Cupcake Wars (7:30pm, Weeknights, Food Network): Can you believe it’s National Cupcake Week? Neither can I, frankly.
- Only Connect (8:30pm, Monday, BBC4): The Urban Walkers vs the Wrights, who seemingly in an Only Connect first apppar to be members of the same family.
- Antiques Master (8:30pm, Monday, BBC2): I’m informed it’s the grand final this week for Sandi Toksvig and chums.
- 71 Degrees North (9pm, Tuesday ITV1): Survivor: Arctic, basically, but actually not too shabby at all based on Saturday’s opener. Not sure the X Factor-esque next time bits are entirely necessary.
- Big Brother US final, Survivor season premiere (Wednesday, CBS)
- QI (8:30pm, Friday, BBc1 and HD): Series H begins.
- Schlag den Raab (7:15pm UK time/8:15pm CET+1, Saturday, ProSieben): Back after its summer break with €1m on offer. Let’s hope there’s some naughty internetness.
So there we are. And YES! Some more iPad reviews when a) I have time and b) when I can sort a teeny site problem out.
New US Millionaire on Monday!
Er… Cupcake Wars on Food Network? Never heard of the channel before and I don’t get it anyway, but what a title! (If they made a UK version, it would have to be called Fairy Cake Challenge, which just doesn’t work.)
Meanwhile… new QI, new Ramsay’s Best Restaurant, Antiques Master final (but the big excitement is next week’s celebrity special), Pope gets egged, Widdecombe breaks hip, Top of the Klass with Myleene Klass gets commissioned as a brand new lottery show for 2011.
Saturday has Schlag den Raab.
Also last night was the final of German Solitary, which was a shame because I realised it was when it was too late.
Excellent Weaver’s Week column this week on Big Brother.
Simon, thank you very much. I really enjoyed putting it all together over the past three months.
I post on a BB forum (not DS) and they all appreciated your article.
The Cube on Sunday.
Yes, that’s for NEXT week’s board of excitement.
Also in the US, Let’s Make a Deal returns for it’s 2nd season, Family Feud is back for its 11th season (first with new host Steve Harvey), and The Price is Right with its historic 39th season.
For those of you who care about these things.
Um… Make that 12th season for the Feud.
LMAD and TPIR don’t start new episodes until the 20th, sadly!
Ah, that’s what I get for relying on TitanTV…
*goes to sit in the corner*
National Cupcake Week? Blimey, so it is. In a spectacular example of non-synergy, it’s also the Blood Pressure Association’s “Know Your Numbers” week. Since the major publicity drive for the latter involves a link-up with Guinness World Records, which these days is a bunch of hackwork considerably less reliable than Wikipedia, out of a highly winning combination of principle and spite I would recommend stuffing your face with cupcakes and hang the health consequences.
Incidentally, Bother’s Bar should declare a National week sometime. Everyone else is doing it…
(with industrial-size apologies to Tom Lehrer)
Ohhhhhhh, the game fans hate the quiz fans
And the quiz fans hate the game fans
But we’re a bunch of Mark Speight fans
He was great on Incredible Games
But during! National Bother’s Bar Week
National Bother’s Bar Week
We all make puns in brackets
That are deliberately weak
Be nice to people who
Have got worse taste than you
It’s only for a week, so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!
Awesome. It will be done at some point.
Also, Survivor starts stateside on Wednesday evening – I hope to watch it on Thursday.
And the BBUS12 Finale, of course.
Ta, will update.
As is traditional, a new ep of OC is immediately preceded by UC.
This week, it’s two institutions that are no newcomers to the Paxman Era: Durham and Magdalen Oxford.
(Again, the following is useless information, and is not intended as a form guide.)
* Durham made their first PE appearance in 1998/9, and have been seen in every series since.
* In 1999/2000, they lost their first-round match but scored enough to play again and went on to be champions – Alex Guttenplan’s Team did the same thing ten years later.
