Iain Weaver asks in his latest TV Guide: “where is Ratings Bear”?

It is a good question. I’ve got an inkling he might wake up out of hibernation to bust out some sort of graph on May 15th for whatever reason, although I can’t be certain, obviously.

Incidentally you missed off illusory gameshow Impossible? on your listings for next Thursday on Channel 5 at 10pm. I’ve been told it’s been filmed underneath railway arches, so make of that what you will.

And Cheryl Cole is off to do US X Factor! I think they’re going to have to work harder than expected to make it work over in the States (I can’t imagine LA Reid in the “Simon’s bitch” role that Louis Walsh has done so well over here), and now they’re going to have to work much harder over here to create a panel people can give a damn about. The X Factor has always been more about the judges than the contestants, despite what they’d like you to believe.

Why not go and see:

• Pointless‘ French pilot! Filming May 11th. Must be fluent in French.
• Red or Black‘s arena stage! I’ve applied for a ticket to this. This is just to watch, not to take part.

Are you mental?

Well it’s your look out, you can set up OFFICIAL online auditions here.

BB Spy is where were probably going to get most of our BB news this year I suspect.

Big Brother returns on cult channel Channel Five later in the year.

According to the normally reliable @tvscoops on Twitter, tomorrow there will be some sort of press reveal about Red or Black, Simon Cowell’s new big money game format. This is what has been revealed so far, it will be interesting to see how much of this has turned out to be accurate and if anything has changed:

• It’s going to be set in a stadium and will feature thousands of contestants. At one point there was a plan for some sort of pay-to-enter raffle to choose the contestants, although that’s gone a bit quiet.
• It will be stripped across the week.
• In each episode, several You Bet!-esque challenges will feature. The contestants must decide if the challenge will be completed or not. A correct answer means staying in the competition, a wrong answer means elimination. It’s sort of a bit like Ultra Quiz.
• However, what we do not know is if audience members are going to be assigned a response or whether they will get free will. The object is that at the end of the week one person will remain. Forced responses will get the numbers down quicker but will give rise to the suggestion that the ultimate winner doesn’t really deserve it, free will risks not getting the numbers down quick enough.
• Once the winner is found they simply have to guess whether a spin on a roulette wheel will end up red or black. Guessing correctly wins a million pounds.
• Ant and Dec are set to host.

I wasn’t initially all that enamoured with it – sure, it’s likely to get decent viewers for the final ten minutes but with so many contestants it’s going to be difficult to care about what’s happening for the first X-1 days. However I’ve since come to the conclusion that if the challenges are interesting and spectacular enough then it might be in with a chance if it can look and feel like event television and not, for example, Famous and Fearless. We’ll soon find out.