I know it’s only felt like days since the last series of University Challenge finished, but both Uni Chall and Only Connect return for brand new series from 8pm next Monday night on BBC2, until inevitably some cooking show rudely bumps Only Connect down to 7:30pm for a bit in a few months time.

In the opening matches the University of Sheffield takes on Bristol University and some fans of the London Underground take on some Bardophiles. I will let you work out which match ups are for which shows.

Also this Saturday it’s Schlag den Star! We don’t know who the stars are yet, but it sounds like Ron Ringguth is subbing commentary duties for Franck Buschmann, who’s presumably too busy covering Euro 2016.

In other news Top Gear is now being outrated by The Getaway Car.

We’re going to give you a very quick primer into what we refer to as “the dark arts”. Fort Boyard starts on France 2 at 7:55pm UK time. Usually you would not be able to watch France 2 in the UK, but thanks to the internet you can cheat a bit.

• The easiest way is to watch on a naughty streaming site. The one we use to watch a livestream of Schlag den Star has one and is probably the easiest method. There may well be alternatives.
• You can use a VPN to pretend you’re in France. We use Tunnelbear, free and other paid for alternatives are available. The advantage of this is you can watch live on France Televisions’ pluzz.fr, but also use its catch-up service if you can’t watch it live. If you pay by the amount of data used, an hour of streaming will come to about 1.5gb. Fort Boyard is a little over two hours.
• It’ll probably be up on Youtube in the next few days.

Alternatively if you’ve got satellite or cable you can wait a year and it will probably turn up on TV5 Monde, which kicks off showing the 2015 series next Saturday (the 9th) from 5:25pm.

I have set up a page for discussing the new series, you can reach it from the menu or by clicking here.

The other advantage of a VPN is that you’re not limited to France, we hope to be taking a look at The Runner in the next few days (Reality Blurred have the details here).

In the meantime here are the Fort Boyard Of Thrones titles:

Here’s some fun that our French friend Cosser pointed out to me, an episode of La Chasse au trésor (singular, as it was then) filmed in 1980 for 1981 in Quebec where they hadn’t taken account of how the temperature changes would steam up the camera and decided it looked so poor they couldn’t broadcast it until TV5 Monde repeated the series in 1990 where it was broadcast for the first time. 

Are there any other examples of shows which were filmed and never broadcast until they come up in a job lot repeat run somewhere? I’m actually convinced there are, although I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. Anyway here’s an interview with the contestants (in French).

In other news Challenge have bought the rights to the first three series of Gladiators, so that’s nice.

On ABC in the US this last week an exciting new (old?) block of shows, Sunday Fun and Games, starring Celebrity Family Feud (a known entity), The $100,000 Pyramid and Match Game, all shows that have been done before (indeed C/FF has been a going concern for a while), Pyramid recently on GSN, Match Game variously in the 90s (and quite recently on Canadian television, both English language and Quebecois).

They are certainly findable if you know where to look and are willing to put up with pop-up ads (irritatingly if you want to use magic to use ABC Go you need to wait for over a week to watch “officially” unless you have a subscriber number).

The new shows are both very good, slick productions very true to the originals, albeit with more whooping. Also an hour of them feels a bit too much, Pyramid is tight but repetitive, Match Game has a bitty-ness that begins to grate three-quarters in. Both feature two full games (and Pyramid makes no secret of the fact it’s just two episodes from two tapings back to back), it’s almost a shame they don’t do The Pyramid Match Game Hour for twice the number of weeks.

I enjoyed Alec Baldwin hosting although the scripted gags felt a bit too scripted. Michael Strahan was confident, if a bit blandly competent. The sets terrific – loved the trilon screens on the Pyramid, for example.

Everything seemed to do fairly well, it remains to be seen if anyone will try anything like this over here, although with ITV apparently resting many of their remade hits maybe now is not the time.

Trailers for the new, emotional series of Robot Wars have gone up on the BBC’s Youtube page.

There are also trailers for the upcoming second series new run of The Getaway Car.

Tomorrow night in the US is the new Sunday Fun and Games strand on ABC featuring all new episodes of The $100,000 Pyramid, Match Game and Celebrity Family Feud. I’m sure there will be ways for them to become “available” eventually outside the US.

With the UK facing it’s own *political* Sliding Doors scenario on Thursday, that gives us a great if very tenuous excuse to link to a full episode of La Piste de Xapatan, not one of our favourite Jacques Antoine shows to be honest but not without interest, a woman hunts for statues in a cave whilst men go on the “trail of Xapatan”, looking for clues to determine which of the statues is worth a lot of money to the professor whilst trying to avoid elimination in rather samey physical challenges against the guards. But they’re all against the clock because in Xapatan the train always leaves on time, will they make it?

For a more detailed write-up we wrote a feature quite a long time ago. Good theme tune.

Edit: In other news, Challenge have got a new logo look: