The one that might work on streaming, Pop Culture Jeopardy, is now out to watch on Prime Video and in actual fact the first three episodes are up in the UK storefront right now. New episodes go up every Wednesday, and it’s a 40-episode run.

Pop Culture Jeopardy sees teams of three battle it out in a series long tournament with $300,000 on the line for the eventual winners. New to the series is the ‘Triple Play’, a three part question/answer/clue/whatever that each person in the team has to give a response to win triple the clue’s value.

The show is hosted by the Jost with the most, Saturday Night Live‘s Colin Jost.

No word on plans for series two of UK Jeopardy, but it doesn’t sound like they’re giving it a New Year’s berthing/baptism of fire like last year. It’s been filmed.

Today is basically Christmas Day for TV nerds (as opposed to actual Xmas Day, which is just a Wednesday) as it’s the day they finalise the schedules for Xmas and New Year. So with thanks to Martin Lewis (and Daniel Hurst who suggested it) let’s take a look at some of the highlights that have come out of the news today, shall we? I don’t actually have the listings to hand to am going by various PR outlets, so this might get amended in the near future.

Sunday 22nd December:
4:55pm: The Chase Celeb Special
6pm: Bullseye (ITV)
7pm: You Bet! (ITV)

Feels interestingly early for a big show like Bullseye although I suppose it’s not far off where it used to go out back in the day and I suppose the early berthing didn’t hurt Gladiators, even if most people watch Glads later the same evening than on live.. It has been pointed out there’s actual darts on later that night so they won’t want to clash. It’s also repeated on Xmas Day at 5:25pm. You Bet is repeated on Xmas Eve at 5:05pm.

Monday 23rd December:
5:30pm: Pictionary (ITV)
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
7pm Would I Lie to You At Christmas (BBC1)
7pm: Junior Taskmaster – The Final (C4)
8pm: Only Connect Royal Special (BBC2)
9pm: The Big Quiz: Coronation Street vs Emmerdale (ITV1)

Pictionary the show that no-one asked for but I suppose sticking it on at Christmas is culturally relevant – haven’t worked out what the schedule for it is but it seems to be on Boxing Day as well. Unusual in that it’s a 30 minute format. Junior Taskmaster moving from traditional Friday here. I’ve never felt the need to watch the big soap quiz but the big news is Sally Lindsay’s hosting after regular host Stephen Mulhern was taken ill recently. Festive House of Games this week has got the best Gladiator i.e. Legend on it.

Tuesday 24th December (Xmas Eve)
7:15pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
7:45pm: The Great British Festive Bake Off (C4)
8:15pm: Only Connect Christmas Special (BBC2)

Wednesday 25th December (Xmas Day)
3:10pm: The Weakest Link (BBC1)
3:55pm: Strictly Xmas Special (BBC1)
5:10pm: The Piano at Christmas (C4)
8pm: The Chase Celeb Special (ITV)

Let’s be honest, BBC1 is absolutely stacked on Xmas Day with general entertainment content, it’s no wonder ITV have given up even more than usual, although perhaps Downton Abbey: A New Era will take your fancy. Edit: it looks like the Xmas Day edition of The Chase is now a new one, not a repeat as originally suggested.

Thursday 26th December (Boxing Day)
5:40pm: Pictionary (ITV)
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
7:30pm: The Masked Singer (ITV)
8pm: Only Connect Books Special
9pm: Blankety Blank Xmas Special (BBC1)
9pm: The 1% Club Xmas Special (ITV)
9pm: The Festive Pottery Throwdown (C4)
Squid Game Series 2 (Netflix)

Cor that’s a stacked 9pm and no mistake, I had a cheeky tenner on The 1% Club being surprise Xmas Day winner last year, such as the weakness of the Xmas Day schedule. Didn’t come in, alas, but I think it’s quite wise they’ve moved it this year. I think I fancy it over Blankety Blank, especially as that has an EastEnders lead-in, but that ought to be a good battle. It will be extremely interesting to see if Squid Game 2 captures the audience in the same way SG1 did. Seeing as Squid Game: The Challenge did extremely well as a spin-off, you’d have to back it. Xmas 1% Club is getting a repeat on Sunday 29th at 7pm.

Incidentally, Boxing Day is ACTUAL Boxing Day for TV Nerds, because the Xmas Day ratings come in.

