Knowing Jack

By | November 6, 2013
4 Comments

This was bought to my attention this morning and likely of interest to readers, Steam currently has a You Don’t Know Jack US bundle going – all of the old PC games except for YDKJ 5 (which featured online play) for fifteen quid. (Edit: Also doesn’t include the weekly online episodes that were released as two compilations – Offline and Louder! Faster! Funnier! so a little bit less complete, but still good value.)

Be warned the humour and references are American and some of those pop culture references are going to be twenty years old, however you’re looking at around 8,000 questions (and to a lesser extent gags) that have been properly crafted and remains a great fun single and especially multiplayer quiz. It’s a shame the Paul Kaye UK edition isn’t up on Steam as you’d get the references and had people like Mel and Sue on the writing team. Of the bundle I reckon The Ride is the most interesting set-up, YDKJ 3 is probably the second best one. I haven’t played Head Rush, which was the teen version.

I spent about £50 on eBay a few years ago getting the CD-ROM versions of most of these and it would have taken about a week to download on your 56k modem. Now you can get the lot for £15 and download them in seconds. Amazing.

In other news Takeaway On Tour tickets now on sale, tickets between £25 and £50-ish depending on venue, 20% discounts for families of four.

Or you can wait for the next series in the Spring.

Show Discussion: Pressure Pad

By | November 3, 2013
40 Comments

pressurepadWeekdays, 3pm,
BBC 1

A visually iconic quiz unlike any you have seen before.

That’s what the blurb suggests, if the pilot is anything to go by it’s lots of mini-quiz formats you have seen before done but on a yay-big sized floor screen, not seen since the “place the thing on a map” bit from I Love My Country.

Still, it does have one-man nuclear power station John Barrowman hosting (so that in itself should guarantee it a few viewers), if they haven’t changed much from the pilot the quiz itself is harmless enough (individuals face off in best of three games, losers are eliminated, in the final round the team captain can get help answering multiple-choice questions from surviving teammates, and if they get them all right straight off the bat they win a progressive jackpot – it’s the most 12 Yard 12 Yard format in aeons). Here are the two things I think will kill it if they’ve not modified them from the pilot (of course you never know how well these things come out in the edit):

  • The insistence on playing everything as best of three but starting each game from the easy beginning bits each time, which made me want to claw my eyes out. The games are sort of Price is Right style – some take longer than others. the prospect of a third go round of some of the games makes me wake-up in a cold sweat. The more quickfire ones are less bad.
  • Whilst there is a rolling jackpot element, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the standard prize of £2,000 split between five people feels a bit cheap.

Very interested to see how this translates to screen, so let us know what you think.

Takeaway on Tour

By | October 31, 2013
11 Comments

Ant and Dec with no Red or Black to fill their Summers are taking proper Saturday night entertainment Saturday Night Takeaway on an arena tour next year so everyone can join in with “did you watch that programme? No.” Blimey and indeed gosh.

Tickets go on sale from next Friday, the 8th November at 9am, at prices yet to be announced. They’re taking in Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Belfast, Glasgow, Sheffield, Newcastle, Liverpool AND London.

I can’t believe the Cambridge Corn Exchange misses out… AGAIN!

Show Discussion: Release the Hounds

By | October 27, 2013
20 Comments

releasethehoundsMonday 28th October, 10pm,
ITV2

One-off horror comedy gameshow with a view to a series. Reggie Yates communicates with a team of three friends sent into a scary forest to complete apparently terrifying tasks and challenges for money, which they only get to keep if they can outrun the titular hounds at the end and escape the forest.

It taps into the primeval fear of it being very dark and the possibility that something may or may not be there. Letting people scare themself with their own imagination has been done before (in MTV’s Fear, for example), and has proven highly entertaining.

It looks like basically an hour of people getting “BOO!” shouted at them in the middle of the night for money, and whilst it sounds like a bit of a one-joke show it can be a helluva joke. I hope it’s got a little more meat to it then that otherwise we’re not sure it has a lot of places to go for a full series, but this is something we’ve been looking forward to for a while so are keeping our fingers crossed is good.

Show Discussion: Prize Island

By | October 26, 2013
25 Comments

PRIZE_ISLANDSundays, 5:40pm,
ITV1

It began in Mozambique last Autumn and somewhere between then and now it sounds like it got lost in Editing Hell – we’ve heard a number of interesting stories on the grapevine, our favourite being that ITV decided after filming that obscure TV host Alexander Armstrong turns out is a bit too posh for the ITV audience so they’ve tried to edit him out a little – I reckon the reason he turned up on fellow Endemol show Your Face Sounds Familiar was to try and ITV him up a little bit so they could actually broadcast this. I love these sorts of stories and would be fascinated to see what the original edits looked like. Oh and hey look, the brilliant Emma Willis is here as well, it’s not like the show is lacking talent. But despite this it’s not being advertised but it also doesn’t have much in the way of competition for the first episode, other than an American Football game and the first twenty minutes of Countryfile.

We may never get to find out the full story behind the development of Prize Island but that it’s been treated so badly seems rather a shame because on the face of it it’s Exactly The Sort Of Thing We Like. The press release:

Hosted by Alexander Armstrong & Emma Willis, Prize Island is a new, action-packed gameshow set on a sun-baked tropical island. Here, ordinary couples arrive in an extraordinary place to participate in incredible games and challenges to win prizes.  The island is a magical place, remote and untouched by the modern world – it is exactly the kind of paradise where we all dream of being marooned, filled with wildlife, sweeping landscapes, the odd vast shipwreck and tons of prizes.

The entire island is the show’s set, with over-the-top stunts and colourful games scattered across the landscape. A surprise lurks round every corner… fitted kitchens appearing from the ocean, TVs in the undergrowth, even hairdryers with very modern technology that lock in moisture dug from the prize seams beneath the abandoned Old Gold Mine. There is even the wreck of a half-submerged pirate galleon in one of the bays across which the contestants must race to stay in the competition.

In this episode four couples arrive on Prize Island to compete in games like ‘Coconut Superstore’, ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Swiss Family Plumbing’. After each round a team is eliminated, leaving only one couple to compete in the final located at the remote and mysterious Moonfish Bay. In ‘Buried Treasure’ the finalists will attempt to locate and win the ultimate prize buried in the sands – a new car and £50,000.

What’s not to like? It’s difficult to do action adventure in a way that a big mainstream audience will buy into, so I guess we’ll find out. It wouldn’t be the first show that channels have tried to bury but turned out to be quite entertaining – the BBC’s Drop Zone with Steve Jones comes to mind, so keep an open mind.

Edit: For balance, Richard Osman is suggesting the editing hell stories are nonsense.

Edit Edit: Thanks to Ashley, to everyone asking where it’s filmed, it’s believed to be Bazaruto Island off Mozambique.