Saturday, 9:20pm,
ITV
Holly Willoughby is joined by team captains Bradley Walsh and Frank Lampard for a show that might as well be called A League of ITV’s Own if the description is much to go by.
Made by the same people behind the recent Reality Bites on ITV2, so likely to have the same sort of tone.
Saturdays, 7pm,
ITV
ITV’s Super Saturdays kick off with Ninja Warrior UK, the home grown version of the popular Japanese event show Sasuke (which in itself was a spin-off of a show called Muscle Ranking (known here and in the US as Unbeatable Banzuke) which already made it to the UK as Under Pressure on Channel 5 way back in 2001).
We’re interested in seeing how it’s been formatted and if they’re going to end the series with a definitive winner (famously the Japanese show has only seen a Total Victor four times out of thirty tournaments so far). We also don’t know if there’s any prize.
Even though series one hasn’t gone out yet, which is confident:
There are all the details, plus a picture of Konnie Huq in something close to a schoolgirl outfit.
This starts on Saturday and I’m quite interested to see how they’ve formatted it – it’s eight episodes, and with 250 contestants to get through I expect we’re going to see the same Stage 1 course for several weeks and I’m not sure how that’s going to play out (if I recall correctly the original Sasuke only started with 100, the Japanese broadcast gets it all done in three hours, the US/UK edits on Challenge get it all done in two/three half hour episodes). It looks sounds like the UK show will be geared towards finding a winner, whereas it was perfectly possible for there to be no winner in the Japanese show.
It looks a bit weird indoors, although at least they’ve kept the Mount Midoriyama name (if only for the final stage, quite cleverly alluded to in the show’s logo).
I reckoned they should have named the set Manc Midoriyama, but there we are. Here is a promo, it’s good to see that unlike Wipeout, you don’t need a little man to fix it so people fall in the water, most people do that anyway, it’s OK to be impressed occasionally:
A Show Discussion post will go up for this and Play To The Whistle on Saturday.
We don’t normally do posts like this but we’re going to make an exception, we’re very sad to hear that Hull’s finest Dave “The Devilfish” Ulliot passed away today.
There are three people who basically got me into the game I’ve very much enjoyed playing for around fifteen years, and they were all the stars of Late Night Poker in the 90s – Jesse May and his evocative commentary, Barny Boatman as hilarious dry co-commentator, and The Devilfish, a proper character in a game that seems to have fewer and fewer these days. Our thoughts are with family and friends.
That’s right murder mystery fans, Korean show Crime Scene has returned for a second series with a mixture of old faces and new, and once again Bumdidlyumptious is subbing them for our entertainment. You can find a link to all the subbed Series 2 episodes here.
Crime Scene is the show where celebrities investigate a mocked up version of a fictionalised version of an actual real crime by getting into the roles of potential suspects and cross-examining each other and investigating the crime scene for clues. The “murderer” must do everything they can to throw suspicion on to someone else. We discussed season one here, we’ll set up a new page for season two if there’s enough call for it.