Let’s have another Round-up. What’s on your mind?
I am quite excited about the prospect of Tim Westwood entering Celebrity Big Brother. I think if he does it, he’s got a massive chance of winning.
Meanwhile, sticking to Celebrity Big Brother, this evening I watched last night’s episode with Vinnie trapped in a phone booth because it sounded like an interesting task. Now for a game of “when press releases don’t quite match up to the reality,” we’re trying to find the quotes on the official site but that seems to be down so I’m going to take them from Inside Big Brother, quoting from the official site:
Speaking to the Big Brother website, task producer Ben Riley said: “It’s going to be dark and devious. There’s a real theme: Hell Lies in Others. It’s going to be exciting.”
He then explained that the task was based on “big American movies like Saw and Phone Booth” and it would be the largest scale task in Big Brother history.
Riley teased: “We might see some conflict, falling out and maybe a bit of manipulation.”
So with that you’d expect something with a bit of menace, oppression and excitement. What we actually got was celebrity maths, Stephanie Beecham sticking hands up some chickens (with gloves, mind) and some very mild practical jokes. The biggest task in Big Brother history? Disappointing.
Meanwhile details of ITV’s answer to the question “how can we fill up our PSB arts quota now The South Bank Show has finished whilst making lots of money?” Popstar to Operastar have been released, featuring as it does Myleene Klass and Alan Titchmarsh – together at last – as hosts and Darius off of Pop Idol as a contestant. And Marcella Detroit from Shakespeare’s Sister. Hmm. We probably won’t be going out of our way to watch this in honesty, although if someone from ITV wants to promise us that Darius will be doing an operatic version of Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time I could be persuaded otherwise.
Update: And the new housemate is, in fact, Ivana Trump. Sad face.
In an interesting move, Channel 4 are to show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire…
…The Indian version!
Obviously linking in to Bollywood season / Slumdog Millionaire.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? India SpecialWednesday 13 January
11:30pm – 1:15am
Channel 4
Celebrity special of Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Presented by Shahrukh Khan, the quiz features a host of Bollywood actors, directors and screenwriters.
Yet again the producers seem to forget CBB is actually just a few weeks long, not three months, and instead of starting kicking people out they’re adding to the mix. Anyone moving in won’t be booed though as due to the snow the crowd has been [url=http://www.bbspy.co.uk/news/exclusive-no-crowd-o-tomorrow.html]axed.[/url]
Ah, that didn’t work then!
Try normal HTML. [a html=”link”]Link-me-do[/a] with the square brackets replaced by pointy ones.
I saw bits of that task- those producers should look around and see some of the BBUS comps- some of them are quite inventive (but to be fair, some of the BBUK tasks are as well- I remember one where the HM’s dressed up as board game pawns and they turned the house into a giant board game, which was fun to see)
Something like Carcassonne or Settlers of Catan, rather than something like Snakes and Ladders or Ludo, I hope.
it was a roll and move game, with “Diary Room” chance cards…
Well Fox got bit in the butt not picking The Cube up…
http://buzzerblog.flashgameshows.com/fox-drops-our-little-genius-contestants-briefed-too-much/
Hardly the closest a gameshow can get to scandal these days.
(c.f. Every Call and Lose scandal of the past few years)
I’d like to say this is a great loss to the world of entertainment.
It isn’t, though.
Meanwhile Treguard aka Hugo Myatt is this week’s Digital Spy icon.
At some point, we’ll stop rehashing Digital Spy news stories.
Popstar To Operastar: Few interesting things to say here.
1. Friday nights? This one’s going after an older demographic, clearly. Although I’m 23 and will still be watching this rather than getting drunk.
2. A judging panel of four, two of whom are the mentors? Innteresting. Reasonable balance of the panel (classical mezzo, classical tenor, pop tenor, non-singing enthusiast), although I’d have preferred a second female and/or a lower male voice on the panel. (Disclaimer 1: I’m a bass/baritone.)
3. I really, honestly assumed Yvie Burnett would be the vocal coach on this, given that she was once a classical singer and her teaching method incorporates both classical and contemporary singing. (Disclaimer 2: I have had a lesson with a teacher trained in this method myself.)
Answer so obvious I didn’t realise it; it’s been rushed out during Dancing on Ice season, so the training will have been happening while Yvie was working on X-Factor.
Are we currently spoiler-protecting Sell Me The Answer? I’ve just seen an episode on Sky 2 which presumably is a repeat from Sky 1 weeks or months ago so I would imagine not, but…
I’ve just watched a contestant be apparently the first to win the GBP 25k jackpot, with the GBP 25k question apparently proving rather easier than Q8/Q9/Q10, though obviously you don’t have traders’ help.
It occurs to me that if you know you’re going to try the GBP 25k jackpot question then you don’t really care whether you’re turning down a guaranteed 10k, a guaranteed 8.4k or a guaranteed 2k, so trading large sums for late answers isn’t nearly the problem that it is if you’re intending to take the money after question 10.
A solution would be to say that the jackpot question is not worth “a guaranteed 25k” but “+15k”, so you only win the 25k jackpot if you’ve got all the questions right yourself – and if you’ve traded all but, say, 4k away by Q10 then you’re playing for 19k rather than 25k.
Cynically, I have a suspicion that the jackpot question would be a lot harder if you were turning down a guaranteed 2k to try it than if you were turning down a guaranteed 10k…
Reality Show that would be awesome but will never, ever, happen:
Nomic: The Gameshow.
Uh oh, methinks there’s a troll on the loose… How often does that happen???
Very irritating, but fingers crossed I’ve put new measures in place which should eliminate most of it.