Did you play a lot of games over Christmas?
One thing I was sent was an episode of Family Game Night, currently airing on family channel The Hub in the US. I think it’s quite neat, and would fit quite well into an ITV or BBC Saturday early evening schedule with a few tweaks.
And you can read about it in my latest feature.
I quite like Todd Newton, and doing a little bit of research bought up a question I would be intrigued if any of my American readers would be able to answer. Newton was meant to be doing a documentary for the Travel Channel last year called Are You Game? where he travels around the world and competes on gameshows with a camera crew in tow. Did the series go out and was it any good? Not much has been written about it anywhere.
If I have my information right, the pilot (shot in Japan) was shown a few times…then the series was “retooled” into “World’s Wackiest Game Shows”, which was just Todd sitting in a studio showing clips. It got a few episodes.
I think I saw the pilot — the best part of it IMHO was when he went for a warm-up at Muscle Park, an arcade with lots of games inspired by or taken from Japanese game shows.
The Japanese game show he went on looked like it wasn’t a real existing one — I’d wager it was staged just for the pilot, and wasn’t much to speak of. Still, I appreciate that they took the care to explain some of the whys and whatfors even if I don’t believe a real Japanese game show would award a car to the MVP of a stunt show.
Speaking of Todd Newton, he also hosted the short-lived program World’s Wackiest Game Shows. Which I think aired for four half-hour episodes on the Travel Channel last Summer. I don’t think Travel aired the remaining episodes after the fourth one, but maybe I’m wrong.