We haven’t done this sort of thing for ages, so knock yourselves out:
Gladiators films in Sheffield the first fortnight in June and at time of writing it looks like there are still tickets available for all filming dates. Most dates start at 1pm, I would expect the filming to be lengthy, but perhaps you have nothing better to do. Applause Store.
Limited availability for Deal or No Deal up in Salford in July (Applause Store). We’re still not actually 100% sure on whether this is going primetime or as a Chase replacement, and the four dates on offer don’t help.
Password films end of June in London (Lost in TV), which is a fun novelty that will never catch-on. Two comedy legends and a special guest are promised, whilst I don’t know who the host of the pilot was, the comedy legends in the pilot were Alan Carr and Daisy-May Cooper so there’s that. But what if you wanted to be a contestant? Well you’ve still got time to apply. Unless you’re reading this after the 9th June, then you don’t.
Lots of people taken aback by comedy horror anthology show Inside No. 9 last night, as the apparently scheduled episode based on 70s sitcom On The Buses was changed to a new quiz, 3 By 3, hosted by Lee Mack. I couldn’t tell if you if there is genuinely an On The Buses episode in the pipeline or not, I had heard on the grapevine there was an episode of IN9 that was going to play with the television form this series, so presumably this was that one.
On the face of it a completely normal and boring daytime-style quiz, with apparently quite large five-figure prizes. Three teams of three compete, the first round, 3’s a Crowd, a bit like old Nick Ross show The Syndicate – get a question right and win money, lose and you get frozen out and have to be tactically bought back, lowest scoring team leaves but they keep the money (one of the many clues for the casual watcher to suggest this isn’t a real show). Round two, 3 Point Turn is basically quiz noughts and crosses, select a square, answer question to claim the square, three in a row gets you to the final, the rounds name coming entirely from the hilariously crap visual effect of the word on the board spinning round and round before revealing if the answer is right or not. The final round, 3 Blind Twice, sees one contestant put in a soundproof booth, another teammate answering questions outside it (goodness knows how this would have worked if a team of three made it to the final), both answer the same question, if they both get it right their money is tripled, wrong back to their original stake, play up to three times, it seems like the third question there’s an all-or-nothing risk so if both get it wrong they lose everything. The team use the words “we’re going to gamble” here, which is a bit of shame as quiz shows just don’t use that phrase these days in lieu of any number of euphemisms.
Of course, being an Inside No. 9 story, the whole thing is cut through with decent and well observed gags – Quiztopher Bigwins as a team name for example, the incredible way they’ve come up with round titles, Lee Mack being Lee Mack generally. Also one of the teams is psychic and a bit weird and clearly the mother (who’s a bit like Judith Keppel) and daughter have some issues which come to a head, which you can probably figure out by the end.
Worth a watch – to be clear, it’s under Inside No. 9 on iPlayer rather than 3 By 3, and also probably shouldn’t be watched by the more easily disturbed. I’d like to say I’m a big IN9 fan given Pemberton and Shearsmith’s other work, but in truth I keep intending to binge watch it all and never get around to it, although I do try and watch the ones that play with the TV form when I can.
Deadline reporting that NBC are going to be alighting on Deal or No Deal Island.
Teams live on an island Survivor style and try to find boxes with millions of dollars in which the last team standing will use to play against The Banker for “the biggest cash prize in DOND history”.
What’s quite fun is that there was an interview with format developers recently (which I can’t find right now, soz) and TV’s Glenn Hugill, for it is he, threw out the idea of doing wild spin-offs of existing shows, combining two different ideas, and I think this was one of them, which is amusingly coincidental or something more sinister.
Yes I know it’s Eurovision on Saturday night, but on Sunday night a rescheduled Challenge Anneka returns on Five at 7:30pm and she’s building a dementia village. So that’s nice. The final episode is TBA.
Over the weekend I watched the first few episodes of Bestemming X, this year’s hottest new format by the sounds of it (the BBC are doing it as Destination X as an NBC co-prod, like they did with The Traitors). In it a group of people in a blacked out bus have to figure out where they are using nothing but their intuition, the windows on the bus occasionally untinting, winning challenges to earn tips and so on, at the end of the episode everyone puts an X on a map of Europe with their guesses, and the person who is furthest away has to get off the bus. At the end of the series, the person who first finds the host at Destination X wins €50,000.
Everyone seems to have been sold on the idea on the basis of the first episode where it reveals to the viewer that nothing is as it seems – all the impressions production gives them, and they go to some lengths, is that they’ve been taken somewhere in England (the clues for this include but are not limited to: one half of a team winning a challenge and getting to skydive having been shown the white cliffs of Dover first, whilst the losing team are made to think they’re on a ferry by playing sounds in and having their bus loaded onto a crane for ninety minutes, everyone going to a quaint country house to eat a traditional English breakfast) but the winners of a task at the country house get the mindblowing tip that just before the elimination, they answer a call from an English red telephone box and are told to have a good look around only for the punchline, as the losing contestant is dropped off is that the Eiffel Tower is in the background and they were in Paris all along. “Huh,” as they say on American podcasts.
Herein lies my problem, and why I don’t think it’s going to take off in quite the same way other shows have, is that at no point is the show’s central mystery all that thrilling, although I’d watch the hell out of a making-of. The show comes from some of the people who used to work on De Mol, and you can certainly see the influences – it’s very stylishly produced and by and large the challenges are decently put together, but whereas De Mol works really hard to make its regular punchlines land, each episode here builds up to one bit and I can’t say the reveal moves me especially (in point of fact De Mol regularly uses the location as its extra contestant frequently to hilarious effect, Bestemming X somehow has to do that and not do that at the same time and doesn’t quite pull it off). Whatsmore having gone all-in on the deception aspect in episode one it barely gets touched upon in the following ones which seems odd as that’s what the show seems to have been sold upon. It’s an OK show, but I think it needs to work out what its strength is and lean into it more.
