8pm – 10:30-ish UK,
Here and on Youtube

Tonight we’ll be counting votes and taking names with the 22nd edition of Bother’s Bar’s Game Night!

Join us for LIVE INTERACTIVE FUN as seven esteemed panellists will be battling it out for your votes across a number of Jackbox games, or will the anarchist Team Audience somehow end up in control of the Bother’s Bar parish?

We’ll be starting at 8pm with Bracketeering and working our way up to the glorious Arbitrary Final around 10:15pm, join us any time you like, drop in, drop out, whatever. We’ll be needing a Voice of the Audience tonight variously so come with a microphone and Discord if you want that to be you.

Live feed will appear here, but we advise watching on the Youtube site for lower latency and live audience chat.

Tom Allen’s Quizness begins Friday May 14th, 8pm. I did some of the early runthroughs, if you like your quizzing with a mental agility aspect and some silliness you may want to look out for it, although without seeing a finished product I can’t tell you if it works on telly or not, obviously.

Unbeatable (which I like to think will have the same theme tune as Impossible but with the lyrics changed) starts 2:15pm on May 10th on BBC1 with The Answer Trap starting very soon afterwards at 3pm on Channel 4. And you know what that means? A week full of content! Incredible.

Also don’t forget that Bother’s Bar’s Game Night 22: The Tenuous Council Elections Special is this coming Sunday at 8pm. You won’t want to miss the Arbitrary Final.

Edit: And it’s Schlag den Star Saturday May 8th (thanks David).

I’ve been reaquainting myself with MTV’s The Challenge of late, having not really watched it for about ten years. For the uninitiated, it’s a reality game that’s been running since 1998 as a spin-off of two existing MTV reality (fly-on-the-wall docs they’d have probably been called back then) shows, Road Rules (starting 1995) and Real World (starting 1992, and they’ve only recently stopped making it) and as such actually pre-dates a lot of reality behemoths that we know today (although it is probably fair to suggest that the form we know now probably owes quite a lot to those behemoths).

The specific rules of the game change from season to season, but on a basic level each episode features a Daily Challenge and an Elimination Round and to make any money you have to survive to the season’s Final. Daily Challenges are big scale and usually visually interesting, something testing endurance/dexterity/puzzle solving, if nothing you’ve really not seen before. The head-to-head Elimination Rounds are either involve a variant on wrestling and/or some sort of action game with a puzzle element. In between we get action from the house usually involving politicking for the various votes, nights at a local bar, fighting and fucking. At heart, it’s sort of Survivor Legacy, contestants get re-invited back season after season, some have been going at it for the best part of twenty years with all the rivalry and baggage that that entails (Johnny Bananas recently completed his 20th season and is now 46 and still pot-stirring at every opportunity).

For a channel that’s so obsessed with 18-34s, the age of its participants might prove a problem. However a few years ago they’ve started inviting people from other international reality shows on, including a big UK contingent from things like Geordie Shore, Love Island, Ex On The Beach and so on. Generally speaking these people have provided good value in terms of comic lines in confessionals. I’ve also quite enjoyed host ex-BMXer TJ Lavin’s complete lack of sympathy for quitters and openly laughing when someone belly flops after a bodged height challenge.

“So Brig,” you might be asking, “this sounds like quite fun. How can I watch it myself?” Well reader, I’d like to say you can (legally) watch it for free, but I can’t. I’d like to say it’s all one streaming service, but I can’t. I’d like to say you can (legally) watch from the very beginning, but I can’t. But I CAN give you this handy table of what’s currently available:

It is a little bit ridiculous isn’t it? On the plus side, you can get thirty day trials of HayU and MTV Play as Amazon video channels so you can sort of watch most in one place, just remember to cancel the sub before you get charged. Who even knew MTV Play was A Thing? Anyway, SORT IT OUT distributors.

I know you’re all going to say “The Crystal Dome”, but you’re wrong, it’s Bid A Note.

Genuinely don’t know.

Edit: Looks like the winner is George Alexander Trebek. Congratulations to him!