* They were once renowned for almost always making it to at least the second round – but they’ve gone out at the first hurdle in each of the last three series.
= Magdalen, meanwhile, has quite a few records to its name – the most notable being that it is the only institution thus far in the whole of UC to have won three series. (It would have been disqualified in 2003/4, though, had Auntie and Granada been tipped off “at the time of broadcast” that captain Freya McClements had moved to Trinity College Dublin by the time the final was filmed.)
= It is also the only institution to have won two consecutive series (1996/7 and 1997/8) – though Imperial came close to matching this feat in 2001/2, as did Manchester in 2006/7.
= This coming PE appearance is its eighth, the most by any Oxbridge institution. Its last was in 2007/8, when it made the semi-finals in somewhat erratic fashion.
Just on the Freya McClements thing:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5122276/Freya-McClements-apology.html
Don’t think we should re-open the whole UC debate here (aside from saying that I think Granada and the Beeb were much more at fault than Corpus and Sam Kay), but just thought I’d clear that up.
Interestingly, she now works for BBC NI. So there you go.
Shoot. I’m out of town for the weekend, so I’ll miss Raab. I’m hoping someone does a play-by-play like episodes past. In the meantime, does anyone know when the next episode is so I can try to keep that weekend free? (I’m guessing it’ll be sometime mid-October?)
In other news, out of nowhere TVTropolis (a Canadian channel that mainly airs “hit TV”) has picked up Total Wipeout. Yes, says the channel that airs reruns of the original and is planning a Canadian version too.
Yes, it’ll debut in the spring, be filmed in Argentina (yes, just like every other one, when you could have just had it built in Canada itself or filmed on the U.S. set), and unlike the UK version it will actually have a tax-free $50,000 prize.
Well we have a tax-free £10,000 prize…
50k CAD comes to £31k-ish. Still, ours could be worse. There’s a European one that has a prize of only €5,000. I think it’s Ukraine, not sure.
You also have to realize that it’s entirely possible that they’re only going to shoot a very minimal number of episodes – we only get 5 Deal eps and 5 5th Grader eps, which they rerun ad nauseum. I don’t think they’ve publicly said how many they’re intending to film. They are sending contestants down the first week of November I do believe.
(Maybe they can shoot a couple of 101 eps too?)
Either it’s me but I’m sure you mentioned they were going to block record twenty episodes.
Travis – you may be entirely right, I can’t remember what I said before.
I think V did 20 weeks (M-Tu-W strip) of the Quebecoise version… again not sure.
Over the past few days, I’ve been watching the first episode of Series Four of “Only Connect” (on Another Website). I’d like to share my thoughts on this.
First off, let me state that Victoria Coren is a find! She has an excellent voice, flawless diction, and the perfect demeanor for this type of show aimed at the type of audience that is the target.
Everything about this show–from the string-quartet theme to the use of first Green letters, then Egyptian hieroglyphics–speaks of class! The set is compact, and easy for the most basic types of camera work. The questions are intelligent, to a fault.
Would it work here in America? There’s a minor debate on Another Website about that. I am not so sure.
The intellectual audience is small enough as it is. Those television services that cater to the intelligentsia are run by snobs, who believe that anything that smacks of a game show is beneath them–or their audience. In this, they are joined by some television critics, who believe that services that allegedly “serve the public interest” should put on programs that do not interest the public! To these people, these services should show informative, educational programs, to the exclusion of anything else that does not meet their criteria!
The BBC operates a cable outlet here in the States. But BBC America subscribes to the same sort of snobbishness. They offer nothing for the kids aside from some UK-produced cartoons that are available only “on demand”. (Therefore, no “Raven”!) And they run a limited selection of BBC programs, and even run “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, whose UK content may be limited to the presence of Patrick Stewart!
BBC America could broaden its horizons by offering a “game night” that would include “Only Connect”, “Eggheads”, “QI” (which got written up in a Los Angeles Times article last October), “University Challenge”, and other shows. Instead, we get “Kitchen Nightmares” ad nauseam!