Its with great sadness we have to inform everyone that not only has Carbide retired, but so has RobotWars. It’s been an amazing 3 years and we look forward to competing over sea’s. Hopefully in our short 15 minutes of fame we have inspired a new generation of builders 💔

— Team Carbide (@TeamCarbide) 16 March 2018

Genuinely a bit of a shame if true, the most recent series was very entertaining, correcting a lot of issues I thought the first two series had.

Edit: Yep.

Sad to confirm the BBC’s decision to de-activate our House Robots. A huge thank you to Dara & Angela, our brilliant judges Noel, Lucy & Sethu, all of the amazing teams and most of all…you for joining us on this amazing robot smashing adventure. #BringBackRobotWars #RobotWars

— Robot Wars (@UKRobotWars) 16 March 2018

You can’t have failed to notice that Jim Bowen, star of hit darts quiz Bullseye, has died. He was 80.

We don’t normally do tributes to the dead at Bother’s Bar – other people do them better. However, seeing as everyone else is going to do Bullseye, here’s a poor quality video of Jim pissing himself laughing at a poor quality escapologist act live on Sky Channel’s Sky Star Search with Keith Chegwin. The other judge is Rustie Lee.

It is POP FACT that Agatha Christie invented the modern reality elimination competition when she wrote And Then There Were None way back in the dim and distant past (in fact it’s practically The Mole, do read/watch/see performed if you haven’t already).

However recently I’ve been finding I’ve been watching lots of streams of a videogame called Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and it’s literally the film Battle Royale with Takeshi Kitano. 100 people dropped on an island who have to loot buildings for weapons and then vie to be the last one standing, to keep people moving and to keep people close the map contracts every few minutes, dealing damage to anyone who isn’t in the safe zone. With the right people I find it quite compelling.

This sort of thing has become all the rage in Videogameland now, there’s a similar free-to-play game called Fortnite Battle Royale which is basically the same thing but faster and with building elements.

The closest we’ve come to this sort of thing, I think, is the Japanese show Battle For Money, a spin-off of Bother’s Bar favourite Run For Money, which featured people running around a map eliminating each other with dodgeballs. Here’s an ep with English subs:

ITV don’t seem to have a press release yet but Variety has, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? returns in the Spring for a week-long run hosted by Jeremy Clarkson. “New twists and turns” are promised, which may be worrying or the shot in the arm the show needed.

It will be filming in Manchester.

There might still be another filmed run of twenty to show, but hit ITV quiz Tenable is looking for contestants for subsequent runs. Pity the poor question writers, I expect some proper barrel scraping unless they find a way to increase the pool.

As there’s not much on at the moment, here’s something I ended up watching a bunch of episodes of yesterday, for no discernable reason, US Supermarket Sweep.