Friday 27th December
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Only Connect BBC Special (BBC2)
9pm: The Big Fat Quiz of the Year (C4)
Evening: Gladiators (TF1)

Finally we get the answer to the big question, did anyone correctly guess who the mystery Big Fat Quiz person is going to be this year? Also French Glads should be an interesting watch if you are able, I wonder what the reaction to it will be.

Saturday 28th December
6pm: Deal or No Deal Celebrity Special (ITV)
7pm: Wheel of Fortune Christmas Special (ITV)

New series starts proper the following week. Can’t remember if they recorded this with the first lot or as part of the second series, hopefully they’ve learnt how to make it a bit more exciting as it goes on.

Sunday 29th December
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Celeb Special (ITV)
8pm: Only Connect Christmas Special (series 19 repeat) (BBC2)
9pm: Taskmaster New Year’s Treat (C4)

Ooh. Ooh? Oh. Doesn’t feel right that but I’m sure it will be fine.

Monday 30th December
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Only Connect Transatlantic Special (BBC2)

Second week of House of Games, doesn’t feature the best Gladiator i.e. Legend.

Tuesday 31st December (New Year’s Eve)
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Only Connect Single Special (BBC2)
12pm: Fireworks (you’ll be watching BBC1)

Also inevitably some poetry but what can you do.

Wednesday 1st January 2025 (New Year’s Day)
Morning: The Annual “Should Do a Series” Gag when the Fireworks numbers come out
6:00pm: Celeb Gladiators (BBC1)
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: The Traitors (BBC1)
8pm: Only Connect Sound Special (BBC2)

Couldn’t resist. And neither should they! This literally just came out just before I “went to press”, 7pm is going to be a Gavin and Stacey doc. Glads into Traitors would have been perfect, but it looked like EastEnders was going to be the filling but thankfully it’s a Gavin and Stacey doc instead. However! ITV have scheduled the final ever episodes of Vera against the first two episodes of The Traitors – thems fighting words! I think I’d expect The Traitors to do better on the night but Vera to ultimately win in +7. Last year The Traitors opened to 3m overnight and I thought that was a bit disappointing for the build up. New Year’s Day is a massive live watching night and ought to do well. It continues 8pm on Thursday before going back to it’s traditional 9pm slot on Friday, and presumably they’ll put the first eps on iPlayer as usual. Anyway this is Judith Keppel vs the final One Foot In The Grave for the 2020s.

Thursday 2nd January 2025:
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Only Connect Champion of Champions Special (BBC2)

Friday 3rd January 2025
7pm: Festive House of Games (BBC2)
8pm: Only Connect Champion of Champions Special (series 18 repeat) (BBC2)
9pm: Have I Got Sport For You (BBC1)

We used to joke in the 90s referring to panel shows as Have I Got X For You, and thirty years later they’ve done it for real. Bring back They Think It’s All Over, you wimps!

Phew!

I’m usually busy on weeknights these days so I don’t get to join in with Ash the Bash’s Twitch streams as often as I’d like, but they’re doing Quiz Night Live all weekend which if is anything like last year ought to be good fun (if the hotel Wi-Fi’s working). Twitch Link here.

I was listening to this Tuesday’s The Rest Is Entertainment this morning on the way to work – I’m a couple of days behind, but I was aware there was some discussion on the future of quiz shows. TV’s Richard Osman (one-time creative head of Endemol UK, knows what he’s talking about) was very positive about the future and its streaming potential. I (amateur industry critic, was on Weakest Link once), have consistently thought the future of quiz shows is pretty bleak and nothing has really changed my opinion. And here are some reasons why.

