Yes I forgot to do this yesterday. What of it?
- The Chase – New series of this begins today with new chaser Paul Sinha off of Fighting Talk. (Weekdaily, 5pm, ITV1)
- Red or Black – already down to the five million levels. This is on all week except Tuesday. (All week except Tuesday, 8pm and 9:30pm ITV1 and 7pm and 9:15pm Saturday)
- Only Connect – Joggers vs Technologists. Hey, is that occasional BotherSOP participant and Krypton Factor semi-finalist Ronald Stewart there? I hope there will be lots of references to “jogging on”. (Monday, 8:30pm, BBC4)
- Take the Money and Run – (Tuesday, ABC)
- Minute to Win It – Reaction to McMullen appears to be overwhelmingly negative. How will it do in week two? (Tuesday, 8pm, ITV2)
- The Million Pound Drop -Live! Hopefully with all screens working this time. (Friday, 9pm, C4)
- Big Brother – In theory the celebrity final and the civilan beginning. It looks like a two hour final on Thursday (9pm-11pm, Thursday, Five) and the new one begins the following day (9:30pm, Friday, Five)
- Would I Lie to You? I never really used to watch this but after enjoyed it on 24 Hour Panel People, so. (9:30pm, Friday, BBC1)
- QI – There are still people who think this is called “chi”. (10pm, Friday, BBC2)
- Epic Win – Someone took home money thanks to our pilot write-up this week. Oh yes. (5:25pm, Saturday, BBC1)
- Strictly Come Dancing – the red carpet launch show (6:10pm, BBC1, Saturday)
Also for those fans of dodgy internet German cable channel re-broadcasting should be in heaven on Thursday night from 7.15 (UK) 8.15 (CET) as the new series of Schlag Den Star returns to Pro Seieben – and unlike the Rabb version – it will only take up two hours of your time.
(* Minor warning – Unlike Schlag Den Rabb which is seemingly streamed by a loads people in Germany, Finding a stable stream that is regularly reliable via Mr TV.Justins site at times during the last SDS series was a very hit and miss affair. It can be worth the effort though)
I’m jumping the gun, but this one seems to be working: http://www.justin.tv/xstreamx55#/w/1736545312/2
What I will do is put this up on a seperate post so it doesn’t get lost (although I will probably have to miss it tonight, regrettably).
Fort Boyard Netherlands is available online…
http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/index.php/serie?serID=7041&md5=b04eb884638474d7ab543d8523d86057#
(and for some odd reason they used the TPIR theme during the show..)
Ta! Apparently it was trending on Twitter earlier.
If nothing else, it’s got quite nice graphics, riffing on the current French set. Title music is the same as the Swede/Norwegian one, even if the titles are actually different.
Watched it now, that was OK actually, emphasis on comedy, and directed with pace.
I don’t love versions where the endgame is set up so that you might as well not bother playing it if one team has a lead, irritatingly I don’t know what penalty there is for falling behind in keys here. What I did gather but is not immediately obvious is that each prisoner knocks 50 off your gold total which is quite interesting.
It looks like there’s some sort of league system at play.
That’s probably the worst playing of Ventouse I’ve ever seen.
I’m going to guess it’s the same thing- a gold penalty for each key they have to make up (it was just that this time they ended up even in keys)…this penalty for prisoners is a good idea, better than some of the other ones the duel series has come up with (from putting hands in cylinders to making one team stand on the letter tiles before they start going for the gold)…
If the google translation of the original page is right, there are 10 eps to this series- the first 6 eps should be between the groups- each team plays against each other team in their group
Group 1- A,B,C (AvB, BvC, AvC)
Group 2- D,E,F (DvE, DvF, EvF)
after that, I’m not sure…
Both New Pointless and New The Chase doing well on The Chase’s opening afternoon, although Pointless is .5-.7m ahead depending on which figures you use.
…Is the background music that plays while the team’s deliberating or before the cash builder rounds starts on The Chase new, or was it always there?
New. Don’t ask me why they’ve added it though.
A couple of minor irritations with The Chase are starting to creep in.
I know it’s been said before, but it would be a good idea to give the team in the final a choice of set of questions A or B. At least it may reduce the moaners who say The Chaser gets far easier questions.
Second, the team ARE at a slight disadvantage during the final though, as they sort of wait for the voiceover to say their name before answering the question. The chaser doesn’t have to – so over the two minutes, if you add up the one or two second pause for each answer, it could add up for the chaser getting a couple of extra questions.
Third – purely visual. When the team win money, there is a very nice graphic on the LED screen on the front of the desk which counts up when a new total is added. However, when they loose it just sort of pathetically fades out.
Why not have it slowly counting back down to zero, before the screen goes red?
I have a real bugbear with the chase over something incredibly minor: the contestants should be CHASING the ‘chaser’. Let the chaser score as high as they can under the current rules. Then do the contestants chasing. I’ve always wondered why this isn’t done.
Wouldn’t that make the Chaser the “chasee”?
The producers do offer a random choice of question sets off camera for the Chase – the good old method of ping pong balls in a bag, they just don’t mention it on air.
Also in series 1/2 they DID have the downward-scrolling thing when the team lost (with SFX to boot), but for some reason they changed the cash font in series 3. Possibly to include minus numbers, not sure.
here’s the first contestant on Italian Minute to Win It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uynF3hp9lZA
Interesting set! Incidentally if you hadn’t gathered yet, if you just copy and paste the Youtube link it will now show up in the comment, using magic.
Incidentally I watched Minute To Win It tonight whilst I was round my Mum’s. It’s a hit!
However that last game – trying to get coins in a piggy bank using magnets, was really utterly unfairly difficult I reckon.
I also wonder if having each event ending in a numerical score (as opposed to the task based nature of the original) may grow tiresome – I would hope for more variety in objects and skills being tested.
Perhaps something like whichever team performs the task in less time gets a fixed amount of points (whatever’s proportional to the scoring system already in place)? Then, you could have INCREDIBLE
JEOPARDYhead-to-head action!Or maybe even one point for every second or two seconds left on the clock?
Wow, Shaun got absolutely THRASHED on The Chase earlier. The 2 players left got 20 steps in their 2 minutes, managed to get 2 more steps from Shaun getting questions wrong with 0 score, and only managed to get a score of 9 when the time was up!
I always thought of Shaun as the strongest Chaser, but he’s now dropped to 3rd in the Chaser rankings, with Paul technically last as he’s not been used yet. Anne leads with a good margin with 84% over Mark with just over 72%, and Shaun now has 71%
Well, if you want to get technical, Paul shouldn’t be in the rankings until he plays at least one game, and it won’t be meaningful until he’s played a fair few games 😛
Ah, so the bloke on tonight was Paul then. I’m sure his “character” will develop over time, but based on tonight although his knowledge is sound I don’t think he’s really Chaser material.
P.S. A “new” round on Pointless today – basically they split the first round into two and announced at the beginning the first player would get a question on “Boy bands” and the second on “Rock Bands”. Didn’t really work IMO.
I wssn’t sure with Anne in 2009 but she found her feet in good time. The bonus with Paul that being a stand up comedian, he probably can ad-lib on the show very well.
The split round wasn’t actually any different to the normal, original first round, just on a smaller scale. Presumably they are doing it so they can use categories that don’t have enough answers for a whole round.
Paul Sinha was pretty good after his ropey start I thought. He was on with Richard Bacon the other week and mentioned that he had rather a result on one episode, denying some old ladies rather a lot of money
I’m sure they’ve done the split round at least once before – maybe very early on in series 2 or 3.