Right, I left my Anonybox open all afternoon, let’s see what interesting gossip you didn’t want to put your name on you have come up with:

• Letterbox is still boring. – Well, yes.
• In the U.S., a local station in Philadelphia has airing a local game show called “The Class-H Room” (no, really, that’s how they spell it) for about a month now. It pits teams of students and teachers against each other. All episodes have uploaded on YouTube. – I can’t work it out, is that meant to be a pun? It’s Canada’s Smart Ask all over again.
• The worst “Tell us a fun fact about yourself” response I ever heard at a quiz show audition was, “I’ve been arrested for murder twice”.
• I have been present at several pitches for pretty straightforward quiz shows at which someone has suggested “what if we made them wear shock suits?”. It has never once improved anything. – Yeah, I mean at most it’s a round of Distraction isn’t it? Where do you go from there? At least with something like Russian Roulette once you’ve comically screamed and fallen through the floor you’re literally out and the show progresses.
• Crystal maze live is moving its London maze to the trocadero in the new year. Completely new games apparently too. – yes indeed, 32 of them apparently. Little Lion had been trailing a mystery announcement for ages and people assumed it would be something new and exciting, and there’s me going “it’s probably just going to be a new Crystal Maze.” I am skill.
• James Acaster should be on every series of Taskmaster, in disguise if necessary. – When Taskmaster first started, I loved the idea of it but thought it should be a bit more argumentative. Seven series later we finally have an aggressively entertaining panel and it’s getting its biggest ever numbers. Good.
• Enjoyed inside number 9 live Halloween Ghostwatch remake, although compared to Ghostwatch in writing it’s a little lacking and the other program flashbacks are….we’ll there just a bit to silly in my taste. Needed to be PERFECTLY edited to work altogether. Though I will applied the crew for having the nerve to do a thing like this in this modern day and age and actually working, sorta…. makes me wonder what a proper official Ghostwatch remake would be like…. ( and I know there was a short story sequel by the original creator!) – fascinated by the puntctuation here but yes I watched it on catch-up having forgotten it was on and enjoyed it although I think there were probably one or two elements too many, less is sometimes more. I laughed when I heard it lost 30% of its audience about ten minutes in.
• Edit: Facebook considering an international version of The Mole. Ooh!

And there we are! Join us next time for your fascinating anonymous opinions and gossip the next time we open the Stool Pigeon!

Surprise us anonymously with things we ought to know, the postbox will close around 6pm and the best stuff, if any, will get put up later.

Edit: Box closed.

I want to talk about Big Brother, something we haven’t done for years and years really.

And that’s because, as we enter the show’s last ever week on Channel 5 (the final is Monday November 5th) there’s one thing I’ve been saying again and again on Twitter whilst watching it, and that’s “haha, this is a great task!” Gone are the “what did X say about you in the diary room” shenanigans of Channel 5 Big Brother’s past, largely gone are the stupid tasks where everyone is working hard to complete a task, only for the actual task to be to fail the task. No, this year they’ve been a bit more gameshowy, a bit more clever, a the ideas have been a bit more fun.

When it’s not been grabbing suddenly falling coins (or towards the end, balls in the garden, but only for people who have actually got out of bed), it’s been pretending they’re on a plane for hours with a crying baby, keeping a giant running sand timer topped up and most recently hysterical prison subterfuge (if you only watch one episode of C5 Big Brother this year, I’d like to point to the episode that went out Thursday 25th September as an episode of consistent hilarity and heroism). They’ve been entertaining and playful and great fun in a way BB hasn’t really explored for years.

If I have one problem with the series it’s that Big Coin hasn’t proved crucial enough and probably needed a bit more time in the oven. In the first week it was important, as the lowest totals would be put to the public vote, but since then not having Big Coin hasn’t really mattered, and there hasn’t been an awful lot to actually spend it on – the auction prices are typically very low and the decisions not that important, except in one or two cases where having the most bought power. I reckon there needed to be more opportunities for totals to rise and fall other than the one challenge during the week (most of which have been enjoyable), the auctions to increase with bigger jumps than the 5 to 10 they typically are, and something either really good to happen to the person with the most and/or something really bad to happen with the person with the least, like automatic nomination. Big Coin decisions should be difficult and relevant to position in the house and I’m not sure it’s quite worked like that here.

I can’t say I’ve watched BB much during the Channel 5 run – as I’ve said in the past, an hour a night for weeks on end is a lot to give up these days, but I’ve kept up with this one all the way through and it’s sad to me it has rated so poorly.

Scottish contestants required for a show called Danger Balls, which would make a great nickname for someone.

We are looking for fun pairs living in Scotland to take part in our brand new BBC Game Show, Danger Balls.

You could choose to leave with guaranteed cash. Or you could hold on for a chance at the jackpot, but risk leaving with nothing…

Danger Balls: The game where only the last ball left in play at the end wins the big cash prize. So unlike Bingo or the lottery, players are hoping their numbers stay ‘in the bag’ for a chance to win. Every show features three teams of two who’ve each been allocated 5 numbered balls. As the balls are picked from the bag at random the teams must answer questions to eliminate an opponent’s ball or save their own. The show also has compelling moments of strategy. Will the players cash in their balls when given the chance or hold out and hope for the big money, even though it could mean leaving with nothing?

Contact us now for more information!

We got that blurb from SRO, but I can link directly to the BBC site here. Let’s hope they use “I’d like to cash in my balls!” as a catchphrase.

In other news, it looks like The Time It Takes with Joe Lycett starts next Saturday at 5:40pm, which I’m not sure shows a lot of confidence in it, but at least it’s only 35 minutes if it’s not very good. We hope it is though.

It is said that Einstein came up with the quote “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

The Sun has reported that we’re due for another Blockbusters revival.

In other news, Channel 5’s upcoming Celebrity Game Night is giving me all sorts of positive Win Lose or Draw-style vibes – the host in Liza Tarbuck and the captains are Danny Baker and Susan Calman. They’re filming over the next week at Elstree if you’re free and interested. It looks like they’re dropping the members of the public aspect of the original but that probably doesn’t matter too much.

So I found myself watching a repeat of Catchphrase on Challenge last night. Carlton era. But I just want to know if you can spot the big graphical difference between these two vids, one from series 10, the other from series 11.

Series 10:

Series 11:

Spotted it? I never quite got my head around how it worked.

Clearly, that big screen is not really a screen as the Catchphrase logo in embossed glistening font at the top and tail of the show will attest, and the catchphrases are added in post (I’d suggest this is probably the same during the TVS era, even if there was some sort of back-projection thing going on). And yet in one there’s a clear reflection on the floor of what’s on the board which doesn’t happen in any series prior.

So how does that work? Are those Catchphrase logos simply on large removable bits of card, removed and added as and when? Has someone been charged with matte-ing the reflection onto the floor? Seems a lot of effort for not much reward. So, what?