Mondays, 9pm
ITV2

Well here we are then, perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps not, Release the Hounds has made it to a full series after a pilot last Halloween. Which I thought was disappointing. And then international one-offs for it haven’t done very well either. Still someone thinks it’s worth bothering with and we really hope the series lives up to the promise we think the show can have.

Three friends enter an estate and partake in horror-based challenges to earn keys which unlock chests full of money. However to keep the money they must outrun a pack of hounds over a straight line course. Meanwhile Reggie Yates laughs at them from the safety of his commentary box.

One of the criticisms we had of the original were that the tasks were basically unfailable which didn’t help tension, and that it all didn’t feel quite scary and creepy enough, although the final challenge which was in effect loads of jump scares in a forest at night showed off some of the potential of the format. It looks very much like they’re going for more traditional fear based tropes in their challenges this time round – a locked phone box that fills with water, tarantulas, the dark, locked phone boxes that fill with water and tarantulas in the dark, that sort of thing. I really hope it works out, because it’s Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Ought To Like.

Let us know what you think.

Oooh yes! Bonolis and Laurenti return to Italian TV tonight for another seven-night-a-week run of Avanti un Altro, one of our favourite foreign shows of the last five years. In an alternate universe Michael Barrymore’s presenting a daily UK version at 5pm on ITV and it would be massive, but seeing as that’s an alternate universe fraught with danger, and that in most other alternate universes the UK version is rubbish, perhaps it going a bit quiet in actual reality might be for the best.

We’re hoping for new characters and lots of new hilarious question types and mucking about – really having no knowledge of Italian is only a small barrier to enjoyment.

Hopefully as in the last few years the full episodes will be online and ungeoblocked. Here is the link, you will need to click on “Puntate Intere” to get to them. The shorter videos *may* be geoblocked.

In the meantime, we might have mentioned this last year, but there’s a new Youtube series of Russian fan-made show Against the Flow (let’s see how this copes with cyrillic: Против Течения ooh not bad) just started based on the AuA end game, check it out: