We don’t yet know how Survivor is doing in the consolidateds – we should find out how the opening weekend did on Monday (it seems to be hanging around 10th in the trending list), but having said for weeks before the show starting that the post-Strictly weekend timeslot was quite a big misstep, well it’s not giving us a great deal of satisfaction in being right. There’s an extremely real chance that tonight’s episode might have an overnight that starts with a 1.

The irony of a show predicated on strategy being done over by the strategy of management is not lost on me. There was no need for the stakes to be so high – it didn’t need trailing for months beforehand during big primetime events. The papers are saying it cost £30m to make – I don’t know how much I buy that, the tariff for This Sort Of Thing will be between £500-750k per episode, maybe a bit more can be negotiated, £30m that suggests they’re paying £2m an episode. Have you seen the size of the Tribal Council firepit? The original show cost £10m and and that’s when there was money to throw about.

The sad thing is is that the show, or at least the bones of it, isn’t that bad. It’s not. I can understand the lighter tone being divisive (mainly split along tribal “have you seen the American one” lines). I think it needed to highlight Characters Doing Antics a lot earlier, we don’t have an awful lot to grab onto even three episodes in. Everyone’s a bit “polite BBC” thus far. They’ve picked good challenges, which clearly they’ve made the show’s centerpiece, they haven’t gone overboard on twists and the ones they have picked so far have simmered quite well even if it’s more through implication than conversation.

Unfortunately for the Beeb, there are no good options for it right now – short of pushing it later into the evening so something more appropriate can ride the Strictly wave (Blankety Blank, much more suited, but with limited episodes left). They’re not going to drop McIntyre in there – early next year they’ll have 11 episodes of Big Show and The Wheel to go with 11 episodes of Gladiators and that feels like a much more successful schedule, they’re not going to want to disrupt that. I don’t know what else the Beeb have planned for Saturday nights when Blankety Blank finishes. And they can’t just move it to Wednesday/Thursday nights like it probably always should have been because it feels like The Traitors will be launching there soon.

They would, I’m sure, like to do a second series, mainly in a “this wasn’t a commissioning mistake” capacity, but even if they did schedule a second one correctly, the show’s got the stench of failure about it now and that’s really hard to get back from. Twenty years ago Survivor outrated Big Brother, but BB was seen as the big success. The more things change.

Incredible scenes in last night’s Joko & Klaas vs ProSieben finale on ProSieben last night.

It’s called ‘The Easiest Challenge In The World’, all they have to do hit a button within five minutes, ‘you’ll figure the rest of the rules yourself’. That’s it. There are some other gubbins around, but all other rules have been made up in our plucky duo’s heads. It’s five minutes of two people sitting around in blindfolds and headphones seeing if they can break their conditioning, to work out that something’s wrong. It manages to be both compelling and increasingly hilarious – there’s a bit where Joko peeks out his blindfold but looks the wrong way and the audience goes crazy. It’s like something from Derren Brown.

My only thing is they should have just ended the show and kept the cameras running and let us know the next week how long they continued to sit there.

To be clear, I don’t think it will be rubbish, I’ve always quite enjoyed it with the caveat that I can also get Survivored out – the versions you can stream on Prime and so on feel like they go on too long and there’s little variation in the challenges which all fall into precisely three flavours (wrestling, obstacle course with a thing at the end, hold a thing for as long as possible), the US one I probably haven’t watched properly since Russell Hantz was A Thing and the effort of sourcing wasn’t worth the payoff. I still have trouble with the idea that Joel Dommett has the gravitas to pull off “the tribe has spoken”, but there are decent people working on our show and at a fixed 60 minutes, I’ve got an open mind.

The scheduling for it is baffling though. On the face of it putting it on after Strictly on a Saturday and Sunday is an aggressive move – it’s the BBC’s biggest live audience of the week by a distance. My issue is Survivor feels like waaaay too heavy a show for a weekend berthing, and especially after 90/120 minutes of light entertainment dancing and with Blankety Blank afterwards – that’s a really weird sandwich, no flow at all. It can be argued that it would be “bringing the drama to replace Casualty“, but the problem with that is that nobody watches Casualty in 2023. You would hope that people will watch on iPlayer, but that’s going to need buzz but I absolutely can’t see it matching The Wheel (4m + 1m) on a Saturday, and last week’s Antiques Roadshow got 5m out of Strictly. I think Survivor will launch around 3-3.5m overnight, fine as it goes, but at what cost? And if it doesn’t hold that it’s going to be a long Autumn.

Of course there’s a second, more amusing, issue that Survivor faces in that three weeks into its run I’m A Celebrity starts on ITV, and with it being live and likely much bigger there is no way, not a chance, Ant and Dec don’t get digs in from link one. This will be amusing, especially as I’m A Celeb only exists because of Survivor‘s original failure in the UK. If Survivor starts off shakily, they’re going to want to sink it while they’ve got the chance. I’m a Celeb is not the guaranteed behemoth it might have once been, but with a decent selection of celebs it can certainly still open to 10m, or at least twice what Survivor will probably be getting.

Basically I think they’ve ballsed the scheduling up and they probably ought to have saved it for the New Year.

In other news some streaming trailers have dropped.

007: Road To A Million – travel to a place, do a stunt, answer a question, repeat until you fail or you’ve won a million quid. Looks fun. Launches on Prime Video November 10th.

Squid Game: The Challenge launches November 22nd on Netflix and airs across three weeks.

Wink Martindale’s Youtube channel posted this this morning, the 1990 US Countdown pilot, hosted by Michael Jackson (not that one).

Immediately I quite enjoyed the synth-rock-tastic interpretation of the theme tune as was de rigeur for US shows at the time, so it was quite surprising to hear our standard UK Countdown clock jingle for the rounds themselves. I don’t hate the amateur/celebrity nature of the game, although clearly you’d want the celebs to be of a roughly equal skill level and that’d be quite hard to balance. It is perhaps telling how much applause five letter words got. It felt like it took an age to get the nine letters out even though realistically it probably wasn’t that much extra time.

I don’t love the Countdown Scramble, or at least I don’t love the way it’s presented here. I did quite enjoy Jackson’s desk just flying off.

Of course it’s extremely easy to look at the lack of maths round and laugh, but let’s not forget Le Mot Le Plus Long existed as a format that ran for five years before Armond Jammot added the “le Compte est bon” (the sum is right) element so it’s not like it was unheard of.

Last week the BBC launched a quiz streaming channel on iPlayer and that’s you know, fine and great and all that, but it looks like it’s all quite modern last few years stuff.

So it’s annoying that yesterday they launched an international BBC Gameshow FAST Channel (can be found on the US on Freevee) and it sounds like a proper blast, quite a lot of little-seen-outside of original broadcast stuff from 2000-2010, the sort of time when they were throwing formats against the wall and seeing what sticks. Knowitalls with Gyles Brandreth! Get Staffed, which I had no recollection actually going out! Traitor with Tony Livesey, the show The Traitors could have been!

The idea that this is “the best of British gameshows” is frankly way off, but it represents a time when it was probably at its most creative, figuring out how to extract the entertainment of Millionaire without the money. Loads of 6/7 out of 10 stuff by the sounds of it but much of it interesting in its own way. Pity we can’t have it, really.