We’ve not had a round-up thread for a while, so let’s do one now:
ITV fined about £3k (including fees) over the I’m a Celeb rat-eating incident. Regardless of how ridiculous I think the situation is, I’m glad that ITV are at least taking responsibility for it and haven’t just left Manning and D’Acampo out to dry. Someone should do some sort of Rodent Injury Lawyers 4 U skit, it would go down a storm on Radio 4 I imagine.
A late arrival for the Board of Excitement, Deal or No Deal‘s Love Week begins today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMToQon8jYA&feature=related
Fort Boyard. In German. Yes.
Ooh, I’m glad you’ve found that I’ve not actually seen the German remake yet.
I found it by accident, hehe. It’s now gotten very hard for me to pick my favourite 1-hour version. Toss up between Germany 00-02, Armenia 09 and UK 98-01 for me.
I’ll very probably stick my FB features up this evening, I think.
Look out for the strikingly handsome young man wearing glasses 3 rows behind Noel today.
That was me BTW.
So was that his real beard?
I’m afraid not
I was just a row too far back to not be in the shadows of the audience. There was a rather memorable (and amusing) incident cut out of today’s show though.
Wipeout exclusive but not too revealing preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ48S8NSI9Y – basically firing paint and foam at people!
Mmm. I will be honest and suggest that that’s a little disappointing…
That’s what I was thinking – the obstacles should be good enough not to need such childish extras. That final obstacle intrigues me though – can’t really work out what it’s supposed to be!
I notice that picture of The Cafeteria is basically the same thing. Bad feeling about this season, but we’ll see what happens.
I predict that final obstacle involves crossing a series of podiums whilst those things swing, potentially sweeping them off their feet.
Only Connect Connecting Walls going online? BRILLIANT idea.
I remember TV-Norge got in trouble when a Mole-contestant stabbed a rabbit to death, and they had to re-edit the episode before they could show it. A year later a guy on Farmen buthered a rabbit by use of a hammer, and TV2 got away with it…
The British counterpart to this was that there was no apparent objection to some of the contestants killing the chickens they were given as prizes in the first season (aagh, series, damnit) of Survivor, but the very concept of it was dismissed with alarm in the first series of our Big Brother. I don’t understand the difference,
It’s also not the first time a rat was killed on a British reality show – Survivor UK had one bit where they caught and drowned some rats in a pot so they could be eaten.
Uni Challenge last night, then.
After the excitement of last week’s Qualification quarter-final, it was the turn of the first Elimination match, to reduce the number of teams to seven.
Girton Cambridge and St Andrews both entered it on the back of heavy defeats in their preliminary QFs, against St John’s Oxford and Manchester respectively. Before that, Girton had squeaked past Nottingham and St George’s London, while St Andrews comfortably beat Somerville Oxford but looked over their shoulders at Newnham Cambridge.
Despite having been on something of a downward curve since the Somerville match, the Scottish university had still been the more impressive of the two, particularly given the quick buzzer work of Christopher Flaherty. Girton, in all fairness, hadn’t exactly set the world alight, except perhaps for when they racked up 100 points before the St George’s medics had even troubled their buzzers. So I had the favourites’ tag on St Andrews…
But it was Girton who were first out of the blocks, and they dominated the first quarter of the match, with captain Christopher Cameron making the first four correct buzzes. St Andrews could only manage two penalties, and after the first picture round found themselves 70-(-10) down. After that, though, it was their turn to take control, with Flaherty once again on song. They didn’t fare terribly well on the bonuses, however, and thus it took them until just before the second picture round to draw level at 85 apiece.
They wasted no time taking the lead, however, and when Flaherty netted his seventh starter of the night to help extend that lead to 30, it looked like they were well on their way. But the last few minutes were to prove that UC can be a funny old game sometimes.
Girton halved the deficit after Allanah Brown-Kerr picked up only their second starter since the first picture round, then Daniel Spencer produced “Descartes” when Paxman hadn’t given all the bare bones of the question. This gave the Cambridge side a set of bonuses asking to spell out two homophones. They got the first bonus no problem, but on the second Spencer stumbled spelling ‘marquee’, saying “double-u e” when of course he meant “double e”. His protests were understandable, but Paxo was probably just about fair in marking the team as wrong. It didn’t rattle them, though, and they easily got the third bonus – and, quite remarkably, they were back in front.
Then Cameron got his fifth starter, and another two bonuses meant that St Andrews suddenly found themselves needing more than one starter to win. But the gong went before they could even get the one, and Girton had pulled off (in my opinion, anyway) the surprise of the series so far.
So St Andrews are out, and afterwards one couldn’t help but wonder how they could be so impressive against the strong Somerville side and ultimately fail to really follow that up despite Flaherty’s continued excellent work…
M’learned colleague Mr. Elmes asks after the surprise of this year’s University Challenge series. Taking account of result and score, I’m going to name St Andrews’ second-round win over Newnham Cambridge (9 November), when Mr. Flaherty’s nine starters eclipsed a mediocre (13/37) bonus conversion rate, and the questions fell just wrong for the opposition.
Posterity might show that the narrow win for St John’s Oxford over Loughborough (16 November) was the closest anyone got to the champions. But then it might not, I don’t know the upcoming results, I don’t want to know the upcoming results, and anyone who spoils it will be ruthlessly hunted down.
Unrelatedly: BARB have provided the multi-channel top 10s for 28th December – 3rd January. While Only Connect doesn’t feature, I have a suspicion that its first episode this series took place on 5th January. That would be an acceptable reason for its absence. Tenth place was 244,000, first place 400k.
Normally they’d have published up to the middle of January by now. They really are dragging their heels, probably thanks to the new ‘system’.
They’ve published up to the 10th of January.
Only Connect was the ninth most watched broadcast on BBC4 that week, although comparing that week with the previous two suggests that you got unlucky (Or lucky, the boost in ratings iirc you got this year might have been partially down to it) and hit an extraordinary popular week for BBC4.
Another way to look at it is that you were the BBC 4 winner for Monday, and that’s nothing to sneeze at!
Technically known as a “tentpole” show – i.e. the viewing figures either side of our slot were lower. I think the first three shows were tentpoles; one of the Mandela shows beat us in week 4 (I think our viewing took a big hit due to CBB that week).
How big an overlap is there between lateral thinking puzzle based quizes and celebrity big brother, anyway?
Given that 80% of the contestants were under 35, possibly more than you’d think.
They’ve finally caught up – ratings were:
w/e 17 Jan 2010 – 4th place, 388,000
w/e 24 Jan 2010 – 3rd place, 422,000
Hooray! I would hope that this is now a BBC 4 staple, at the very least.
Thinking about it further, I would have thought that OC got demographics that most shows (and, hence, commercial broadcasters) would kill for – evidently reasonably strong among the youngish, but highly skewed towards the intelligent and probably the affluent, even though most game shows skew wayyyy down towards mums-with-kids and the commerically less desirable. (Or is anyone savvy enough to enjoy OC savvy enough to avoid ads?)
By way of comparison, does anyone remember who advertised when ITV broadcast University Challenge?
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100211/tuk-tv-host-to-be-locked-in-steel-box-6323e80.html
Apparently this was going to be a TV thing, but Tim apparently couldn’t wait for that long. Hmm.