Thursdays, 9pm,
ITV2

When in Rome do as the Romans do, as the old adage goes. Eight couples travel back to Ancient Rome where the men will compete in tough physical challenges in the hope of making it to the Emperor’s Games at the end of the series with a cool £10,000 on offer to the winners. The ladies will aid and abet and partake in traditional ancient roman activities and help their partners, all under the watchful eye of Tom Bell as the Emperor’s assistant, Roman Kemp the voiceover and Tornado from Gladiators training them as Il Doctore.

It’s Hercules meets Love Island, basically. On a sliding scale, I predict the closer it is to the former the better it will go down on here and personally I can get definitely get down with this sort of thing although now I’m out of the demo whether I’ll find the contestants and their antics (and I predict many, many antics) annoying is another matter.

The set looks terrific though. The show’s from Electric Ray who you might remember were the people behind non-hit Prized Apart, let’s hope they’ve learnt some lessons from that.

If you watched it let us know what you thought in the comments.

Wednesdays, 9pm,
Dave

UKTV Play

Great stuff, our favourite new show of the last X years returns to Dave for an eight episode run, where five more comedians will put their problem solving, comedy and gamesmanship skills to the test. This series we have (from left to right in the promo shot):

• Bob Mortimer
• Mark Watson
• Aisling Bea
• Nish Kumar
• Sally Phillips

This post is a bump from the Wednesday previous as the first episode has been up on UKTV Play so you may want to wait until after the first episode has gone out before reading the comments if you don’t want to be spoilt.

Edit: Two-part Champion of Champions special for the run-up to Christmas announced.

Weekdays, 2:15pm,
BBC1

I’m not even sure this needs a follow-up discussion post (the first series one’s here) but this is BB 4.0 now and today that’s how we roll. It sounds like the opening speed round to determine the first Boss has gone to be replaced by someone picked at random. Hopefully that loss of content will reappear elsewhere.

It’s probably no coincidence this begins this week. Last year when Judge Rinder was shown off on the Strictly launch and came across well, ITV used this promotional opportunity to, er, not show Judge Rinder’s daily afternoon show for a few weeks. Taking this opportunity to promote Susan Calman after the Strictly launch show therefore seems quite smart.