Alright, let’s open the box and see what you’ve written. Remember: we can’t prove the veracity of any of these, the only people who know the truth are the people involved and the writer themselves. We’ll try and sort fact from fiction though.

• Epic Gameshow is filming at the moment – Price is Right films two episodes on Friday including a Christmas special! (Not really gossip, but factual. As long as they don’t mess up Play Your Cards Right.)
• Stephen Mulhurn to host new ITV gameshow Who Gets The House in which families compete for a bigger slice of their inheritance. (Ha ha!)
• Despite Jeremy Vine’s ritualistic insistence on Revenge of the Egghead that CJ wrote the penalty questions himself, I have heard it from CJ himself that he did not in fact write any of them. (This is the sort of thing that could BRING DOWN THE BBC. I hope you are happy, 12 Yard.)
• CHALLENGE BRIG: get Anne Hegarty, Richard Osman, Rick Edwards or someone with a name entry on UKGS and at least 123,456 Twitter followers to take part in a live Ask Me Anything interview on the Bar by the end of August and it’s worth £100 to the UK charity of your choice. You’re on a freeroll here. (Hmm.)
• Went to a mega long record at Media city recently for a show called Quizmaster for ITV. Not sure I’m allowed to say anything else about it… (You didn’t sign an NDA and you’re anonymous! Anyway this came up variously in last month’s Stool Pigeon).
• ITV have had to pay through the nose for The Masked Singer after getting into a bidding war with Channel 4. What makes it sting even more is that they were offered the format first (before it was a hit on Fox) and admitted at a recent industry event that they laughed it out of the room when it was first pitched. (Believable. And speaking of The Masked Singer, congrats to Friend of the Bar and regular German correspondent Nico W who worked on the recent highly successful German version.)
• Supermarket Sweep is going to be returning in September and will be more riskae hence the move to ITV2. (Would you like to fondle me baps, babe? Can you handle my banana? Etc.)
• A contestant gets to question 15 in the new series of Millionaire, and gives a Final Answer. I won’t say what the outcome is. (Gosh. Has Stellify gone from making it too hard to making it too easy? At least they seem reasonably happy to give cash out.)
• I feel like for the nickelodeon crystal maze, they are likely to go for a social media influencer, perhaps one that already lives in the UK (to save money) They did it with the new version of double dare and that worked out pretty well. Just not sure who. (Is Stampy The Cat still A Thing? I’m 38 now.)
• A team is apparently winning [REDACTED] in an upcoming episode of the Celebrity Chase. (I’m redacting this because we don’t really do spoilers, and it also means when it happens it will still be a surprise. It’s a lot of money though.)
• It’s time to rattle those pots and pans. (Is… is it a red tomato day?)
• One of the topics on this evening’s Just a Minute is/was ‘Gameshows’! Mostly about Sale of the Century and Jeopardy… (Gosh.)
• Famous online trivia contest LearnedLeague (players over the years include Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, James Holzhauer and at least three UK Chasers) has been approached for a loose quiz show interpretation, i.e. someone likes the name and wants to use it. (Hey producers! If you want a show that’s a bit like LearnedLeague but the rights are much cheaper, there’s this podcast I hosted and produced once upon a time…)
• Rumor has it that Ninja Warrior UK has got axed. No confirmation yet but let’s see happens. (Seems like an odd period to axe it, after someone has won it and the numbers have been consistent (if unspectacular), but Lost in TV who normally advertise the audience tickets for filming August/September don’t seem to be advertising them this year. So who knows?)

And that’s all the weather… for now.

BY POPULAR DEMAND, the Stool Pigeon is open for business, give us your best anonygoss.

I’ll keep the box open until around 8-ish.

THE BOX IS NOW CLOSED. Look out for the write-up soon!

I check the audience sites every few days, apparently I completely missed Supermarket Sweep tickets going live the other afternoon and some dates are already sold out, so if you want to see a show that offers “a respectful nod to the history of the original, the reboot will also inject the cheekiness and downright silliness fitting of an ITV2 prime-time slot with new games, challenges and a sprinkle of celebrity stardust, all culminating in teams taking on the unforgettable trolley dash to win a cash prize,” get on over to Applausestore, current dates are mid-August at Maidstone (where they filmed the last reboot, fact fans). We still don’t know which supermarket will be providing all the goods.

Also recording: Pants On Fire, the Emma Willis fronted show of that game from Dutch Mol where people do ridiculous things and someone hasn’t and they have to convince a panel they have. That’s for E4, recording at Elstree also mid-August.

This might be quite fun, Bradley Wiggins hosting a comedy sports challenge show for Comedy Central. In it, “mortals” compete against big name sportspeople in comedy takes of their sports and are able to choose a headstart for various amounts of points.

The interest lies in that it’s a format being produced by Bother’s Bar’s favourite wayward child Gary Monaghan and Mad Monk, of excellent Wild Things and Banzai fame. Which means it’ll either be very very good or a complete shambles probably. Which will it be? I look forward to finding out.

In less exciting news, ITV Studios have bought up prominent Israeli outfit Armoza Formats, who have previously given us The Common Denominator, The Bubble, international hit Still Standing and… Babushka. So a mixed bag.

I haven’t watched this yet, but here’s an early playing of Trivia Murder Party 2, coming up in this autumn’s Jackbox Party Pack 6. Looking forward to Game Nighting with it.

So I’ve been playing a lot of “roguelikes” on my XBox One recently (Brig Bother, add me!!!).

Roguelikes are based on an 1980 game called Rogue, a dungeon crawling adventure from 1980 played with ASCII art, the main ideas being procedurally generated levels (basically: random, but within certain creator-defined confines), monsters and treasure, and importantly permadeath – you die, you start right back at the beginning – you have to learn from your mistakes. These games also have a winning condition – defeat the big bad at the end of the last level.

Modern roguelikes have a fun mechanic in that although you start from scratch after dying, you might have unlocked some of hundreds of different objects, each with various effects which then may or may not turn up in future runs. Every game is different, if you’re fortunate the random number generator favours you with excellent items and weak monsters, sometimes it hates you. The Binding of Isaac and Dead Cells are undoubtably the cream of the genre at the moment, although we’re currently also addicted to Ironcast (a steampunk tile matching game) and Rogue Legacy, which has a neat passing-your-genes-on mechanic. And also Crypt of the Necrodancer (and direct Zelda spin-off Cadence of Hyrule) takes the ideas and puts it to an incredible beat. And Slay the Spire!

Is this an untapped genre for TV formats? Knightmare is an obvious example of what is basically what a roguelike could look like. But what about quizzes? 1 vs 100 (the original version of the format) basically fits doesn’t it? One contestant goes on a run and either succeeds in glory or crashes out never to be seen again. Millionaire is almost a roguelike I reckon, but falls down in being able to walk away. Randomize the lifelines and make it all or nothing though…