Show Discussion: Battle Camp

By | April 22, 2025

From Wednesday 23rd April,
Netflix

The Paramount Reality Universe has long-running multi-show all-star reality challenge show The Challenge and now Netflix is getting in on the action with their NRU show Battle Camp.

Battle Camp sees eighteen of your favourite Netflix reality stars (!) from shows such as The Circle, Love is Blind and The Mole compete at a sort of Summer Camp under the watchful eye of moustachio-ed former NFL player Taylor Lewan as they compete in various games and challenges to win $250,000.

The main point of difference between this and The Challenge seems to be that to get eliminated from The Challenge you have to lose a challenge, here failing at challenges and losing popular votes means your name gets put on a wheel, and whoever the wheel lands on goes home. It will be interesting to see how much you can affect your odds, or if they might as well have saved everybody a load of time by just spinning the wheel at the start and giving that person $250,000 and we can all get on with our lives.

Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Challenge TV gets some competition

By | April 16, 2025

Broadcast reporting ITV Be is going to be shut down with its hit shows moving to ITV2, and the channel is going to become ITV Quiz, playing quiz and game shows “akin to a FAST channel”.

Quite interesting, it will presumably cost pennies to run if its not going to have any of its own commissions. Does anyone watch much of the FAST channels on ITVX? Is this just going to have The Chase, Tipping Point and Celebrity Catchphrase on a loop or will it be more interesting than that? Is that American BBC quiz FAST channel still going and has it added anything interesting in the last year?

Edit: Sounds like U&Dave’s Silence is Golden starts on May 5th, where an audience must keep silent as comics try and make them laugh to win a dwindling share of £250,000. This will need to hit the ground running early, Last One Laughing UK has been a big hit and the timing makes the comparisons inevitable, unfairly or not (this was revealed and recorded last year).

The advert for Genius Game looks extremely good

By | April 10, 2025

Looks like we’re getting many of the hits, the Zombie Infection game, what I originally thought was Middle Race but might on closer inspection be actually be Scam Horse Race (with some other animals), elements of some sort of flash-forward/flash-back at the end, phwoar at the set (although it does look, dare I say, a bit more cramped than the original).

Our season commentaries for the original seasons of The Genius a decade ago are still up on our Specials Board, if you are that way inclined. We will inevitably be chatting about this and other Brain Survival Spring games in the Discord under #geniuschat.

It’s Brain Survival Spring

By | April 9, 2025

Well fans of the genre are about to be spoilt – already we have the surprisingly good LG Genius corporate rip-off Life’s Game on Youtube, adverts for ITV’s Genius Game have started going out – rumours suggest an April 30th start but we’ll see and this morning the trailer and date for Devil’s Plan 2: Death Room on Netflix has dropped – May 6th, and it looks goooooood.

The Devil’s Plan is a kind of legally distinct sequel to The Genius, made by the director of the original and some of the staff. The first series had lots of great moments, even if it was sometimes a bit more ponderous. And now it looks like we’re going to have Genius vs Devil’s Plan at the same time, which we wondered might happen when we knew DP2 was Q2.

I Want To Break Free

By | April 2, 2025

Got To Get Out is the new Glenn Hugill produced show for Hulu starting next week (so no idea if this will be officially viewable in the UK anywhere) where a mixture of reality celebs and non-celebs try and escape a house as a money clock counts up to a million dollars. It looks quite fun from the trailer, although the trailer also details a major spoiler which suggests episode 3/4 will probably be worth a watch so you might as well not bother with any of the other ones. Also it occurs the reason it looks quite fun is because it was quite fun when it was basically Jailbreak with Craig Charles on Channel 5 about 25 years ago.

Know Where To Hide: Wie niet weg is…

By | March 28, 2025

Here’s some unexpected fun for the weekend, and thanks to Nico W on the Discord to alerting us to it – it’s Dutch Big Money Celebrity Sardines on Amazon Prime and it’s Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like. Nine Dutch celebs travel around various Dutch landmarks on a bus playing Sardines for €18,000. One person is picked at random on an extremely whizzy wheel (immediately one of the all time great gameshow props, I reckon) to go and hide somewhere on the location, the other contestants get 90 minutes to find them, and if they do find them they have to hang out in the same space until the clock runs out. If *everybody* finds the Hider, the Hider is eliminated. If not everybody finds the Hider then the Hider picks someone who didn’t find them to eliminate. There are added complications – there’s a currency called Triangles which can be spent to increase your chance of becoming the Hider or to buy various advantages, at various points during the Hunt special rooms open up offering risky rewards via mini-challenges and decisions. Hunters earn Triangles by finding the Hider, but they earn more the fewer people find them. Sometimes the Hiders haven’t thought about the implications of the space they’ve chosen to hide.

It’s decently entertaining and at around 45 minutes an episode (six episodes as far as I know) doesn’t outstay its welcome – it’s sort of a bit like Bother’s Bar favourite Run For Money except without the running or indeed much money but the location scouts have done a good job of finding decently sized buildings which are interesting and have lots of potential hiding spots. Stylish graphics. English subs are available. My one criticism is then “next time” bits give away a bit more than you’d really like.