I know “fun” and “Belgium” aren’t two words that tend to go in the same sentence, but I felt it about time there was a little feature on De Slimste Mens ter Wereld, a very entertaining quiz show from the country that bought us The Mole, and didn’t bring anybody Blokken.

They’ve recently been doing a sort of Champion of Champions series on Belgian telly with top contestants from the past ten years.

I think this would work quite well in the BBC2 Pointless slot. You could probably have Alexander Armstrong hosting and Richard Osman as the judge as well, then they could be on all year!

It’s more commenty than before, and the lack of percentages is deliberate. However, I will add them here in a short while so do check back.

It’s the results!

Percentages under the cut. I recommend reading the report in full first before coming here to comment.

Continue reading →

…or can you?

Doubtless you’ve gathered there’s a new You Don’t Know Jack! coming out in the States on February 8th – for the uninitiated, YDKJ is the mildly amusing outrageous trivia gameshow video game. You get asked a bunch of (in the main) quite clever questions of both high and pop cultures (frequently both at once) and get called a div if you get them wrong. There was a UK version with Paul Kaye (Dennis Pennis) hosting and written by popular studenty-comics at the time. It was nicely done and it was a cult success, although not as much as it was in Germany where they did several, and in the US this will be the seventh main game after a lengthy hiatus. There was even a TV show of it.

Well Alex Buzzerblog has a video of the new game in action which I can’t actually watch properly at the moment because my current computer is without sound, which removes a lot of the point. But what if you did want to play it in the UK? Culturally, you’d still be able to “get” about 70%-75% of the references in my experience (questions about US advertising and US sports may be lost on you), unfortunately it’s probably not going to be released over here.

But never fear, because if you did still want to play you probably still can – Amazon.com will export it over here for about $50 total.

Now, the PC and DS versions are going to be region free, of this I am 99% confident. Most PS3 games are also region free, so you could probably import that without worry. I’ve ordered the XBox 360 version as a large number (but not all) of XBox games are region free and I’ve got an XBox – fingers crossed, I will let you know when it arrives (the fact that Amazon will export it to our territory is probably a good sign). The Wii version almost certainly won’t be region free so import with caution.

This is only advice don’t take it as gospel although as ever I’m putting my money where my mouth is so if you can hold on wait for my copy to come through before committing yourselves.

Right, I notice from my logs I’m getting a lot of hits for Don’t Scare the Hare right now, and that is probably because my hilarious pilot review of it (9th September, let’s not forget)  is the top result on Google at the moment. And I noted with some amusement that the original ticket listing for Don’t Scare the Hare reverted to ‘Saturday night game show’ on the BBC ticket site fairly quickly.

I do believe they are filming right around now, so has anyone been and how was the experience?

I’m meant to be going to at least two pilots in the next few weeks. FEAR ME.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it yet, Buzzerblog has done an interview with executive producer of The Cube Adam Adler.

Alright, I’ve just spent the last few hours collating all the votes. The full write-up will come along in the next few days. In the meantime here are some facts:

• One Endemol show has done very, very well.
• One Endemol show may have broken the record for highest percentage of votes cast in the Hall of Shame, beating The Colour of Money. BREAKING NEWS: I’ve jsut checked – it’s close, but it doesn’t quite manage it.
• If the blank and obvious protest votes in the Hall of Fame counted as their own entity, “2010 was a bit poor really” would place fourth.
• There have been some dramatic shift in fortunes in the Golden Five.

But can you guess which shows fit which facts?