Board of Excitement 7th – 13th November 2010

By | November 7, 2010

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m just going to copy and paste last weeks:

  • The Cube (7pm, Sunday, ITV1)
  • The X Factor (8pm, Sunday, ITV1)
  • Only Connect – second quarter-final, The Wrights vs The Bloggers (8pm, Monday, BBC4)
  • The Apprentice (9pm, Wednesday, BBC1)
  • The Challenge: Cutthroat I caught up with this this week, the elimination challenge from the week before last involved hitting your opponent in the face with a fly swatter. Meanwhile one contestant is in hospital having fell badly into some water from 40ft in the air. WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN? (Wednesday, MTV US)
  • The Million Pound Drop – Live – eighty minutes each. I do not think it unfair to suggest that the weekend episodes on this week were significantly down on what the show was getting when it was being stripped, although they remain Decent For Channel Four. (10pm Friday and Saturday, C4)
  • Schlag den Star – hopefully someone will pop up with a link to watch a live stream nearer the time. (7:15pm, Friday, Pro Sieben/the internet)

Edited to add:

  • Premier League Poker – first match. Goodness knows why they show it almost a year after filming it, although I think I’ve forgotten who wins so that’s OK then. New eight-seated deepstack format as well. I believe the first few episodes may already be up on YouTube. (1am, Monday night, Channel 4) Edited to add: Er, might actually have started a few weeks ago, but the blurb says it’s the first match starting this evening. Oh, have there been qualifying episodes? That might explain a lot.

Unbelieveably poor questions of our time again

By | November 6, 2010

Once again, it’s our old friend The Million Pound Drop, because apparently it is very difficult to create multiple-choice questions where only one of the answers is definitively correct:

“Which actor played Doctor Who for the longest period?

  • Sylvester McCoy
  • Paul McGann
  • Christopher Ecclestone
  • David Tennant”

The correct answer, and the one that the couple left free was David Tennant, the reasoning being that he was the Doctor for four series. But hang on, the question does not ask who had the most series as Doctor Who, it asks who was the Doctor for the longest period, in which case (looking around) the correct answer is Sylvester McCoy who played him from 1987, had a break, then appeared in the Paul McGann movie in 1996 giving him a period (what the question is asking) of nine years. I did idly wonder if McGann would be the answer, seeing as he’s technically the doctor from the TV movie until the first Christopher Ecclestone episode but I think that would be a year shorter.

Only Endemol can etc etc.

Show discussion: Schlag den Star

By | November 5, 2010

Because we haven’t done one of these yet, why not have a discussion post for Friday’s Schlag den Star? It’s on 7:15 UK time, and hopefully someone will pop-up with a live stream address.

Oh! It’s Million Pound Drop (The) this evening also.

Yeah, but it’s just luck isn’t it?

By | November 3, 2010

22nd November is when Deal or No Deal will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of the third week of it being on air – an unusual thing to celebrate by all accounts, but then DoND is that sort of a show. At least it isn’t calling itself “six in Big Brother years”.

Old faces are promised, as well as a hilarious VT and a twist which could add thousands of pounds. The idea that the show was ever as popular as it was was mainly because of Bother’s Bar is mysteriously being swept under the carpet.

I might go into the internet archive to see what exactly people were saying about the show five years ago (it’ll never last, that sort of thing). Does anyone have any favourite comments?

It turns out you CAN in fact get the Stauf these days.

By | November 2, 2010

Not strictly gameshow related, but something that may prove of interest, legendary sort-of-Crystal-Maze-in-a-haunted-house 90s PC game The 7th Guest is getting a release on iDevices next month. It was one of the first games to use full motion video, and is effectively Professor Layton fifteen-years ahead of Professor Layton, with added blood and horror.

What with You Don’t Know Jack making a resurgence (they’d better bring it out for the UK, is all I’m saying), we’re truly entering a golden age of videogames that are a little bit like gameshows sort of.