So RTL Plus started last week, a new German channel aimed at mid-40s females offering up reruns of court shows and new versions of old quizzes, beginning with Jeopardy and Familien Duell right now with Glucksrad and Ruck Zuck following later.

Interestingly they’re all filmed on the same set, reconfigured as necessary. If you want to watch them you will need to point your VPN at TV Now.

Jeopardy is the more interesting of the two current offerings. The podiums feel teeny tiny (perhaps tellingly when they reveal the Final Jeopardy responses they’re done in a box-off). They use the US music and stings, although I think the stings need to be mixed a bit higher.

Yeah sorry, I took this whilst watching from the sofa.

Two points of note. First of all the clues are in the main quite lengthy – this example is by no means the longest on offer. The font size scales to fit the screen. Perhaps unsurprisingly they only got through about 60% of the clues in Doppel Jeopardy.

Secondly the clue values are weird in a way that I can’t quite determine if it’s ingenious or madness: €10, €20, €50, €100, €250 as standard. Ignore the fact that this is budgeted for a digital channel (it feels like all these games have a average prize budget of around €3,000 an episode) that is one top heavy board. On the one hand, €250 has never felt so exciting. On the other hand €250 is the only one that really seems to matter. It is interestingly telling that in the episode viewed the contestants shied away from selecting the top-tier question in most cases.

Familien Duell (Family Fortunes/Feud/whatever) is mainly very pink. It keeps the original German theme and sound effects and piggy bank motif, and seems to offer €6,000 daily with returning champions.

I’m certainly looking forward to seeing Glucksrad as that was one of my favourite German shows in the nineties (and probably my favourite version of the format full stop). Right now the channel is free to air but will be going behind a paywall in due course. It sounds like many of these shows will get an airing on the main RTL channel at weekends.

We always found Blockbusters actually a bit dull but we appreciate a good title sequence, and Blockbusters‘ titles were amazing.

Anyway our chum John has tracked down a copy of the annual with a behind the scenes look at how they were created and it’s too good to get lost in the comments, so here’s the link.

It turns out that Dara O Briain’s Go 8 Bit is pretty much an immediate hit for Dave with the first episode last night really not far off what a first-run of Taskmaster (new series starts October 4th) gets, and some presentational issues aside I’m pleased for everybody involved.

Anyway I went on Youtube last night and it recommended Games World to me. I used to love watching this growing up, a weeknightly video games show on Sky One. The week’s main events were The Eliminator (on Mondays and from the second series Mondays and Wednesdays) and then Beat the Elite on Fridays, where the Eliminator winners would take on the Videators (i.e. researchers they’ve put in costumes) to try and get as high as possible on the all important leaderboard.

And it’s still not bad today, carried as it is by Bob Mills in one of his earliest TV jobs (he tends to stick to radio these days) as ringmaster taking the piss out of moody twelve year-olds and in this special episode games journalists:

What struck me here is how *young* the journos are, I used to spend all my pocket money on computer mags at the time and would have assumed they were all much older. Also whilst Mills is clearly not a gamer he was quite good at exposition and running the show, letting Jeremy Daldry (also quite a funny guy and went on to become a TV producer) play to his strength as commentator without treading on his toes.

Games World is not as fondly remembered as Gamesmaster, but certainly at the time I thought it was a pretty successful attempt at video games entertainment.

So with comic and actor Stephen Merchant announced as the host of the one-off revival (a name incidentally we probably wouldn’t have considered, but on reveal pretty much immediately thought “yes that’s quite good”) I thought it would be fun to look at some parody as the show is ripe for that sort of thing.

The earliest one would probably be the Punt and Dennis “making a cup of tea” game:

Meanwhile Tony Robinson wrote a spoof into an episode of kids show Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. Here’s actually the entire script, but here’s the relevant video.

Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish frequently did take-offs of popular TV shows with Star Wars models for their TV show. “The pony trekking holiday in Ullswater will be mine!”

My personal favourite is The Crystal Muck from Dick ‘n’ Dom In Da Bungalow, one of many gameshow-based endgames they played out. Dave Chapman giving it everything, “CORRUGATED IRON and PIPING.”

Finally the most recent and probably the best observed, this from Cardinal Burns a few years ago: