It’s round eight of Mix It Up Real Good tonight, 8pm, free to enter, and it’s a game of Five Card Draw. Do come and join us.
That clashes with JLS Does Deal Or No Deal On Channel 4. Play and chat!
MEANWHILE, this morning I’ve been using the dark arts to watch a Canadian cable show called Panic Button, which is due to air in the US soon. I saw a trailer for it and thought it looked kind of interesting – the pitch film suggests it’s set in a haunted house, but the reality appears to be a remote institution. In it five people face their fears for apparently no other reason than to try and get over them, by completing tests set out to them by a disembodied cold computer voice. The first half of the show is taken up by a sort of more extreme version of that bit with the prisoners escaping the underground dungeons on Fort Boyard, but a bit more tailored to each person’s fears. The second half is taken up by more specific challenges the first one more proactive (put your hand in the tank of snakes to retrieve a bone), the final one more of an endurance test in the vein of I’m a Celeb. Contestants quit by hitting their panic button or by yelling “panic, panic, panic!” they win if they get through all four levels.
It’s quite clear what they’ve done here is film 30 different contestants go through the game and cut and paste so that a) a selection of different fears and therefore tests are shown during each episode and that b) there will be enough drop outs so the final segment will have two people in it doing different things, with the likelihood that one will ‘win’ and one will ‘lose’. The graphics show people in different parts of the facility, but clearly it’s just the same course dressed up for different people.
If you like the Saw/Cube ideas and aesthetic (and I do), you’ll probably get a kick out of this, I did find it genuinely thrilling and un-nerving, the show’s biggest problem is that it’s basically too dark and whilst that might be acceptable for scaring the contestants, for the viewers the dark passages element is actually a bit irritating – it’s twenty minutes of screaming and not being able to see very much. However if you do like this sort of thing (and I rather suspect you already know if you like this sort of thing), it’s worth a look if you can get past the geoblocking.
Its actually filmed in an old slaughterhouse in Toronto.
Ah ha, good use of setting.
US version going to be on TruTV, also only thirty minutes long.