Actually a few things to watch out for this week:
- Fifty 50 Show – Episode three of the gameshow discussion podcast EVERYBODY is talking about is set to feature Only Connect dungeon master David J Bodycombe as a guest, so do tune in. (Monday, from the RSS feed you’ve set up on iTunes)
- The Celebrity Chase – not normally billed, but Tim Vine is in this one. Will he Fluke his way to vic…*dies* (Sunday 6:55pm, ITV1)
- Breakaway – yeah, we quite liked this last time in the end, and now thanks to our success in Le Tour and the Olympics, everyone now understands cycling and can therefore understand the clever ideas behind this game. Cough. There are changes to this series, so I will set up a seperate show discussion post for it tomorrow. Hope its kept the theme tune. We discussed series one here. (Weekdaily, 4:30pm, BBC2)
- Only Connect – Scribes vs Ciphers. No, it’s not the second series of Jamie Theakston’s The Search we’ve all been secretly waiting for. OR IS I…oh. (Monday, 8:30pm, BBC4)
- The Pointless Book is out – if what we’ve been told is correct, there IS a game show segment. We may have helped out. (Thursday)
- Avanti un Altro – Well there’s not much else on until Saturday, only to say that I’ve watched every episode of this this series so far and I still love it. I’m hoping to have a feature done soon, and I believe I’m pencilled in to do Fifty 50 next Sunday where I will insist on talking about it. Enthusiastically. I just wish the Mediaset player stopped tending to spoil who the finalist is going to be and how much they’re playing for in their thumbnail. (Every day including weekends, watch it online)
- Bob’s Full House– A lot of people have been waiting a long time for this, the only real version of Terry Mardell’s quiz bingo format that anyone properly liked but that’s because it’s the only one with Bob Monkhouse at his peak (although we accept that Lucky Numbers got more than one series, The Biggest Game in which town, exactly?). I don’t know which years Challenge have got, for me I always quite liked the early years when they’d insert trick “is it A or B? No it’s neither.” questions in the quickfire round, but I’m sure what they’ve got will be excellent. Hope this does well for them. (Saturday, 8pm, Challenge TV)
IN OTHER NEWS, Wetten Dass…? returned to German screens last night, you can watch the bets here. Slackline, where a man attempts to score goals by doing overhead kicks on a tightrope (he must score four in a row in three minutes without touching the ground) is probably the most impressive and indeed was voted the best bet, but I also quite enjoyed Rudern, where a man attempts to wakeboard behind an eight-man team of rowers.
Challenge has picked up the final series from 1989.
Next Saturday will be another interesting one in the Netherlands. Finals of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and ‘Beat the Best’, while SBS6 has premieres with a new panel show with hypnotized celebrities and the return of the big money drop (show me the money).
I’ve scheduled Fifty 50 to go out on Monday, by the way. The first episode going out on the Sunday was just an early release, Mondays are hopefully going to be the norm. I record on Sundays to give me plenty of time to edit, unlike last week.
Edited, thanks.
For completeness, I quite liked One To Win at the time.
Also there is some Trump Card, the US version of the One True Bingo Format, on YouTube. It’s more old-school than the University of Bologna.
Episode 3 is now up! There’s two versions: the short version which is about 28 minutes long, and the long version which is over an hour long.