Stuff

By | June 8, 2010
17 Comments

Right, Paul Brassey wants your help in determining the direction of future televisual endeavours, and anything that intends to improve the genre can only be a good thing. You can find all the details and a fairly lengthy questionaire in a new page linked to up there – What Is It You Want? The title is mine. I will leave the page up for a couple of weeks.

Tangentally: Mart S if you’re reading, the answer to your e-mail which to which my reply seems to have bounced back is “yes that would be lovely, thanks very much.”

And finally this Tuesday evening, the details for the final rounds of The BotherSOP are now up for you to peruse, so you can buy into the Superstack Grand Final right now, then forget about it until about an hour after it started, only to find that because of the nature of the event you’ll still have about 3,500 chips left.

Big Brother Bingo

By | June 8, 2010
2 Comments

All 80 Big Brother hopefuls revealed. Why not play Big Brother Bingo by trying to guess which 16 will make it into the house on Wednesday?

A few things:

  • But there are no contestants from The Million Pound Drop there! How can this be? That has just blown away my tiny little mind.
  • If Graham off of Coach Trip makes it in, Big Brother 11 scores -1/10 for the series regardless of whether it’s any good or not.

Board of Excitement: 6th June – 12th June

By | June 6, 2010
24 Comments

The Summer, there:

  • The Bother Series of Poker Game 10 (8pm, Sunday, Full Tilt)  – discussion page here.
  • Big Brother 11 (Launch night 9pm Wednesday and daily for the next 14 weeks, Channel 4) – as I’ve said, quite interested this year although doubtless will have stopped watching by Friday. I wish it best of luck though.
  • The World Cup (Every channel, all the time from Friday and six weeks hence) – can’t say I’m spectacularly interested although I quite liked that Dizzee Rascal track premiered on Britain’s Got Talent last night. Or I liked it until James Corden appeared, at any rate.
  • Total Wipeout: The Legends (5:45pm, Saturday, BBC1) – yes it’s a new episode, famous losers get to have another go, and it’s against England vs USA on ITV1. Good luck with that.

Fingers crossed, Fort Boyard 2010 details may emerge this week.

It’s no wonder Britain’s kenoing mad

By | June 5, 2010
11 Comments

Doubtless you’ve noticed that late nights on ITV have a new look. A new teleshopping look with a two hour block called The Zone. The Zone is a series of three or four ‘blocks’ linked together by Michael Underwood and Angelica Bell, or Nigel Mitchell off of Quizmania and Zoe Hardman off of the awesome Playing it Straight selling holidays. Half of these blocks are live simulcasts with QVC, which I’ve always liked because I love live broadcasting like that. Another block is a simulcast with Challenge Jackpot’s Roulette Nation.

But it’s the other thing I want to talk about, Challenge Jackpot’s Bingo Stars which is my favourite segment of the block for entirely the wrong reasons.

It’s basically keno. You pick five numbers from 80, ten are drawn, the more you match the more you win. You can stake up to £10 per line.

Here is a very rough guide to the odds and returns:

Matched Rough Odds Return
1 5 to 2 Stake returned
2 9 to 1 1 to 1
3 81 to 1 9 to 1
4 1635 to 1 99 to 1
5 95,400 to 1 9999 to 1

As doubtless you’ve noticed, the house has a bit of an edge here and traditionally keno is the game that favours the casino the most.

But the thing with what is essentially a lottery is that the poor returns are mitigated by the fact that the big prizes are very very big. It’s the glamour of the gamble and what could be more glamourous that winning lifechanging sums on late night TV? Let’s take a look at a winners list:

bingo

Oh.