Round-up 29th Jan ’10

By | January 29, 2010

It’s very very late, but I think it would be good to have a quick round-up of some stories covered in the comments you might have missed:

  • Evil Dr Will’s favourite man Neil Patrick Harris is hosting the The Cube pilot for CBS, and is even producing it, intriguingly.
  • There’s going to be an Australian version of Countdown. Elizabeth Murdoch’s Shine Media will be producing it for Aussie Public Service channel SBS.
  • It’s the official press release for Mission 2110!
  • Deal or No Deal is searching for contestants again. SURELY THIS IS YOUR TIME, MISTER AL. You have until the end of March.
  • It’s the Celebrity Big Brother final tonight! NEWS.

23 thoughts on “Round-up 29th Jan ’10

  1. Ryan

    Mr. Brig – ’tis for CBS, the cube pilot 🙂 NBC have done that horrible rip off.

    Reply
    1. NJ

      You sir, are not the only one. Neil Patrick Harris is on my list of people I’m glad are still alive.

      Reply
  2. Alex

    Apparently Pete Waterman’s writing/producing the UK Eurovision entry this year. Sounds good. About 20 years late, but good.

    Reply
  3. Mister Al

    SURELY THIS IS YOUR TIME, MISTER AL.

    Doubt it. I’ll stick another application in but that Banker is well scared of me, innit.

    (By the way, did we all spot Ryan in the audience for today’s game? He was the one with more energy and enthusiasm than the rest of the pilgrims combined. He certainly made me, sitting slightly behind him, look like the slothful idiot I am.)

    Reply
    1. Ryan

      Awesome! I am flattered and look forward to seeing the broadcast once I get a hold of it!

      Reply
  4. Chris M. Dickson

    Anyone else see Mastermind tonight? Oof.

    If you didn’t, expect the gory details within the Week, if the world doesn’t get overexcited about it tomorrow.

    Seems that Fridays are the new Mondays, with a MM/QI hard quiz hour to rival UC/OC.

    Reply
    1. Jennifer Turner

      Yikes! And I don’t think anyone’s ever scored just one point on general knowledge either. There’s no way I’m attempting to spell the guy’s name though, so an update on UKGS will have to wait until either the show goes up on iPlayer, David Clark gets his review up on LAM, or someone else does it.

      Reply
      1. Jennifer Turner

        Though having said that, it’s now on iPlayer, so that’s sorted.

        Reply
      2. jakob1978

        Iv’e seen people do badly on general knowledge before (I remember a celebrity episode with Adam Hart Davies, where he did really well on his specialist, but hardly scored anything in the general knowledge), but i’ve never seen anyone stumble so early in his specialist and never recover. Felt rather sorry for him.

        Reply
        1. Jennifer Turner

          I’d forgotten that, but you’re absolutely right, she did.

          Reply
  5. Des Elmes

    Tonight’s episode of In It To Win It was definitely the scrappiest one I’ve seen – how often do you get a prize fund as low as £15k, and not one but two contestants twice failing to come up with the right answer to a Red Area question?

    And it will surely have proved to those who didn’t already know, or still had doubts, that they choose contestants based on their personality rather than their knowledge.

    And no doubt not everyone watching will have been best pleased about Charlie fortuitously winning £7,500…

    Reply
    1. Travis P

      £25,000 was the lowest prize fund achieved on the show. Tonight’s episode simply broke the record by a margain.

      The household (me included) wanted Charlie to win something since he did make it an entertaining show and what has happened to him recently. Fair play to him, any other show he wouldn’t get far.

      He did confess in the red area, quote “I have a brain”. With the final question was he babbling on about Educating Rita or something else?

      Reply
      1. Des Elmes

        More than likely I’m stating the obvious here, but there will have been some viewers who took a dislike to Charlie because of the show he put on, even with his recent tribulations – which is why I said “no doubt not everyone will have been best pleased” by his win.

        I wasn’t one of these viewers BTW – I was more neutral on the whole thing than anything else.

        Reply
        1. Travis P

          I know what you mean. Folks on Digital Spy are pretty split with his performance tonight.

          Reply
    2. KP

      I’ve never liked In It because of the way you can luck into sometimes much bigger wins than that. (Sarah from PokerFace lucked into a £32,500 win before her PokerFace appearance and I almost cheered the panto villain against her in the final because of it…)

      Quiz shows are quiz shows and luck shows are luck shows, IMO – and I don’t like them meeting in this sort of way.

      I am a grumpy purist.

      Reply
      1. Gizensha

        Personally I don’t mind them meeting, though do tend to agree that the way they meet in In It feels wrong. Feels fine in, say, 19 Keys and probably would in a hypothetical quiz adaptation of Killer Bunnies And The Quest For The Magic Carrot* – Answering questions in either of those increases the odds of winning, rather than being able to luck into a win from doing nothing.

        *Actually – There’s a lotto quiz idea for you – X minutes of questions, some asked sequentially, some on the buzzer, each correct answer gives the player a number, maybe some possibility of losing numbers, stealing numbers, whatever, fill a draw machine with numbers equal to the amount of numbers the players own, draw, winning player wins the prize. And the Killer Bunnies victory mechanic gets shown on national television. What should the prize be? Probably about the average prize pool on In It or the average daily prize given away on 1 vs 100. Not a very interesting quiz, mind, but a fairer bog-standard quiz with some luck basis than In It.

        Reply
  6. art begotti

    I think I might have spotted an error in QI from a couple nights ago, but I’m not sure who to report it to, nor what difference it would make at this point. They used a bit of Obama footage in a question regarding how many men have served as president of the US. He says that 44 Americans have held the post and got a ten-point forfeit for it (he was even in the score roundup at the end), with the logic that Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, and so his terms are often counted as separate, though still by the same person.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CH5JLPsPtU (starting at about 4:10)
    However, I’m not sure the QI Elves took into consideration the case of David Atchison, who effectively served as president for a day (although some of the technicalities are kinda up in the air). Thus, there were in fact 44 men who served as president.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rice_Atchison#.22President_for_One_Day.22
    It’s an incredibly trivial thing, but it’s something you’d think they’d pick up on and make a question out of on its own.

    Reply

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