Fridays, 8:30pm,
BBC1

Now here’s an interesting one. Ostenably it’s Taskmaster mixed with a bit of Gogglebox, from the mind of Alex Horne of Taskmaster.

Five families each have a button installed in their house with a screen on it. At any time the button might go off. They push the button and are set a task, the same task all the other families get. Once everyone has completed, the one that did the best banks money. At the end of the show the most successful team are given the choice to walk away or risk that money for a £10,000 bonus if they win the following week – win or lose it looks like all the families can stay on until they win an episode and walk away.

The half hour evening slot feels very unusual for this sort of thing so the pacing ought to be interesting. It was always intended to be a half-hour show, although I think I heard mention that the original intention was midweek so make of that what you will.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Weekdays, 5:30pm,
Channel 4

Inventors attempt to sell ideas to an audience armed with buttons and lights, and if at least one person reckons they’d buy the product it’s thrown open to a panel of buyers who may or may not make an order. Perhaps they should have called it Sell Me Out.

Given how well Dragon’s Den continues to perform it’s surprising more shows haven’t jumped on the pitching for business bandwagon – although perhaps Dragon’s Den pretty much has the market cornered – off the top of my head I can only think of The Money Pit. This one offers Brian Conley (my liking of Conley is not steeped in hipster irony) and neon. Will it be enough?

Fridays Sundays, 8pm,
Channel 4

No point giving Series 1 Block 3 a new post, so I’m bumping this one up instead.

(The post for the Celeb editions and the several hundred comments they generated can be found here).

And so we come to the year’s main event, the civilian run of The Crystal Maze.

Merely two months ago, 22 years of excitement and hope, bolstered by two years of advertising by other people, broke down to “I mean, it’s alright,” and “I really think this should be better”, now we meet the 15-episode civilian run with a sort of non-committal nod of the head and a disinterested “Oh, OK then.”

We’ve already seen most of the games. We get that Richard Ayoade is hosting seemingly under the impression it’s not very good. Can it turn things around in having fewer games to focus on the personalities of the contestants?

It’s probably wise not to read too much into the overnights for this (although it will be difficult to spin “around a million” into a positive), but watch-out instead for how many it adds in +7 catch-up as a trend, where it had been adding a great deal.