Board of Excitement 21st-27th February 2010

By | February 20, 2010
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What’s on the board, Miss Ford?

  • The Bother Series of Poker Event 2 (Sunday, Full Tilt, 8pm GMT/1500 ET) – the discussion page for this week’s game is here.
  • The Amazing Race (Sunday, CBS) – Well, a week after the first episode and I can’t remember many of the teams except for Mario and Luigi the detectives (one of them is probably called Bob, they always are) and Team Lesbian. That probably makes them my favourites by default.
  • Only Connect (Monday, BBC4, 8:30pm) – it’s the final heat of this this week and this week’s cleverly diametrically opposed types are the Booksellers vs Bowlers. I don’t know how the next round has been drawn so expect lots of amusing and inaccurate guesswork.
  • The Krypton Factor (Tuesday, ITV1, 7:30pm) – it’s the first semi-final! Ratings for this haven’t really held up that well, but I’d like to see it come back for a third series and put right what went wrong this time round.
  • Survivor (Thursday, CBS) – well embarrassingly I haven’t watched ep 2 yet, I was meant to last night, but instead the new The Pet Shop Boys live DVD came through the post so I watched that instead, and as such I intend to wear a cardboard box over my head for most of the next week. I’m sure it is very good though, and will probably watch it later.
  • The Bubble (Friday, BBC2, 10pm) – To be honest doesn’t deserve to be here but I put it here just so I can say that I thought it was neither good nor bad, it’s a bit like what you’d expect the TV equivilent of sensual deprivation to be. Which is sort of ironic.
  • Ant and Dec’s Push the Button (Saturday, ITV1, 7:45pm) – this should be quite good fun, basically two families taking on several tasks whilst a £100,000 money clock counts down and likely to have a few entertaining Ant and Dec cheeky twists. This is actually recording on Thursday, if anyone’s going do please feel free to do a recording report – I’m not interested in spoilers of results, but I’m always intrigued by the format and what you think of it. I know contestants are asked not to divulge stuff on the internet, two words: assumed name, and don’t say anything that makes it obvious it’s you. So twelve words really. I would go down to this myself, but I’ve only got so much leave and wages, generous as my leave allowance is. Also it’s at rather audience-unfriendly Pinewood. Admittedly, so is The Whole 19 Yards, but that should finish early enough to catch the last train, y’know? In theory. Anyway, it would be quite good if the theme for this was ‘Push the Button’, the controversial Israeli Eurovision entry by Teapacks from a few years ago.
  • Solitary v4.0 (Saturday, Fox Reality) – Well last week we had the hilarious game of “input these phrases into the computer where each letter on the keyboard stands for a different letter on screen, deleting everything if you type the wrong one in” (needless to say, I’d be fascinated to know if someone did accidentally type “This sucks Vag” genuinely or someone on the production team has quite an amusingly risqué sense of humour) followed by the always fun Twister meets Laserquest meets neck pain treatment. Again, I’d be quite interested to know how many rounds of a treatment the producers have prepared beforehand, and if there are some sort of hard-and-fast rules they have to use on the fly if the contestants are a bit hardier than originally thought. Anyway, this is episode five, which I predict to be like episode four, but with one less person in it.

Indications The Whole 19 Yards Might Not Be All That

By | February 19, 2010
14 Comments

A source told The Mirror: “It’s a huge hit in the US so they’re hoping it follows suit here.”

I would be intrigued to find out who this source is.

Vernon Kay and Caroline Flack are hosting if you hadn’t gathered already. Not convinced it requires two hosts, but I’m off to see an episode in March so we’ll see.

Rumours that Kay will be fronting a british version of The Phone are completely made-up.

Meanwhile, today’s leading search referal is “how dangerous will 101 ways to leave a gameshow be?” to which the answer is VERY, VERY DANGEROUS.

The Bother Series of Poker Game 2

By | February 18, 2010
4 Comments

pokertrophy2I’m off to play some real life poker this evening, which is a good time to remind you, the punter, that there is a game of poker at Full Tilt on Sunday night at 8pm, and if you do well in this one and well in most of the other events, you can possibly win this trophy, a gold medal, and the £75 that goes with it all.

There will also be fun chat about whatever anyone can be bothered to bring up on the night (doubtlessly a running commentary of the BAFTA Film Awards), and lots of whinging when I get inevitably get tediously outdrawn once again.

So don’t worry if you’ve never played with us before, we are quite gentle, albeit in an aggressive manner. And there’s nothing on telly Sunday night. Not unless you really like Dancing On Ice or Lark Rise to Candleford, anyway.

I completely forgot to add isn’t-news-weird quiz The Bubble with David Mitchell to this week’s Board of Excitement, I’m not overly convinced it will be brilliant, but Frank Skinner, Victoria Coren and Reginald B Hunter are on the first one. BBC2, 10:00pm. I’m ‘out’, so expect some opinion on it sometime, ooh, during the weekend.

Idle Speculation

By | February 18, 2010
21 Comments

Right, one of the exciting things about the NEW! Bother’s Bar is that I can see what people are searching for to find this place, and some of the search terms are rather interestingly leading.

So: that big Amanda Holden Crystal Maze rumour? It looks like it’s The Door, the show based around Bushtucker Trials ITV were getting excited about towards the end of last year.

Fort Boyard 2010 News

By | February 17, 2010
13 Comments

Thanks to Lee for the heads-up, I’ve discovered a few new things via Facebook:

  • Yes, Anna-Gaelle is leaving and Olivier will host on his own. This is a very fundamental change to the show.
  • This is probably my dodgy translation, it sounds like the teams are going to be left to their own devices whilst the games are being played.
  • Civilians are back! I’m idly wondering if they might get celebrity team captains though. This is potentially quite exciting, members of the public don’t need to be paid for and so it doesn’t really matter if they get taken prisoner first game and are never seen again.

Veeeee-ry interesting. This is all rather last-throw-of-the-dice after last year’s resounding audience loss (don’t forget that Intervilles and Carte Aux Tresors was also axed after last year, CAT having tried a few different things in the previous few seasons), but it’s not the first time the show has had to do it so it might be the shot in the arm the show needs.

Hopefully the money they save in appearance fees can go towards a few really spectacular new adventures.

Edit: Oh wow, just saw the Fort Bavard e-mail, it’s becoming a two-team show like recent European versions.

This makes me fairly sad, I’ve always found this version of the format rather anaemic compared to “proper” Boyard, although I’m hopeful the French will do something interesting with it – the place should represent more than a jumped-up outward bound centre, it has a history, and it would be incorrect not to play it up. Also it would be nice if they could sort out some sort of endgame to avoid the idea that one team might as well not bother turning up if they go in behind.

Still, 21 seasons is a pretty good run if next year is it, all told.