Alright, this is pretty complex to buckle up.

This dropped into my Netflix recommendations this morning as I was about to watch an episode of Baking Impossible and thought it looked quite interesting – I can’t say I’ve seen much Spanish reality. From the first five minutes – oh, it’s basically Big Brother, but in truth it’s actually a bit more interesting and insidious than that.

Twelve contestants think they’ve made the final round of casting for the show, and the last stage is two weeks staying in the house that they don’t believe is being filmed, because they’re idiots apparently who have never come across the idea of one-way mirrors, whilst doing tests in the “workroom” (which they know IS being filmed). Each contestant is wearing a wristband that apparently is tracking everyone’s emotions, and this is all fed into their individual pie chart and discussed by a casting coach, the idea, as far as they’re concerned, is to try and “scientifically” come up with the perfect reality show contestant and to see how far they’re willing to go for $100,000. The question the show seems to be trying to ask: are people different when they don’t think they’re being filmed?

However what the contestants think the show is, and what the viewers think the show is are rather different and I suspect by the end of the run our positions will have changed again. Two episodes of seven in we’ve been introduced to a fake contestant, two fake “bad cop” producers, a confidentially break, mess, tears and tantrums and evictions and nothing is quite what it seems – only that reading the episode synopses ahead, there IS a game and there IS $100,000 at stake and at some point everyone’s going to find out they were being filmed the whole time.

The show is hosted by actress Najwa Nimri who apparently can’t sit in a chair properly and the direction goes slightly overboard with “look how mysterious this all is” in quite an annoying way, but I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t interesting enough that I wasn’t going to finish the series – it’s only seven episodes long and each one is about 45 minutes.

If you were expecting a Plays Badly video on the new Koh-Lanta Microids game that was apparently getting released last week – so was I! However a check on all the storefronts suggests that it hasn’t actually been released for whatever reason.

In the meantime, here is some music.

Tonight, 8pm – 10:30ish
Here and on Youtube

It’s that time of year again! A new Jackbox Party Pack has been released, and the prize for winning a Game Night is first dibs on the new games. Join us from 8pm as all the previous champions from the year (except for one who’s going to be at the World Minigolf Championships) compete for the ultimate accolade: Champion of Champions.

We’ll also be joined by some super special guests I’ve invited to fill up the numbers, as Team Audience has had a great year. And as ever Team Audience will be competing tonight to ruin the hopes and dreams of our panel, so get your phones and tablets ready. It’s like real life Squid Game!

One winner will get to see the light in the Arbitrary Final from around 10pm, where anything can and might happen! You won’t want to miss it!

I’ve just watched the first episode of Baking Impossible on Netflix and it was quite good – kind of like Scrapheap Challenge but with cake. Nine teams of “bakeneers” (one’s a baker, one’s an engineer, the first time they meet each other is on set) are charged with engineering mission they have to bake their way around – the first one involves building a boat that could cross a 20ft “sea” whilst being buffeted by light wind from some fans within a 45 second time limit. The resident panel of judges, led by Andrew the engineering one off of Bake Off a few years ago, judge the teams on engineering, whether the cake it was carrying was any good and “bakeneering”.

My one issue I think is that surely judging a cake (which got no screen time at all in the making bit) that’s being carried across is a cop out – they should be tasting the boat, surely? Otherwise it’s standard episodic elimination, but with the mission winners getting an advantage for the next mission. It’s quite fun – magician Justin Willman is a decent host. Worth a watch.

Have quite enjoyed comments suggesting the set looks like a Mint Wispa.