The Traitors has Uncloaked. Bake Off has Extra Slice. The Apprentice has You’re Fired. This Year, The UKgameshows.com/Bother’s Bar Poll of the Year has POTY Mouth.
Monday around 9pm the polling report and results will be found on UKGameshows.com. You should definitely read that first! Here, under a cut, will be the percentages and a longer tail for you to peruse and discuss.
The results are out! Go and read them first and discover the rest under the cut.
Continue reading7.2m overnight for the Traitors final last night, and 4.8m for Uncloaked immediately afterwards (surely making it the highest rating chatshow effectively of the modern era). Incredible. The main show will certainly be over 10m in +7.
And this leaves the BBC with actually a bit of a problem I think – at some point this year we’ve been promised a 9-episode Celebrity Traitors. How do you schedule it?
We’re presuming the application closing date of February means they’ll be filming US, UK and Celebrity a few months earlier than they tend to and let’s allow for three months for editiing. Let’s presume that January is sacrosanct now for Civvy Traitors, where do you put Celeb Traitors? Late Summer/Early Autumn feels like you’re not getting best audience value out of it as it’ll still be warm out. Autumn means Strictly is also on which risks over-exposing Claudia. I suppose I’m a Celeb tends to finish early enough in December that you could run it the weeks after, Christmas up the castle and end on Christmas Day which would be the most fun but runs the risk of overexposing Claudia and the show presumably starting a week later.
Not many easy or obvious spots really. Of course they could do it weekly as a slow burn, and you could probably get away with that and Strictly on at the same time if you did it that way, but the audience has been conditioned to expect it three times a week now. Could you get away with changing momentum?
It’s a nice problem to have. And in 2026 there’s another problem, in that New Year’s Day is a Thursday, so if they want the New Year’s Day bump that worked so well this year they’re going to need to rearrange what they do with it, unless they believe (possibly correctly) they can just wait until the following full week to launch it.
What do you think? Let us know what you think they’re going to do in the comments then next year we’ll find out if you have been CLEVER or STUPID.
Not gameshow or formats really but important to the site nonetheless so indulge me, extremely sad to hear about the passing of legendary Future Publishing writer (amongst other things) Jonathan Nash, a man who encapsulated more than anyone why I loved computer magazines, specifically Future Publishing ones, in the 90s, someone I was thrilled to be asked by to contribute some stuff to a thing about twenty years ago and thrilled that he nicked one of my jokes.
His writing was certainly a massive influence on the earlier years of The Bar, and even if we’re more direct (i.e. lazy) these days, I certainly like to think that one of the reasons we don’t just accept press releases at face value that has endured throughout comes down to his writing. A sad day.
Last night we discovered The Traitors Shop, for all your backstabbing needs. Their big front page item right now: Death Match, the absolutely thrilling elimination card game as seen on TV. The box suggests four players, the description suggests 4-6 players, it also suggests 15 Death cards and a Life card so really you could play up to eight players. It’s suggested you play it as a drinking game, but feels like far too much effort for the penalty of taking a drink to be honest.
It costs £14.99. But does come with a plastic wax seal, so that’s alright then.
Bafflingly you can also buy this wax seal letter for £7.95. For this you get a premium quality envelope! Traitors branded writing paper! Replica wax seal! What you don’t get, and they’ve really missed a trick here, and isn’t obvious unless you read the description is the written message on the paper itself – it’s blank. What a missed opportunity that is, I’d actually be very tempted to pay £8 for that if it had an official Traitors murder letter in the official font that I could surreptitiously leave on a colleague’s desk for them to discover. The fun you could have! It’s not the same if you have to handwrite it all.
There’s actually a fair amount of decent stuff here – A cloak for £28. T-shirts and hoodies I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to wear outside. A £45 christmas jumper. I quite like the coasters for £16.95. I might pass on the boxer shorts though.
In other news, would YOU like to have disparaging comments about you from Ray from Hunted? After an age of Channel 4 indecision, it looks like a commission is on, applications for another series are open. Looking at the numbers and demos it seems crazy it’s taken so long, but that’s modern TV for you. Do take a drink everytime Ray says “they CANNOT make it TO EXTRACTION” in the current (recorded 18 months ago) Celeb Hunted series going out.
The votes have been counted. There will be a wailing and gnashing of teeth. Eyebrows will get raised. And you’ll find out exactly what you’ve voted for next Monday (27th Jan) just after 9pm (that’s after Quizzy Monday finishes on BBC2). The main write-up will be on ukgameshows.com, the more detailed numbers and longer tails will be here for you to peruse afterwards.
Get your predictions in… now!
We are so over 2024, what have we got to look forward to in 2025? Well we’ve scoured the ticket sites, this is what we’ve found thus far:
Of course The Wisdom of the Crowd, the idea that if you average out the guesses of loads of people it tends to be fairly accurate, is as old as time and has been used for things variously for years. Here’s a pitch tape for a format that went round about a decade ago, this new show probably isn’t it, but there’s only so many ways you can dress up the idea.