Barnstorm have got four places in the iOS Top 10 paid for app charts with their various TV quiz adaptation apps, and rightly so.

I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest this next one probably isn’t going to join them.

Haven’t played it yet – might be a terrific appterpretation of a non-hit show. Will try and do a Plays Badly of it in the near future. All the bumpf here.

I’ve got three Christmas dinners to go to over the next week or so, so probably best not to expect too much this and next week (although we’ve got Schlag den Star on Saturday and, put it your diaries, Christmas Game Night next Friday night (Because Boyard Land starts the following day)).

Anyway this turned up on Youtube the other day, an episode of A Word In Your Ear, the Saturday night BBC show that was axed then bought by The Family Channel, with host and producer Gordon Burns no-nonsenseing his way through comedy communication challenges. I always quite enjoyed the “draw things described only with geometric shapes” bit, although surely the blindfold statue test is way easier than the Duplo block task.

I hope you will be able to join us for the final Schlag den Star commentary of the year this coming Saturday from 7:15pm, actor Wotan Wilke Möhring takes on World Cup hero Jens Lehmann for €100,000 in a contest being advertised with “high testosterone” and “real men!”

In other news, Vanna White takes over hosting duties this week on Wheel of Fortune in the US (with apparently Minnie Mouse taking over letter revealer duties, as it’s an on location week) as Pat Sajak was taken in for emergency surgery on an intestine during filming. It’s actually not without precedent:

Have there been any other unusual role reversals in Gameshowland?

Apparently it’s murder-mystery week at Bother’s Bar, so here’s a fun thing that’s just turned up, Youtube channel TVM (a very promising channel which specialises in TV production music) has come up with the clean opening and closing themes to Cluedo, not a great show, but a hugely evocative theme.

Thought experiment: who’d play who in Cluedo 2020?

Edit: A WordPress Jetpack update seems to have borked Twitter embeds, so the story here is that Boyard Land opens on December 21st on France 2, and here’s a link to a tweet with the titles.

As we all know, Agatha Christie invented the elimination reality format in 1939 with And Then There Were None. In the Whodunnit? book post from a few days ago, Clicky asks the following question:

Speaking of which – does anybody happen to have a good reading list of “And Then There Were None” homages? I’ve probably read like 12+ of them and am always craving more. (IE same formula as the original and the two books in this post: group of people getting offed one by one and one amongst the group is the killer).

Clicky

This is a good question and thought it deserved amplifying, being Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like. Does anyone have recommendations?