Sorry I can’t guarantee excitement at the Bar this week, I’m off for the week which means being almost completely out of the loop, but I’m having great fun playing cards in London.
There’s a new Fifty Fifty show out, this week Lewis Murphy talks to David J Bodycombe and Travis Penery about the current state of Saturday night television.
Meanwhile it sounds like That Puppet Game Show is being moved to 5:15pm from 31st August, it looks like my prediction of it being “not a hit, but not a Don’t Scare the Hare style flop either” is only going to be half right.
Speaking of non-hits, Take on the Twisters pulled just 925k yesterday (a repeat of Pointless got 2.7m, for comparison). Was idly wondering on Twitter how many episodes of The Chase it would take to build the ITV audience back to its usual level, it took about a week to lose it. Mark Labbett reckons about a fortnight, Richard Osman has plumped for one. I suspect the answer is somewhere in between the two. We’ll find out come September 2nd, and Richard has suggested he thinks new episodes of Pointless will start then as well. Summer’s over everyone!
In other news, here is an interesting discussion on some intriguing Korean shows, and Celebrity Big Brother starts tomorrow. Also The Great British Bake Off did quite well.
Not having seen “Take On The Twisters”, I reckon I’ve not missed that much.
Perhaps ITV can arrange to import the American episodes of “The Chase” and use them as a filler. They may have to figure out some degree of filler themselves if they do. I have not timed it out, but I suspect that our version comes in at less than the forty-five minutes or so (less commercials) than is common for the U.K. version. (Which is to say that ours probably has more commercials. There are more commercial breaks, that’s for sure!)
Interesting observation: after seeing four of the eight episodes of the first American series, it’s interesting to note that Brooke Burns is not easily broken up by a cleverly-written question. So, the writers have gone over to a Plan B–see if they can break up the Beast. There is usually one question per week that gets Mark Labbett all flustered, and the audience loves it!
Wonder what would happen if it were the Barrister–Mr. Stone Face–instead of the Beast in these situations.
Friday’s episode of Le Cube has a first-for-France event, perhaps aided by the recording stopdown between episodes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPPsQweSWds
Also, this YouTube user has posted the entire French series so far:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MyPlaySongs
And he’ll stay most likely alone since Cube has been axed – Nagui will be back hosting N’oubliez pas les Paroles in september.
As France 2 struggles to save money on programming costs, he will also have a very weak lead-in program for September (talk-show) – and Lagaf’s Juste Prix returning this Monday won’t help, too. (with a nice addition for this new season – the third pricing game will be always played head-to-head. Some Bigdil spirit floating in the air, eh.)