OK, I’m going to sticky this to the top as I know there have been a lot of enquiries: UKGameshows has been AI traffic bombed, there are people behind the scenes working on bringing it back but there’s no timeframe, thanks for your patience.
Show Discussion: You Bet! On Tour
Saturdays, 8pm,
ITV
“Hang on Brig, this is just an extension of the brand, shouldn’t you just be pointing to the previous You Bet show discussion page and leaving it there?”
Possibly. Possibly. I was as prepared to write this off as much as anyone, the two “specials” being a fabulously aggravating, poorly directed, poorly formatted watch.
But. But but but but. We were alerted to the On Tour pre-titles in the ITV Press Centre and this actually looks… quite fun? Certainly much looser than the studio one (people have noticed tonal simularities with In For A Penny) – if you don’t want to invite comparisons with the original then making it completely differently might be quite smart. It looks like if you succeed at your challenge you win £5,000, and I believe the best celeb bettor also wins £5,000 for charity, but there’s been no mention of any forfeits (although that looks like Holly Willoughby on a rollercoaster so they might not have been completely removed). I don’t even know if they’ve even kept the audience betting – each episode was recorded over two days, they could have just had whoever was around going to a website on their phone or something.
We might be getting overexcited about a show that sounds like it’s basically the best bits of shows that are a bit like You Bet! but aren’t You Bet! from the past twenty years, and there will still be the nagging feeling that the editing and direction will still have been designed to irritate everyone over the age of 25. But for now I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Let us know what you think in the comments.
The calm before the storm
Sorry, not much greatly interesting happening at the moment but this weekend we’ll have Show Discussion posts for You Bet On Tour and The Inheritance and there’s a new quiz podcast coming out next week that may or may not be interesting. And the following weekend has Postcodeloterij Win Win With The Postcode Lottery! September new season!
Meanwhile it’s the finals of Desty X tonight and tomorrow (the show everybody is ambivalent about), and The Fortune Hotel Thursday and Friday.
Edit: This has just come up on TV Zone and if I’ve understood it correctly it sounds potentially quite wild and interesting – basically Dermot O’ Leary introducing a live NFL game on Five under a NFL Big Game Night wraparound, and during the bits where they go to an ad break on US TV, Five will be doing a gameshow where members of the public helped by Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora and a celeb will do things decided by the action just gone to help members of the public win trips to the US. Unpredictable stuff happening on live TV! I love it.
Staying in The Loop
First of all The Answer Run starts its new series this afternoon from 4:30 on BBC1, might as well use the previous Show Discussion post for it. Similarly 007: Road To A Million starts on Friday, and here’s the previous Show Discussion post for it to use.
However we were alerted to A New Thing that may well be of interest starting tomorrow on telly person Ben Justice’s Gameshow Guru channel on Youtube, The Loop, a quiz with professional graphics from proper telly people Marvellous Machines made on the cheap.
This seems like a very ‘in’ thing, we know there are some professional TV developers working on a quiz show podcast we’re just waiting to get details on – it will be interesting to see how well these skills transfer to new mediums, whether they gain traction, how much gumption they have if they don’t immediately take off in what’s probably quite a challenging space. Then I’ll make a Netflix documentary about it all and make millions.
What do you do with a problem like Pere Fouras?
Look it sort of works.
An interesting story came out over the weekend, Yann Le Gac, the man who has played Fort Boyard‘s Pere Fouras for 34 of the last 36 years, is thinking about joining close friend Olivier Minne (who is having to leave thanks to signing to a different network) out the door – basically he’s 72-years-old, it hurts to do the voice, the costume is heavy and there are so many flights of stairs, also he *really* got on with Minne and they’d often stay chatting until three in the morning during filming periods. Le Gac also works for Adventure Line in a producer and game designer capacity for things like Koh-Lanta (the domestic version of Survivor).
Minne leaving is a loss, he’s been a popular and successful frontman for the show since 2003 – over twenty years, but the story of him leaving for another network came too close to recording for him to be replaced, as such this being his last season is being acknowledged on the show. Whatsmore there are at least three people off the top of my head who could front it more than adequately (Feraud! Rovelli! Riccio!). Replacing Pere Fouras will be much harder – he’s the soul of the show, the one season in his otherwise continuous run Yann wasn’t playing him, 2002, the show was almost axed and it felt like someone cosplaying the role (actor and impressionist Didier Hervé).
What to do? Same character with a different actor is only going to invite likely unflattering comparisons, and if it happens next year they also have to deal with a new host as well. Doctor Who style regeneration? New character? It was always a pity that Francis Lalanne fell out with the show when they couldn’t have him on during COVID – his professor character felt like a natural person to pass the Master of Fort Boyard baton over to – and it’s not like this wasn’t coming! The character might be 200-years-old or whatever but the person playing him was always going to be limited.
I *suspect* the channel will be able to sweet talk him into doing one more year next year, for continuity, for the kids, to have a proper goodbye. This puts off the problem rather than solves it but at least buys time, for all we know next year might be a disaster in terms of ratings or the current high-profile renovations not going as planned and they might have to rest it anyway, then it could come back in a few years in Year Zero capacity, but I’ve always thought if they stop making it it’ll be really hard to start making again years down the line, and it’s not like loads of countries are chomping at the bit to make their own versions at the moment (this year is France and Belgium and that’s it). But if there’s one thing it will always have going for it is that you can have lots of shows that are *a bit like* Fort Boyard, but there’s only one show that has the broadcast history and the location, and that’s Fort Boyard. Until the Russians have done their knock-off, obviously.
The last episode of the season, Minne’s final episode, featuring table tennis prodigies the Lebrun Brothers and host of the recently axed Des Chiffres et Des Lettres Laurent Romejko, airs on France 2 August 30th.
There’s a Floor in the format
TV Zone reporting that The Floor is indeed for ITV, as if we hadn’t guessed already. Ten weeks, 81 players, looks like they’re using the variety of rounds the show can provide rather than just “identify the the thing in the picture”, although that will probably still be 70% of rounds. No idea of host yet (The Sun seemed to have a headline that suggested it was a ‘Hollywood Star’ but I think they got confused about Rob Lowe and they’ve modified it since).
Probably about time. We watched the first episode of the Dutch one almost three years ago and thought that it was not rubbish, since then it’s been a bit of a monster in terms of sales, and it even seems to have worked in most of them. It’s an extremely malleable format, and even though I think the strategy element is overstated, fun to watch. I look forward to seeing how it does here.