Tons of cool stuff in the previous comment box that I don’t want to get lost so here they are in a post.
First of all, rather brilliantly, it’s Valvet, the Swedish version of Swap Team. Based on the original Norwegian version (we think) it’s played with adults and features EXPLOSIONS, and it’s fair to suggest there’s a slightly more grown-up theme to some of the games, it’s unlikely kids were ever going to get to use a blowtorch I expect. Almost four minutes of anagrams is a bit much (although there’s 1,000,000 Kr up for grabs, which is about £85,000). Their endgame was a bit more eliminatory and interesting than ours, and their ending labyrinth actually had a memory element not obviously present in ours. Most fun – the theme tune, which is the same as ours except with different lyrics. And still in English! Also: a viewer competition.
Also turning up yesterday Jakten på ökenguldet, (The Hunt For Desert Gold) the Swedish version of The Desert Forges. It follows the original French format pretty closely (with some differences – fewer games in the Desert, the route to the Forges).
In other news Netflix have put up two series of The Challenge, series 31 (Vendettas) and 33 (War of the Worlds) although confusingly they’ve labelled them S5 and S6.
And finally, Prime have re-added S5 of Aussie Survivor (Champions vs Contenders) to go alongside S3, no idea why they haven’t re-added S4 yet. Check your watchlists though, it appears to be a different listing to the first time they put it up.
Thanks to the Bother’s Bar Discord for bringing this up, the very first game of Wonga on The Big Breakfast, the end of the live millennium nine-hour special.
When they bought it back as a semi-regular thing, they added a seven minute chess-clock.
Various weeknights over the next three weeks, 9pm, BBC1
Extremely unusual scheduling for a shiny floor show on the BBC this which suggests either a) confidence and a willingness to ape Millionaire or b) desperation over a lack of shows in the bank. Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance sees contestants attempt to win up to £100,000 by answering questions and balancing gold bars atop an increasingly unstable table – wrong answers mean adding penalty bars, and if a stack falls down it’s game over.
Because of the way they’ve recorded audience reaction, we’ve already got some idea as to the quality of the largely edited shows. Clearly quite a lot of interest is going to lie in how well Gordon Ramsay fits in as host – it’s got a post-watershed slot so it will be interesting to see how his natural prickliness combines with the high tension the show wants to have. Not too dissimilar to Jeremy Clarkson on Millionaire, which has been a success by and large.
Does the end result work? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Might be a bit banal but the BBC are currently looking for a new daytime quiz show for BBC1, so there is a massive amount of companies pitching quizzes to them at the minute. There’s around 25/30 companies pitching with 6 of them being sent to the next stage, which happens aound the end of March I beleive. So expect ITV and C4 to get bombared with quizzes from the companies that didn’t get through shortly after!
I’ve already been a zoom contestant on 3 different ones so far, with one that’s incredibly fun that uses a grabber and another that was hosted by a former girlband member who did a lot better than I expected her to do at hosting.
I feel like there should be a show in all that.
By grabber do we mean arcade-style crane? Will the tension in the arms match the tension in the studio? I have to say, I look forward to high stakes buzzwire quiz show The Coil With Nadine Coyle. Or perhaps it’s Mutya, Cudja?CelebShaznay Squares?
CPL are searching for contestants for a new quiz show where you have to say funny answers. Rumoured to be a Channel 4 show, with Tom Allen in line to host.
Always a risk with asking members of the public to be funny. Sounds a bit like Quiplash.
At least five UK past and present game show hosts (as well as, surely, host-to-be Jenny Ryan) are available on Cameo, so you can pay them to produce short personalised video messages. Twenty-five seconds, fifty quid.
For a bit of fun, it’s Play Your Cameos Right! You have to say whether the next celeb’s cost is higher or lower than that of the previous one. Your row of five is as follows: Nigel Lythgoe, Jason Manford, John Robins, Pat Sharp and Omid Djalili. (You can look up the answers yourself.)
One of the major UK channels are looking at adapting the Dutch game show ‘Voor het blok‘ as a Saturday night primetime show.
Ah now this is quite interesting. For the uninitiated, it’s basically an entire show based on that round of Japanese show Tore! (Pharoah!) where people stand in front of a wall of 100 blocks (or whatever), and if they take too long to give correct answers blocks start shifting forward to push you off, so you have to contort yourself into various positions in order to stay standing. It’s the Tore! equivalent of the Planks of Life on Dero!
I can’t find any sharable videos of Voor het blok, although it’s a sort of kids family show, so here’s the original game played in Tore! Jump to about 1h 20m in if it doesn’t go there automatically.
Maya Rudolph and Kate McKinnon are on the shortlist for the US version of The Wheel.
There is a ‘slight’ possibility of Wipeout returning in early 2022 if covid restrictions ease and the US version does well
These we are, some fun stuff if not a classic edition of the Stool Pigeon, if you didn’t get in it’s because it’s fairly common knowledge or clearly a lie. Or something that smells like something that looks true but probably isn’t:
Rylan’s been pegged to host the UK version of Holey Moley. Must be a weekday.