• Discoverability and inertia. If you’re a quiz in daytime getting your consistently strong ratings, you have it relatively easy. Daytime is about routine, you switch on your channel at the same time and the same show comes on. Occasionally channels will try something else in the shot which is incredibly annoying, numbers go down, if the show is good sometimes they go back up again but you don’t actually have to do much as a viewer to discover these new shows, it’s more passive. If you want to find a new show on a streaming service, you’ve got to actively go and look for it. When people are paying a tenner a month or whatever for a service, they’re not going to go out of their way to watch a quotidian quiz show, which they will have no idea even exists unless Netflix starts blanket advertising its existence, they’ll usually want a drama or something big scale, something that feels worth your time and investment. Is anyone in their day to day life going out of their way to watch and talk about Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity? No they are not. Even something pretty good like Netflix’s Cheat comes along, which you could have put on terrestrial and probably would have done OK but unspectacularly, it barely moves the dial – in fact it was pretty much the worst original performer on the service for several weeks. Older people might be timeshifting Only Connect (370k in catch-up in the latest Thinkbox), but they’re not timeshifting Alan Carr’s Picture Slam (82k), or The Hit List (52k) or The Chase (33k, 34k, 69k, 43k, 63k).
• Localisation. To be clear here, we’re talking about quiz shows, there will always be space for competition and unscripted on TV, mainly because there is something pretty universal about falling in love, voting people off, and trying to tell if a handbag is a handbag or if the handbag is actually cake. Quiz, however, is not quite universal. Sure, the idea of getting the question right and winning a prize is, but a quiz where the material appeals to everybody in the world is a quiz where the material appeals to nobody in the world. Early questions on Millionaire, The Chase et al tend to be about local cultures, phrases, sayings, TV shows because that’s where the audience is, I would expect anyone from the UK to struggle with the first five questions of Romanian WWTBAM even if they were translated into English, for example. In streaming terms this isn’t great, either your show is full of international slop (“what’s the capital of France?”) or you limit your audience who probably won’t be bothered enough to find it anyway, and then it doesn’t do well enough to spin-off into other local versions.
• Business. At least with Netflix and Amazon you still get paid to make the thing. If as suggested, you try and make a show for Youtube or TikTok presumably you’d need to front up the money for the entire series first then hope that a) people find it and b) there’s enough of a long tail that you’d make your money back in the long term. I’m just looking at some of the viewing figures for older shows currently on ITV Studios’ Puzzle channel – An episode of Pick Me with 2.8k views. Eggheads averaging about a thousand. Ooh, an episode of Sitting on a Fortune is up to almost six thousand after two months. How long is it going to take you to make a return on those sorts of figures? Sure, clips from shows do well, but they’re minutes long and you know exactly what reaction is expected of you going into them. And sure, “guess the X from the emoji” quiz videos are viral and popular, but they’re not television are they?
• Interactivity. Everyone thinks they want this, by episode two you’re happy enough to just shout at the television. It is already a lot of effort scrolling through the list of shows to get to the one you want. If I want to interact with the TV, I’ll turn my PlayStation on.

So having said all that let’s end on a potential counter example. Pop Culture Jeopardy starts next Wednesday on Amazon Prime. Everyone knows what Jeopardy is. They haven’t extended it to an hour (as far as I know). It’s not the first online spin-off they’ve done, they did Sports Jeopardy on Crackle which they did three runs of, this is at least about something that possibly has broader appeal. I understand it will be watchable in the UK. If that can’t do anything, what chance do you think your Quizzy Settlers of Catan has?

From August’s Stool Pigeon:

Well, we have it on good authority they were doing New Year’s Day links at the Celeb Glads recording from someone who was there, and now The Traitors has been officially announced for New Years Day. Your move ITV.

Incidentally, I listened to this week’s The Rest is Entertainment on the way to work this morning, I think ROsman is wrong about quiz’s streaming future. I will put my thoughts down this afternoon.

Well French Gladiators coming to TF1 next year is looking pretty good, looks like they have some events we don’t have (clearly a clip of Suspension Bridge, seems crazy we don’t have it in our rotation seeing as we have a set-up for Collision anyway), looks like they’ve retitled The Edge to Vertigo (annoying, but I suppose it’s no different to us renaming Joust Duel and then having a separate event called Joust). There are at least three Glads I’d be quite excited to feel the power of, ahem.

It will be really interesting to see how this does for them, there wasn’t a French version of Gladiators in the 90s so the nostalgia factor won’t be going for them, although doubtless elements of the original American Gladiators will feel familiar through osmosis, and Fort Boyard et al “borrowing” some of the ideas.

It was filmed at Aren’Ice in Cergy-Pontoise (even if it looks like Sheffield!).

Edit: Apparently the embedded link isn’t working so here’s a direct one. The trailer doesn’t seem to be on Youtube yet, which is a shame.