Whilst we wait for details of ITV’s Genius Game waiting to be aired (sounded like February! Then Q1! Then Q2! Now who knows!), Netflix have put up some promo photos for S2 of The Devil’s Plan coming Q2 in their recent Korean preview thing and it looks cooooooool.

Digging the new aesthetic.

They’ve also revealed that Physical: Asia (a team-based edition of Physical 100) is coming Q4, and Crime Scene Zero, a new version of the popular role-playing detective/murder game we’ve discussed in the past, is coming Q3.

We’ll have a Show Discussion Post for Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt starting tomorrow later this evening.

TV Zone reporting The Sun reporting that The Inner Circle, a pilot recorded by Amanda Holden last year, has been commissioned by the BBC for Saturday nights. Edit: 25 episodes for daytime, 6 celebrity ones for Saturdays.

We opened the Stool Pigeon last August, and this is what someone had to say about it:

Amanda Holden has recently filmed a pilot for a new show called ‘The Inner Circle’, best described as quiz Golden Balls – my guess is it’s gunning for the early Saturday evening slot. It’s the first foray into the game show world of a production company which previously mainly did documentaries, and the format is genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever come across.

It sounds like it might be a car crash and we cannot wait.

Edit: One Question series two finally going out from Friday 14th Feb. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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.

7.2m 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.