BY POPULAR DEMAND, the Stool Pigeon is open for business, give us your best anonygoss.

I’ll keep the box open until around 8-ish.

THE BOX IS NOW CLOSED. Look out for the write-up soon!

I check the audience sites every few days, apparently I completely missed Supermarket Sweep tickets going live the other afternoon and some dates are already sold out, so if you want to see a show that offers “a respectful nod to the history of the original, the reboot will also inject the cheekiness and downright silliness fitting of an ITV2 prime-time slot with new games, challenges and a sprinkle of celebrity stardust, all culminating in teams taking on the unforgettable trolley dash to win a cash prize,” get on over to Applausestore, current dates are mid-August at Maidstone (where they filmed the last reboot, fact fans). We still don’t know which supermarket will be providing all the goods.

Also recording: Pants On Fire, the Emma Willis fronted show of that game from Dutch Mol where people do ridiculous things and someone hasn’t and they have to convince a panel they have. That’s for E4, recording at Elstree also mid-August.

This might be quite fun, Bradley Wiggins hosting a comedy sports challenge show for Comedy Central. In it, “mortals” compete against big name sportspeople in comedy takes of their sports and are able to choose a headstart for various amounts of points.

The interest lies in that it’s a format being produced by Bother’s Bar’s favourite wayward child Gary Monaghan and Mad Monk, of excellent Wild Things and Banzai fame. Which means it’ll either be very very good or a complete shambles probably. Which will it be? I look forward to finding out.

In less exciting news, ITV Studios have bought up prominent Israeli outfit Armoza Formats, who have previously given us The Common Denominator, The Bubble, international hit Still Standing and… Babushka. So a mixed bag.

I haven’t watched this yet, but here’s an early playing of Trivia Murder Party 2, coming up in this autumn’s Jackbox Party Pack 6. Looking forward to Game Nighting with it.

So I’ve been playing a lot of “roguelikes” on my XBox One recently (Brig Bother, add me!!!).

Roguelikes are based on an 1980 game called Rogue, a dungeon crawling adventure from 1980 played with ASCII art, the main ideas being procedurally generated levels (basically: random, but within certain creator-defined confines), monsters and treasure, and importantly permadeath – you die, you start right back at the beginning – you have to learn from your mistakes. These games also have a winning condition – defeat the big bad at the end of the last level.

Modern roguelikes have a fun mechanic in that although you start from scratch after dying, you might have unlocked some of hundreds of different objects, each with various effects which then may or may not turn up in future runs. Every game is different, if you’re fortunate the random number generator favours you with excellent items and weak monsters, sometimes it hates you. The Binding of Isaac and Dead Cells are undoubtably the cream of the genre at the moment, although we’re currently also addicted to Ironcast (a steampunk tile matching game) and Rogue Legacy, which has a neat passing-your-genes-on mechanic. And also Crypt of the Necrodancer (and direct Zelda spin-off Cadence of Hyrule) takes the ideas and puts it to an incredible beat. And Slay the Spire!

Is this an untapped genre for TV formats? Knightmare is an obvious example of what is basically what a roguelike could look like. But what about quizzes? 1 vs 100 (the original version of the format) basically fits doesn’t it? One contestant goes on a run and either succeeds in glory or crashes out never to be seen again. Millionaire is almost a roguelike I reckon, but falls down in being able to walk away. Randomize the lifelines and make it all or nothing though…

Keep out of the kitchen.

So sang Bucks Fizz on their 1983-hit If You Can’t Stand The Heat.

To celebrate this, here’s a video that has nothing to do with kitchens.