PUSH the Button

By | February 22, 2010
4 Comments

Well it looks like the advertising for Push the Button has started in earnest, there’s a set of Facebook games for you to play to win tickets to the show (frankly not that exciting given you can just apply for them through SRO anyway, unless there’s some audience participation element that some of the audience won’t be playing along with a la Takeaway) or £5,000 on Friday. This would be much better if the games weren’t seemingly time limited (today’s game you can’t seem to play now they’ve given the tickets away, which is a bit poor) and also the interface thing seems to take an age to load, although how much of that is the application and how much is Facebook I don’t know. NEw games at 1pm, but they’re probably no Bejeweled Blitz.

Meanwhile in BSOP land, Game 3 is now taking registrations, Requests > Search by Tournament ID >  #141667534. If you’ve yet to play and you’re serious about winning the trophy and the associated prizes, the dropped points element means you need to play this one really to have the best chance of winning. If you’re not serious, why not join in anyway there will still be money floating around.

Are You Smarter… ups its jackpot

By | February 21, 2010
7 Comments

Something pointed out to me whilst The BotherSOP Game 2 was taking place (which I won, it would be very remiss of me not to point out) is that Noel’s Are You Smarter Than Your Five Year Old which apparently started on Sky One this evening has upped its jackpot from £250,000 to £500,000. Fairly interesting, but more intriguing when you consider that the rest of the ladder hasn’t increased – the final question is now a jump from £100k to £500k. Interestingly tempting, but how many people get to the £100k level anyway?

Survivor 20

By | February 21, 2010
3 Comments

Heroes acting like villains! Villains acting like villains! A man fainting! People pointing out that they’re not as close as you think because they were backstabbed by them in their original season! Jeff Probst! A tribal council set up in the treetops without a roof that you just know will be reflected on as actually a really bad production idea by episode five! A broken toe! Boston Rob! Jeff Probst!

Survivor 20 is IMMENSE. ALREADY.

Board of Excitement 21st-27th February 2010

By | February 20, 2010
10 Comments

What’s on the board, Miss Ford?

  • The Bother Series of Poker Event 2 (Sunday, Full Tilt, 8pm GMT/1500 ET) – the discussion page for this week’s game is here.
  • The Amazing Race (Sunday, CBS) – Well, a week after the first episode and I can’t remember many of the teams except for Mario and Luigi the detectives (one of them is probably called Bob, they always are) and Team Lesbian. That probably makes them my favourites by default.
  • Only Connect (Monday, BBC4, 8:30pm) – it’s the final heat of this this week and this week’s cleverly diametrically opposed types are the Booksellers vs Bowlers. I don’t know how the next round has been drawn so expect lots of amusing and inaccurate guesswork.
  • The Krypton Factor (Tuesday, ITV1, 7:30pm) – it’s the first semi-final! Ratings for this haven’t really held up that well, but I’d like to see it come back for a third series and put right what went wrong this time round.
  • Survivor (Thursday, CBS) – well embarrassingly I haven’t watched ep 2 yet, I was meant to last night, but instead the new The Pet Shop Boys live DVD came through the post so I watched that instead, and as such I intend to wear a cardboard box over my head for most of the next week. I’m sure it is very good though, and will probably watch it later.
  • The Bubble (Friday, BBC2, 10pm) – To be honest doesn’t deserve to be here but I put it here just so I can say that I thought it was neither good nor bad, it’s a bit like what you’d expect the TV equivilent of sensual deprivation to be. Which is sort of ironic.
  • Ant and Dec’s Push the Button (Saturday, ITV1, 7:45pm) – this should be quite good fun, basically two families taking on several tasks whilst a £100,000 money clock counts down and likely to have a few entertaining Ant and Dec cheeky twists. This is actually recording on Thursday, if anyone’s going do please feel free to do a recording report – I’m not interested in spoilers of results, but I’m always intrigued by the format and what you think of it. I know contestants are asked not to divulge stuff on the internet, two words: assumed name, and don’t say anything that makes it obvious it’s you. So twelve words really. I would go down to this myself, but I’ve only got so much leave and wages, generous as my leave allowance is. Also it’s at rather audience-unfriendly Pinewood. Admittedly, so is The Whole 19 Yards, but that should finish early enough to catch the last train, y’know? In theory. Anyway, it would be quite good if the theme for this was ‘Push the Button’, the controversial Israeli Eurovision entry by Teapacks from a few years ago.
  • Solitary v4.0 (Saturday, Fox Reality) – Well last week we had the hilarious game of “input these phrases into the computer where each letter on the keyboard stands for a different letter on screen, deleting everything if you type the wrong one in” (needless to say, I’d be fascinated to know if someone did accidentally type “This sucks Vag” genuinely or someone on the production team has quite an amusingly risqué sense of humour) followed by the always fun Twister meets Laserquest meets neck pain treatment. Again, I’d be quite interested to know how many rounds of a treatment the producers have prepared beforehand, and if there are some sort of hard-and-fast rules they have to use on the fly if the contestants are a bit hardier than originally thought. Anyway, this is episode five, which I predict to be like episode four, but with one less person in it.

Indications The Whole 19 Yards Might Not Be All That

By | February 19, 2010
14 Comments

A source told The Mirror: “It’s a huge hit in the US so they’re hoping it follows suit here.”

I would be intrigued to find out who this source is.

Vernon Kay and Caroline Flack are hosting if you hadn’t gathered already. Not convinced it requires two hosts, but I’m off to see an episode in March so we’ll see.

Rumours that Kay will be fronting a british version of The Phone are completely made-up.

Meanwhile, today’s leading search referal is “how dangerous will 101 ways to leave a gameshow be?” to which the answer is VERY, VERY DANGEROUS.