Exciting news this afternoon, Michael Kelpie from Potato (the ITV studio who make The Chase) announced on Twitter that they will be making a proper local version of Ninja Warrior. Potentially this is quite exciting, the Japanese one built up a cult following on Challenge over the years (although it had to be redubbed after the Stuart Hall allegations) and it’s been a number of years since we had an obstacle course show in the form of Total Wipeout. I just hope it’s a bit more impressive than American Ninja Warrior which I caught once and appeared to be mainly people running up and down a beach. Edit: If you want apply you can through this link.
You’re Back In The Room, a hypnotism game show with Phillip Schofield where people have to do physical and mental challenges despite having been comically hypnotised by Keith Barry beforehand films at ITV Towers 19th-21st January, tickets at Lost in TV.
Meanwhile if you want to join Emma Willis in an air-hanger in Farnborough in Saturdays in February for Prized Apart, you can do that through SRO. Still not sure on the logistics of that, the suggestion was it was going to be live, but Willis will also be hosting The Voice going out on Saturday nights. So who knows?
In other news, there was so much good quizzy extraneous stuff in the Schlag den Raab commentary broadcast on Saturday that as an experiment I’m looking into editing it down to just that (so you can see what you’re missing) and uploading it for Christmas. Fingers crossed tomorrow night or Xmas Eve morning.
American Ninja Warrior got better – the first couple seasons were more about training for the real Sasuke, hence running on the beach, but eventually they changed the format to essentially be their own competition, instead of being a way to choose which competitors to send to Japan.
They changed it to their own competition when the original Japanese show got cancelled I believe- they build several qualifying courses and a final course in Vegas now (no one has beaten it yet)
I just had to check, I don’t think Sasuke has been cancelled – the original production company went bankrupt and Tokyo Broadcasting System took it in house according to Wikipedia. There was one in April this year.
They’ve gone to one a year now since 2012 and seem to be getting into a rhythm of it. However one of the obstacles involves actual proper swimming and…I don’t like.
So does this mean any future Ninja Warrior will be shown on ITV or ITV2, or are the two events being kept separate now (American Ninja 1 and 2 have been shown on Challenge, but none of the others)