What’s on the board, Miss Ford?
- The Bother Series of Poker Event 2 (Sunday, Full Tilt, 8pm GMT/1500 ET) – the discussion page for this week’s game is here.
- The Amazing Race (Sunday, CBS) – Well, a week after the first episode and I can’t remember many of the teams except for Mario and Luigi the detectives (one of them is probably called Bob, they always are) and Team Lesbian. That probably makes them my favourites by default.
- Only Connect (Monday, BBC4, 8:30pm) – it’s the final heat of this this week and this week’s cleverly diametrically opposed types are the Booksellers vs Bowlers. I don’t know how the next round has been drawn so expect lots of amusing and inaccurate guesswork.
- The Krypton Factor (Tuesday, ITV1, 7:30pm) – it’s the first semi-final! Ratings for this haven’t really held up that well, but I’d like to see it come back for a third series and put right what went wrong this time round.
- Survivor (Thursday, CBS) – well embarrassingly I haven’t watched ep 2 yet, I was meant to last night, but instead the new The Pet Shop Boys live DVD came through the post so I watched that instead, and as such I intend to wear a cardboard box over my head for most of the next week. I’m sure it is very good though, and will probably watch it later.
- The Bubble (Friday, BBC2, 10pm) – To be honest doesn’t deserve to be here but I put it here just so I can say that I thought it was neither good nor bad, it’s a bit like what you’d expect the TV equivilent of sensual deprivation to be. Which is sort of ironic.
- Ant and Dec’s Push the Button (Saturday, ITV1, 7:45pm) – this should be quite good fun, basically two families taking on several tasks whilst a £100,000 money clock counts down and likely to have a few entertaining Ant and Dec cheeky twists. This is actually recording on Thursday, if anyone’s going do please feel free to do a recording report – I’m not interested in spoilers of results, but I’m always intrigued by the format and what you think of it. I know contestants are asked not to divulge stuff on the internet, two words: assumed name, and don’t say anything that makes it obvious it’s you. So twelve words really. I would go down to this myself, but I’ve only got so much leave and wages, generous as my leave allowance is. Also it’s at rather audience-unfriendly Pinewood. Admittedly, so is The Whole 19 Yards, but that should finish early enough to catch the last train, y’know? In theory. Anyway, it would be quite good if the theme for this was ‘Push the Button’, the controversial Israeli Eurovision entry by Teapacks from a few years ago.
- Solitary v4.0 (Saturday, Fox Reality) – Well last week we had the hilarious game of “input these phrases into the computer where each letter on the keyboard stands for a different letter on screen, deleting everything if you type the wrong one in” (needless to say, I’d be fascinated to know if someone did accidentally type “This sucks Vag” genuinely or someone on the production team has quite an amusingly risqué sense of humour) followed by the always fun Twister meets Laserquest meets neck pain treatment. Again, I’d be quite interested to know how many rounds of a treatment the producers have prepared beforehand, and if there are some sort of hard-and-fast rules they have to use on the fly if the contestants are a bit hardier than originally thought. Anyway, this is episode five, which I predict to be like episode four, but with one less person in it.
“Anyway, it would be quite good if the theme for this was ‘Push the Button’, the controversial Israeli Eurovision entry by Teapacks from a few years ago.”
You mean the quite controversial entry, deemed not bad enough to disqualify, unlike Georgia’s Vladimir Putin inspired song.
I Don’t Want To Put In, or something like that, wasn’t it? It would be even funnier if Push the Button had that for the theme.
In slightly related news, I rather quite like the Macedonian ESC entrant. Wow.
Saturday Night Ratings
1 – In It to Win It – 6.81m (28.0%) – Highest rating this series
2 – Let’s Dance – 6.25m (26.8%)
5 – Take Me Out – 4.99m (20.5%)
6 – All Star Mr & Mrs – 4.71m (19.5%)
7 – Weakest Link – 4.43m (19.3%) – Repeated from Friday night on BBC Three
Did the Mirror really describe Only Connect as weird?
I haven’t found that reference, but on 11 January 2010, The Mirror did describe it as the “maddest quiz show on television”.
I observe that there’s been pretty much no mention at all of anything to do with the popping of the question on yesterday’s DOND – which certainly received a negative reaction on Digital Spy.
(THE FOLLOWING MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS)
Anyway, this series of Uni Chal provided yet another cracker last night, as Edinburgh and Jesus Oxford did battle in the second Elimination QF.
Edinburgh nudged past UCLan and Regent’s Park Oxford to reach the last eight, while Jesus beat Clare Cambridge then came from behind to beat Warwick. Imperial London and Emmanuel Cambridge were found to be respectively too hot to handle in the preliminary QFs.
The match was more or less even stevens up to the first picture round, before the Scottish side upped a gear, bagging four consecutive starters to open up a 70 point lead. They also brought out quite a sneer from Paxo when they said “Bournemouth” instead of “Blandford Forum”. Jesus’s knowledge of theme tunes from cult 60s drama series during the music round helped them slice the deficit to 20, but then Edinburgh kicked away again, and when their lead reached 185-110 with only a few minutes to go, surely they were well on their way?
But, as was the case when they looked down and out against Warwick, Jesus had other ideas. Tom Speller buzzed in quickly on a starter about Sonia Sotomayor, then Will Doherty bagged two in a row, both asking for the next term in a sequence. (Expect Weaver to bring up OC here on Sunday.) The Oxford side flew in with answers to the bonuses, often interrupting Paxo, and in no time at all the gap was down to just 15.
Then Speller seized his fifth starter of the night, and this gave Jesus a set of Name That Decade bonuses. Still going like an express train, they dropped the first one, then got the second, but before they could answer the third, the gong sounded.
It has never happened before in the Paxman Era that there have been three ties in the same series, and this after going five years without one. Good things really do come to those who wait. The breaking starter was on matrices, and Andrew Matheson’s knowledge of them kept Edinburgh in this year’s competition by the skin of their teeth.
Neither side deserved to lose such a match, and it is a shame that Jesus are now eliminated, especially after that huge fightback. For Edinburgh, though, the prize is a clash with Manchester next week, in the first of the final QFs for one of the two remaining semi-final places.
Girton Cambridge and Imperial do battle in the other final QF, and one would expect wins for Manchester and Imperial. But this series has had more than its fair share of twists and turns…
Another very enjoyable Only Connect. My better half soon quickly took to rooting against one of the teams and – staying spoiler-free – cheered at the thrilling conclusion. I really liked last week’s Gamblers team, though am not immediately sure how far they might get.
THere doesw sometimes seem to be a bit of a tendency – and this is absolutely no bad thing – for round one questions to seem to be based around one little-known and interesting fact (Tony Blair’s brother is something, Racehorses can have a maximum of something) and then finding some facts that are a bit like that and interesting in their own way, as well as easier to solve. Is that fair?
There is definitely a flavour of question where clue 1 is incongruous with the others that it puts you off answering what is otherwise a fairly simple connect. Pakistan was an example this week. My favorite was S1’s “Architecture was a former Olympic discipline”.
Incidentally, the Blair thing was not intended like that. It was very hard to find the name of a current judge that was well-known. It was going to be Lady Butler-Sloss and she’d be clue 4 but she’s retired, as have many who have led ‘high profile’ cases, inquests, inquiries etc.