Sorry I can’t guarantee excitement at the Bar this week, I’m off for the week which means being almost completely out of the loop, but I’m having great fun playing cards in London.

There’s a new Fifty Fifty show out, this week Lewis Murphy talks to David J Bodycombe and Travis Penery about the current state of Saturday night television.

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Meanwhile it sounds like That Puppet Game Show is being moved to 5:15pm from 31st August, it looks like my prediction of it being “not a hit, but not a Don’t Scare the Hare style flop either” is only going to be half right.

Speaking of non-hits, Take on the Twisters pulled just 925k yesterday (a repeat of Pointless got 2.7m, for comparison). Was idly wondering on Twitter how many episodes of The Chase  it would take to build the ITV audience back to its usual level, it took about a week to lose it. Mark Labbett reckons about a fortnight, Richard Osman has plumped for one. I suspect the answer is somewhere in between the two. We’ll find out come September 2nd, and Richard has suggested he thinks new episodes of Pointless will start then as well. Summer’s over everyone!

In other news, here is an interesting discussion on some intriguing Korean shows, and Celebrity Big Brother starts tomorrow. Also The Great British Bake Off did quite well.

So Whodunnit? finished in the US last night and certainly it was an odd little show for a number of reasons. I ended up quite enjoying it but the set-up was far from perfect.

For a start it never seemed quite comfortable believing its own fiction, and the last ten minutes of the final proved this right up until the end. Contestants who are murdered except aren’t being murdered, and a murderer led off by police car at the end when really if there were murders happening you’d think someone would have called the police right at the start. It didn’t help that people thought the contestants were really getting murdered and they had to point out that they weren’t, which spoilt the surprise of the final shot a bit.

The title is hugely misleading – working out who did anything was in fact the least important aspect of the entire show – you never had anything to figure it out from other than who you thought looked a bit funny, they had no real agency throughout the entire run and the reveal at the end – that it must be you because it isn’t me – I think it was meant to be dramatic but actually felt rather embarrassing, especially when they started rhyming unconvincingly. It actually would have been far better if Giles had done it, or at least it would have been better if they treated it as a series of procedurals with the murderer being a known but outside force to be revealed in the finale then the end would carry rather more impact. Or if its going to be one of them at least give the murderer something to do!

Everyone goes on about “ooh, it’s like The Mole,” well it’s only like The Mole in so much as its got some puzzles in it. Many of these were fairly entertaining to be fair and I’m glad they got a bit more interesting than the opening week. It’s a shame the only way to find the murder weapon was to successfully complete a riddle based treasure hunt, like in real life. I could take or leave the information sharing aspect but accept that splitting the evidence in such a way that you had to collaborate to work out the full story is quite clever.

It was nicely shot, and it would be a shame not to see Giles again (how unlucky would you have to be to sign up to work for another mystery murderer at the same house?), but the numbers aren’t looking good for another season.

Details BBC, closing date 4th October. Good luck!

Alternatively, e-mail onlyconnect@parasolmedia.co.uk.

The Mirror is reporting that 15 to 1 is going to have a one-off come back with Adam Hills hosting.

I’m not going to pretend I’m excited by the prospect, but I understand a decently large group of people probably are, so knock yourselves out.

Edit: Meanwhile, Tim Child talking about the extended version of the Geek Week Knightmare soon to be released. One of the interesting questions for me was if it did make a full time comeback, how would it get round the issue of commercial breaks? We’ve previously established it wouldn’t be for kids television, and it’s more likely to be 45-60 minutes. I’m not sure I like the idea of a bell going off every twelve minutes, temporal disruption should mean finality, but how do you do it without being too cheesy? Just fade to commercial after a room and don’t mention it?

Hello just a quick thing – I updated WordPress’ Jetpack late last night, it went a bit wrong but after a mild panic it looks like we’re back in business. If you see anything acting oddly at The Bar, please do let me know so I can investigate. Ta.