This has just popped up on ITV’s contestant callouts, The Neighbourhood, evidently with Graham Norton (unless this particular neighbourhood just has a giant cardboard cutout of Graham Norton in it).

In The Neighbourhood, it’s not about keeping up with the Joneses – it’s about beating them!

Unlike anything you’ve seen before, households from all walks of life will move in side by side. They’ll live as neighbours but compete as rivals. Whether facing off in street-sized games or gossiping over the garden fence, in the ultimate reality showdown.

ITV are looking for dynamic families and housemates to take part in this new ground breaking programme where one household will win a life changing cash prize!

Sounds a little bit like The Button Survivor meets Neighbours. Doesn’t feel like a very Graham Norton thing, although evidently he’s branching out a bit more these days. We’ll see.

Extremely excited about this! Mister Doc who has been hitting it out of the park with his archive Youtube channel recently is going to put up two episodes of Trick or Treat, the first one Monday at 6pm.

So for the uninitiated this was LWT’s take on Let’s Make a Deal, albeit through the prism of the IBA’s games of skill and prize limit rules which went out on Saturday evenings in 1989. It was hosted by Mike Smith and, in one of his earliest regular TV gigs, Julian Clary as The Joan Collins Fan Club – would expect this to have been quite a brave decision for ITV in 1989.

I distinctly used to remember the endgames where all the show’s winners came back to win the star (or not so star prize) which usually involved picking one of several keys, Julian going off to lie down in a darkened room, one player trying a key and getting eliminated and Julian then “finding” another key off-stage, too late for the eliminated player – I wonder if you could get away with that wheeze now.

The eight-year-old me remembers really enjoying this so it will be interesting to see how well it stands up 35 years later.

If you didn’t see this a few days ago, Wink Martindale’s Youtube channel posted a full episode of the 1991 HTV West local adaptation of Press Your Luck, something lots of people have been itching to see for a while (what’s left? A 1984 edition of Jeopardy with Derek Hobson is probably the current Holy Grail).

So lots of things to remark on here, let’s do a list.

• Enjoyed Rick Turk’s reinterpretation of the theme tune, very much in the Australian mould of “basically the same but just different enough to not have to pay for the licence for it” Aussie composers are wont to do. Very Grundy.
• Two HUNDRED Pounds!
• Paul Coia shouting “Whaaaaammm-mmmyyyy!” every few seconds.
• The quiz rounds go on a bit. How much of that is to fill the extra minutes a UK half-hour show is, how much to satisfy the IBA “game of skill” regulation of the time I don’t know. The second half definitely doesn’t need that many questions.
• In lieu of a spinning stage, those turning desk displays are quite fun.
• No Whammy animations. in fact they seemed to have redesigned it a little bit.
• The board calibrated so a choice space could be between a Whammy and some points, or some points and a different amount of points so not really a choice at all.
• It looks like those Whammy pop-ups are on some flimsy pieces of card.
• There are so many spins in play it’s little wonder the show ends the way it does, really.
• UKGameshows suggests this got not one but TWO series, a second one in 1992, so I wonder if they made any improvements to it.

Whilst we wait for details of ITV’s Genius Game waiting to be aired (sounded like February! Then Q1! Then Q2! Now who knows!), Netflix have put up some promo photos for S2 of The Devil’s Plan coming Q2 in their recent Korean preview thing and it looks cooooooool.

Digging the new aesthetic.

They’ve also revealed that Physical: Asia (a team-based edition of Physical 100) is coming Q4, and Crime Scene Zero, a new version of the popular role-playing detective/murder game we’ve discussed in the past, is coming Q3.

We’ll have a Show Discussion Post for Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt starting tomorrow later this evening.

TV Zone reporting The Sun reporting that The Inner Circle, a pilot recorded by Amanda Holden last year, has been commissioned by the BBC for Saturday nights. Edit: 25 episodes for daytime, 6 celebrity ones for Saturdays.

We opened the Stool Pigeon last August, and this is what someone had to say about it:

Amanda Holden has recently filmed a pilot for a new show called ‘The Inner Circle’, best described as quiz Golden Balls – my guess is it’s gunning for the early Saturday evening slot. It’s the first foray into the game show world of a production company which previously mainly did documentaries, and the format is genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever come across.

It sounds like it might be a car crash and we cannot wait.

Edit: One Question series two finally going out from Friday 14th Feb. Happy Valentine’s Day!