Saturday, 7:30,
ITV

It’s Fremantle vs Fremantle talent smackdown on Saturday night as ITV takes on I Can See Your Voice with Game of Talents. Is that meant to be a zeitgeisty take on Game of Thrones? Nobody seems sure.

Anyway this is getting very excited about being a gameshow and a talent show which somebody clearly thought was a COMPLETELY MENTAL idea, and has already described itself as a “show like no other” so that’s already two, maybe three blots on its copy book. On the plus side, it’s been a hit in Spain and it marks Vernon Kay’s return to primetime – it’s been six years since All-Star Family Fortunes finished, incredibly.

Two civilian/celebrity teams try and work out the (eight given) talents of people just by looking at them and some additional clues – it’s Identity basically. The value of each guess is determined by mystery cash balls ranging from £500 to £10,000, with £20k and £50k balls being added as the game progresses. The team with the most money get the chance to win it by guessing which one of four people the final talent applies to.

This seems designed to be extremely Youtube friendly, and will probably live or die on the did-you-see-THAT?-ability of the acts on show and how they can sustain that throughout. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Saturday, 7:20,
BBC1

From the Koreans who bought you The Genius here’s the BBC’s new singing non-singing singing show. TV’s Hardest Working Man 2021 Paddy McGuinness asks a pair of contestants to work out which of the singers in front of them can actually sing and which ones are tone deaf, by watching them do everything other than actually sing. If they can correctly eliminate the bad singers and identify a good singer at the end, they take home £10,000 – but if the final decision is a bad singer then that singer wins the £10,000 all to themselves.

Jimmy Carr, Alison Hammond and Amanda Holden are on hand to help as well as a guest singer.

Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Saturdays, 8:30pm,
ITV1

I completely forgot series two this was starting this week, so what I’m doing is bumping up the series one show discussion and seeing as it’s using mainly the same shows (and Name That Tune), you can continue discussion here.

Original post May 29th 2020

Well it’s finally here, Alan Carr’s epic supersized versions of classic formats – starting with Play Your Cards Right with The Price is Right, Bullseye, Take Your Pick and Strike it Lucky to come, offering epic supersized prizes in epic supersized endgames which by the sounds of it aren’t greatly bigger then they were during the 90s. Still though.

The first one is a celebrity Play Your Cards Right where four couples will battle it out to win £30,000 in cash (woah). Now is it me, or does it look like there are more than five cards in the row on that promo picture? Apparently the second season of the relaunched Card Sharks in the US is going with single game, five questions, seven cards (as opposed to ten cards last year which was rubbish as every game went to sudden death). This was recorded last year, so maybe it’s a tweak. Or maybe we’re reading too much into a clipped photo, who knows?

I can’t say Epic Take Your Pick and Epic Bullseye are that appealing, although intrigued to see how Strike It Lucky fares – a show which is famously not all that as a format but as something for Michael Barrymore to bounce off was very successful. Will an hour of it with Alan Carr have the same appeal? Will the audience response to the catchphrase still be unintelligible? I look forward to finding out.

Let us know what you think in the comments.