With the triumphant return of Race Across The World last night, our thoughts once again turn to the show it reminds me most of, which is 2001 Channel 4 reality show Lost. Especially so after being linked to this Guardian article about the behind the scenes stuff on RATW, which reminded me of the excellent Lost tie-in book which was full of this sort of stuff.

Lost paired up teams of two with a cameraman, dropped them in a mystery location somewhere in the world with minimal money and three days supplies and challenged them to race back to London for £5,000 and the opportunity to do it again. There were three episodes a week, each week being one race.

I haven’t actually watched it in about twenty years (there’s something to think about) but thrilled to discover it’s on Youtube. And do you know what? It holds up really well – it manages to be both raw and slick, and I really like Daniel Pemberton’s soundtracking for it.

A few things happening today:

• It’s the start of Race Across The World 2! 8pm, BBC2.
• Belgian Mole starts tonight! It will take a few days for the English subs to come through, but we will discuss it here.

We were sad to hear about the death of Tremendous Knowledge Dave Rainford from Eggheads yesterday. Here he was as a contestant on Bother’s Bar favourite Remote Control in 1991.

Saturday, 9pm (GMT),
Here and on Youtube.

Join in! Play along on jackbox.tv

We’re back for the 18th Game Night! And this episode’s loose theme is “games we’ve not played for a while + Trivia Murder Party 2“, whether through the unluckiness of the board pick or not fitting the narrative we’ve basically made up to justify playing.

As ever SEVEN panellists are vying for domination whilst YOU, Team Audience, will be doing your best to stop them, so get your phone out and play along with the room codes on screen, and chat along in the Youtube chat.

I’ve also got what in my head might be the best Arbitrary Final yet. If you can’t make it earlier, join us around 11:15pm for that.

And to counteract the Swedish Eurovision National Final we’ll be clashing with, we’ve gone ALL OUT with A REALLY SEXY (and quite expensive) SET OF FONTS.

You will not want to miss it!

Thanks to the Friend of the Bar who alerted me to this: a full episode of La Tresor de Pago Pago, TF1’s answer to Fort Boyard by some of the people behind Fort Boyard. It has a Russian (?) commentary track, but don’t let that stop you.

Three couples compete across three stages, at the end of the first two the worst performers are eliminated. The first stage is your typical adventure racing stuff (kayaking, net climbing, crossing a swamp). The second takes place in the village of Pago Pago (*), where the villagers protect the legendary pearl treasure and our contestants must prove themselves worthy in a number of village-y things (not flinching whilst having an arrow shot at you, bamboo dancing, sumo wrestling, being locked in a basket and thrown underwater). The winning team then get thirty minutes to complete underwater challenges, hampered by resident freediving pirates who want the treasure for themselves, to find a combination to a padlock which blocks the domed grotto containing the pearls, and earn bracelets which can be exchanged for using breathing apparatus held by the treasure’s topless guardians when collecting said pearls.

It’s certainly a bit of a curio, running for 11 episodes on TF1 across two runs – we’re aware there was a German version as well (Edit: actually might have crossed wires there). We quite like the Vangelis-style soundtrack, but there’s not much of it. Ultimately it suffers from Ice Warriors syndrome – there’s only so many ways you can dress up doing stuff underwater really, although it frequently looks gorgeous.

(*) There is in fact an actual village of Pago Pago in American Samoa, but this was filmed in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Putting this here mainly as a reminder to me to look into it in the next few days, I was alerted to this on Twitter last night:

Sounds intriguing and Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like, although I’m interested to see how it goes down – the challenges would need to be very strong as it’d be quite difficult to start following and picking favourite contestants out of so many. Or is it? It’s on SBS6 in the Netherlands if anyone wants to have a look before I do (or indeed even after).