First fortnight Tues and Weds, 9pm,
Then Tues 9pm,
ITV1 and ITVX
Well, not sure what anybody’s expecting with this, it’s been a non-hit in the several places it’s been tried and actually was originally down to go out last year, but for whatever reason was pushed back to 2026.
Fourteen people have fourteen days to climb to the top of a mountain in New Zealand, each initially carrying an equal share of the £200k prize fund. If people can’t hack it, the money they’re carrying is lost as well. At various points the mysterious Mountain Keeper will instruct them to do some sort of jumped-up Go Ape-style traversal task, and at periodic camps they’ll need to vote each other out. If they run out of time they all win nothing, so there’s an element of strategy in being popular and not being too weak. “£200k divided by 14, £14,285.71, that’s an unusual amount for people to be carrying isn’t it?” Yes. And that headline figure will not be given away. In fact making it to the end won’t guarantee anyone gets the £14,285.71 they’ve been lugging all the way if other versions are anything to go by, for reasons you can spoil for yourself if you want.
Ben Shephard is at least a believable host of this having done charity mountain climbs before and being quite a sporty guy so no issues there. Whether this will outperform how the format tends to do internationally remains to be seen – hey it sort of did with Destination X. Let us know what you think in the comments.
EPG on Virgin shows Tuesday/Wednesday next week as well
I thought the first episode was basically OK although they do seem to have found quite a few of the most irritating people in quite some time, and Ace off of Gladiators.
The mysterious Mountain Keeper doing his best Interceptor impression. Ooh, what’s he going to do *next*?
Format point includes ‘events that took three minutes on Fort Boyard now taking twenty minutes here’, although the Miner’s Bridge did look and feel legitimately tough. I don’t think we’re going to get much variety in these tasks though.
God knows why they didn’t just go ‘it’s £15k for everyone’ at the start, or at least picked an amount of money/contestants that divides into a TV friendly number.
Barely over a million for episode 1 I’m told, although there are some mitigating circumstances, the ITVX live stream seemed to be down around 9pm which won’t have helped. No point getting overexcited by episode two’s number as it was up early, and anybody watching early won’t count until the +7s.