Lots of shows on tonight, probably the one that’s going to get the most attention is the new series of Total Wipeout which begins this evening, 6pm on BBC1.

Very quickly as I’ve got to go out, I watched the premiere episode of Winter Wipeout that went out in the States this week – an improvement on season three I think, a few cheap impossible obstacles in the qualifier which are funny the first few times, the Kki-lift round two was really good I thought, like an upper-body strength version of The Sweeper. The Seven-Letter Word I can take or leave, really like the new Winter Wipeout Zone, particularly the sinster snowflakes, which is like a real life version of something from Mario Galaxy. Good.

I wanted to get a ticket for this, but unfortunately was unsuccessful.

However, Friend Of The Bar Geek Comedian Tom Scott managed to sneak in and send us a report which I thought I would put up as an unspoiler-iffic preview:

– There really was no camera trickery – not even any pick-up shots of the magic tricks, save for one (and that was after the reveal, not during the trick itself).

– No female magicians at all, save for a couple of glamorous assistants. I tried searching for “female British magicians” on Google, and it asked me if I meant “female British musicians”. Damn. A few of them do exist, but apparently none of them made the cut for the show.

– One trick stalled half way through due to technical problems – a sound issue, apparently – and couldn’t be repeated; it won’t be in the final show. Now, I could have sworn that Jonathan Ross said ‘nine magicians’ in his introductory spiel, and that wasn’t reshot after they dropped to eight. It’ll be interesting to see how they edit round that. (Flawlessly, no doubt.)

– The recording was long. The setup for some of the bigger tricks took a while! Stuart Goldsmith did an excellent job as the warm-up guy, though – although I was vaguely disappointed that, when he asked a child in the audience “what’s the rudest word you know?”, the answer wasn’t “kettle-head”.

And a review? At 90 minutes it’ll be a bit of a stretch, but if the BBC thinks there’s an audience for an hour of magic a week with ‘The Magicians’, ITV can certainly pull of a one-off 90 minute special – particularly with Penn and Teller’s own tricks in there as well.

Oh, and if there’s a shot of me dropping my jaw in astonishment during one of the close-up tricks, that’s real as well; I didn’t notice the camera until it moved away and I realised how wide open my mouth was…

So there we go, quite looking forward to this. Cheers, Tom