The Cellar

It’s The Olympics! Wooh!

So obviously that means we have to “do” Going For Gold, the euroquiz which originally offered a trip to the Seoul Olympics as its grand prize. Kelly suggested that it was only meant to be one series, but every year they decided to do another one and ten series later it ended.

Today at Lord’s cricket ground is the ranking round of the archery to determine seedings for the first round proper tomorrow. That’s a little bit like Going For Gold isn’t it! So to celebrate, we thank the several people on Youtube who caught the Going For Gold full Hans Zimmer/Sandy Mclellan theme montage on a Challenge repeat the other night, and it looks like GameShowFunTime had the best quality, so here it is now:

I always found Going For Gold, like Blockbusters, a bit dull when growing up. Ace theme, though.

Right, I’m busy for the next few days (although I will still be sproadically around) so here’s a Board of Excitement to tide you over:

• The Great Escape (Sunday Night, TNT in the US) – Episode two of this turned out to be slightly more interesting than episode one, so we’ll see.
• It’s my birthday (Monday, all day) – 31, in case you were wondering.
• Amazing Race Australia (Monday) – This is still a great series generally, but there have been fewer surprising challenges compared to the first one this time round I feel.
• All New Blockbusters (Challenge, 8pm) – The new series begins with a christmas celebrity special.
• Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: The People Play - Three evenings of live shows beginning Monday at 9pm with members of the public. This time round you can play along at home and the results will get announced from the studio, and there’s an “Ask the Nation” lifeline. There will be a Show Discussion post set-up for these specials.
• King of The Mountains (Thursday 8:30pm, Pokerstars) – it’s Le Tour, so it’s time for Le Tour(noi). $10 buy-in tournament. All the details here. It’s open to anybody elegible.
• Reflex (Friday) – This is filming up in Salford. We have people going so look out for a write up.
• Fort Boyard – 2011 episodes on TV5 (not being shown in the original broadcast order, in case you were wondering) on Saturday at 5:24 apparently, although it was meant to be 5:26 this week just gone and they slipped in a ten minute extra programme. Meanwhile episode 2 of the 2012 season goes out on France 2 at 7:35pm UK time, although that was about ten minutes late yesterday as well. Those pesky French and their timekeeping, eh? Discuss the 2012 season through this link.

With a celebrity special on 9th July. And what a spectacular birthday present that will be.

Do you remember All New Blockbusters? It was briefly popular for about a fortnight.

Weekdays 8pm
Challenge TV

Well it’s been what THE NATION has been crying out for, a return to good old classic quizzes based around letters of the alphabet that’s already been bought back twice previously. I can’t say I’m that excited to be honest, although we like Simon Mayo so you never know.

I don’t know what sort of numbers it’s going to attract and how much it’s going to need to be a decent term viable proposition although they’ve advertised the hell out of it which is likely to help. 40 episodes have been filmed originally intended to go as two runs of twenty, although despite being originally informed as being an hour long look in fact to be a much more sensible half an hour. Maybe they’ve got two episodes out of each one with the magic of the edit suite. It will definitely be interesting to see how the numbers trend throughout the first week.

Unbelieveably there are no videos of hit game Tischedecke on Youtube. Anyway, there’s €1.5m up for grabs, Saturday at 7:15 UK time.

In other news, here’s that Blockbusters trailer:

So there we are.