You know what they say: old news is good news! Well actually they’ve misremembered. Anyway, the episode of Fifty 50 Show due to go out a fortnight ago has finally popped up. In it, Dan Peake talks about appearing on The Common Denominator, and Travis Penery joins host Lewis Murphy to discuss Schlag den Raab and all the HOTTEST two week old gameshow goss.

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There’s an extra bit of Dan stuff as well.

We’ll probably think about doing another episode of The Line Up soon.

MEANWHILE! Robot Combat League starts showing on SyFy in the UK from next Monday at 8pm (repeated 10:50pm). Had a chat about the first episode here, but funnily enough despite all the excitement haven’t really gone out of my way to watch other episodes.

Easter!!!

Unfortunately not much to talk about. But NEXT weekend is impossibly exciting:

• 5 Minutes to a Fortune! (Recording Report)
• Catchphrase! (Pilot report, Recording Report)
• A recording report for Reflex with Shane The Legend Richie! (Pilot report, although it sounds like it’s changed A LOT in the interim.)

I gather Catchphrase was on Ant and Dec this evening so good cross-promotion. Like the theme tune, don’t like the graphics, think people will otherwise find it basically pleasing albeit with some unnecessariness.

In the meantime WHO WILL WIN THE BATTLE BETWEEN ANT AND DEC AND THE VOICE? One is lazy but also quite funny, the other I have very little interest in. A and D had momentum going into it. I’m usually brilliant, I’m allowed a blind spot. The first person to mention share gets permabarred.

Where will Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble end up in the charts tomorrow?

More questions than answers, there. There’s no BSOP this weekend.

That’s it, really.

It’s Easter.

Easter eggs.

Geese lay eggs.

The singular form of geese is goose.

The Italian/Spanish word for goose is “oca”.

And somebody’s uploaded lots of episodes of the Spanish version of Il Grande Gioco dell’ Oca, El Gran Juego de la Oca, the original Italian version on Rai Due was required viewing on my television on Friday nights in the early nineties.

Do you get the feeling Endemol don’t quite understand the attraction of their own show?

It’s the English promo for Next One!

Christ. They’ve sidelined the entire bonuses and characters and entertainment when that’s the beating heart of the show. Not pleased.

It’s Bother’s Bar favourite Avanti un Altro!, of course. I’m quite tempted to make a better one.

Doubtless you’ll have seen that PJ and Duncan are set to top the charts this weekend with the amazing Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble after they performed it on Saturday Night Takeaway this last week. It was already in the Top Five in the All Important Vodafone Big Top 40 Sponsored By iTunes the day after they did it, but now it’s top of the iTunes charts so there’s a good chance it will be number one in the proper charts this coming Sunday.

We’ve long thought that people put too much faith in formats and that something that isn’t brilliant can still succeed if it can connect with the audience in some way, nothing really supports that view more than Saturday Night Takeaway does which is doing great numbers despite the fact most of the items in it aren’t actually very good (I’m a Celebrity… Get Out of Me Ear!, Ant vs Dec and The End of the Show Show not withstanding – do you know anyone who really looks forward to the Supercomputer?).

I read an interesting and funny post on DS (it does occasionally happen) suggesting that this makes Ant and Dec more musically relevant than The Voice which starts this Saturday, with its failure to make make stars of the winner.

Meanwhile in a change of tone you might have read about the sad death of a contestant whilst filming Koh Lanta (TF1’s very successful version of Survivor made by Adventure Line) in Cambodia. His name was Gérard Babin and he was 25, which is no age to die of a heart attack.

Let’s not get hysterical over this – this was the first challenge of the series (swimming from boat to beach) and he would have needed to pass health checks to satisfy the insurers of such a show, as such it’s difficult not to see this as “just” a very unfortunate event. People like testing their mettle. People like watching other people testing their mettle. Production companies want interesting (or at least the threat of something interesting) to happen, but the reality is injury and accidents after initial interest cause a lot of long term harm to production companies  (this show was one of TF1’s and Adventure Line’s biggest shows, and now it won’t be happening this year) – not to mention the contestants of course, which shouldn’t be made light of.

Edit: It may be worthwhile to point out that not a lot of information has been released to the media over this yet, but the authorities are currently looking into it.

Happy weekend!

Tomorrow (i.e. Sunday) night at 8pm we’re having a fun game of HORSE as part of our Mix It Up Real Good poker series. It’s open to anyone who basically wants a game, regardless of if they’ve got any interest in winning the glass-effect league trophy or not, so come and join us. It’s DOUBLE POINTS, as the first deeper stacked mixed game of the season.

Otherwise there’s not much of interest this weekend, although there’s a Pointless Doctor Who special (BBC One 7pm) followed by a new series of Who Dares Wins (BBC One 7:45pm). Alternatively there’s Proper Saturday Night Entertainment™ with Ant and Dec (ITV, 7pm) followed by Philip Schofield making looks of joy, excitement and pain on The Cube (ITV 7:20pm).

Lewis Murphy is ill, so there will be no new Fifty 50 Show this week. They’ve still got last week’s to put out eventually.

Edit: Jonathan Ross takes on The Banker on Celebrity Deal or No Deal Sunday evening, 7pm on C4.