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:

• Love Takes a Village – although I don’t know which particular village (it’s filming in Dagenham), anyway it looks like Rick Edwards off of Fighting Talk is set to conquer the States again hot off the back 2022 non-hit The Courtship, alongside one of “Hollywood’s most beloved figures” (if it’s a mystery it’s usually Alfonso Ribeiro), as 100 people with opinions help someone find love. Game Show Network about a decade ago did a dating show called It Takes A Church, I suspect this is a secular version of a similar idea. It’s filming 27th and 28th January, tickets SRO.
• The Winner Takes It All – I don’t know about you but I just love gameshows are “not like any other”, especially when the description of that show suggests contestants will be answering questions for money and prizes. The people behind Limitless Win and Sing On invite you to Salford on 4th February to stand around for 90 minutes (standing is annoying, but if it genuinely ends up being a 90 minute record then that’s fast) and watch a show hosted by two of Britain’s best-loved comedians and entertainers. Someone on the Discord suggested Rob and Romesh and that seems like a good shout, but we don’t know. Tickets via Lost in TV.
• Wisdom of the Crowd – From the makers of The 1% Club, a show that asks how many jellybeans in the bottle for big cash prizes, the fact that it’s an eight hour record and you’re not getting paid expenses to take part suggests the wisdom of this particular crowd isn’t going to be very high. It’s for the BBC. The rehearsal day is Monday 27th January for the pilot recording on the 28th. Tickets/applications SRO.

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.

The voting for the UKGameshows.com/Bother’s Bar Poll of 2024 has now closed. Thanks very much for all your votes.

It will take a week or two to collate everything and write it up so look out for the results in due course. For expectation management, we probably aren’t going to be able to do a live Youtube results show this year for various reasons, but we hope that you look forward to the write-ups nonetheless.

Extremely sad to hear about the passing of Laurie Holloway at 86, those of us of a certain age will know him for his absolutely iconic foot-tapper theme tunes such as Game For A Laugh, Beadle’s About, Blind Date, but as is tradition we always like to illustrate with something a bit more obscure and this is a theme with Holloway written right through it like a stick of rock, We Love TV.

We’re three episodes into The Traitors and it’s as entertaining as it ever is, we’re three missions in and they’ve done a bold thing of tying them into the game a bit more – one involving the Traitors having to sabotage in order to murder which is a great added frisson except the producers will contrive to have five people for the final anyway so actually completely pointless – you’ve tried to solve jank with jank! But more irritatingly, the other two have both involved self-sacrifice – who will knock themselves out – or be convinced to knock themselves out – so that everybody else will live and possibly earn money?

This comes off the back of current Amazon non-hit Beast Games where it feels like 80% of the challenges are self-sacrificing ones. Who will knock themselves out for money? Who will knock themselves out for no money but for other people to survive? Who will knock themselves out for money whilst also knocking out other people who will win nothing? Who will give their coin to someone else who might give you a helicopter ticket but if not enough people do nobody goes to an island? It feels like every possible combination of the self-sacrifice formula has been played out to death and there have only been four episodes so far.

I’m over it. There is absolutely a time and place for the drama of it, but even Squid Game: The Challenge understood its power is in using it moderately and with an element of risk/reward. As it is, as TV challenge design it’s just become very tired, very lazy, very quickly. Where’s the range gone? Ultimately we want winners who have strived for something, not just fell into a good place because they they don’t want it the least.