Their “Spring slate” at their “Formats Festival”.

The Chamber sounds like Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Would Like:

THE CHAMBER
Boom for S4C
 
The Chamber is a unique game show like nothing else on earth…or under earth. The world’s first underground game show thrusts everyday people into an extraordinary subterranean world. Each episode sees two teams take on four different levels designed to test fitness, brainpower and bravery.  The aim of the game is to be the first team to reach the bottom of the chamber and escape, in a race against time to crack the code before the power – and the chamber itself – shut down! With a fully-functioning international hub in Wales, based in a disused Victorian mine, The Chamber delivers a ready-made opportunity for cost-effective, family entertainment.

And Talpa’s The Desert is just Survivor with a racing end game by the sounds of it:

THE DESERT
 
Find the hero within.
In The Desert, competitors are taken away from the urban jungle and placed in the heart of the world’s most unforgiving environment: the desert. Split into teams and guided by survival experts, they must make this harsh environment their home. Weekly boot camps and tests will lead to eliminations, where the losing team will have to vote a team member off the show. Eventually both teams merge into one, and it will be everyone for themselves. After 100 days, the two remaining finalists will compete in an epic three-day solitary race through the desert! This is more than just a competition. The Desert is a transformational journey of self-discovery that will test the competitors’ determination and physical strength. Who will keep up with nature?

And nobody is going to watch a show called Catchpoint:

CATCHPOINT
Possessed and 12 Yard co-production for BBC One
 
The big, physical game in which you don’t always have to be correct to win – you just have to be close enough to the dropping balls… and catch them! Two teams of two answer a series of picture questions to build up their money bank. Every question has ten possible answers, each represented by an image on a giant LED screen. Suspended above the screen is a mechanism that will release a giant ball with the correct answer. Each ball caught adds money to the bank. All the players have to stand in front of the image showing what they hope to be the correct answer. If they are right, the ball will simply drop into their hands but, if they’re wrong, they still have the opportunity to dash, dive or leap to catch it from wherever it falls. The closer they are to the correct answer, the easier it is to reach the falling ball. Full of unique, visual questions, nail-biting tension and hilarious fun.

So there we are. In other news, there’s some discussion of Dick (a)’n'(d) Dom’s new interesting sounding Cash From Chaos podcast in the Taskmaster thread.

As revealed this morning:

• Joe Thomas from The Inbetweeners.
• Iain Stirling from My Dog At My Homework and that Love Island thing.
• Lou Sanders.
• Paul Sinha off of The Chase.
• Sian Gibson from Car Share.

Of those Lou and Sian are mysteries to me, Iain Stirling ought to be good, Sinha could go either way and Joe Thomas has been cast for Greg Davies to shout at.

Not a line-up that I’m fist pumping over, but Taskmaster has taught us that it’s rarely worth judging a series before it’s started.

Tonight, 9pm,
Here and on Youtube

The purpose of a man is to love a woman
And the purpose of a woman is to love a man
So come on, baby
Let’s start today
Come on, baby
Let’s play

The game of love, love
La, la, la, la, la love

So sang Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders in 1965. These days, those lyrics don’t seem quite so enlightened (RIGHT GANG?) but no matter because in 2019 we bring the Game of Love right up to date in Bother’s Bar Game Night 14: Game of Love Edition.

This basically means we’ll be starting with Monster Seeking Monster.

Join us LIVE from 9pm to 11:30 tonight as our panellists battle it out over games of wit, knowledge and skill to win the hearts and minds of the other panellists and the watching audience. You, Team Audience, are as ever invited to try and wreck the night for your own nefarious reasons. You’ve come so close to winning, is tonight the night?

Point your mobiles at jackbox.tv and enter the room codes to play along live. There is a slight delay, lessened if you watch on the Youtube site itself, but all questions and suchlike will appear on your phones.

Currently the “in” thing in videogaming is the Battle Royale, where a large group of people (usually 100) are dropped on a map and have to scavenge weapons and loot in a bid to be the last one standing, with a gradually decreasing area of play forcing people together so you can’t just camp somewhere. Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Apex Legends are the current big names. The name comes from the excellent Takeshi Kitano 2000 film Battle Royale which follows the same idea.

A few nights ago this was joined rather unexpectedly by Tetris 99 on Nintendo Switch, play Tetris online against 98 other players, clear your junk and send your lines to others to force them out of the game which gradually speeds up as fewer players remain until one person is left standing. I have some issues with the control layout, but the idea is kind of ingenious and fun.

Of course, one of the earliest quiz versions of the idea happened over ten years previous with proto-Millionaire Everybody’s Equal.

But it wasn’t the first of course, Ultra Quiz did it first in the eighties. There are some Japanese editions on Youtube, but here are the titles of the 1980s ITV one:

Happy Valentine’s Day! I’ve still got space for panellists for this Saturday’s upcoming Game Night, so do shout if you’re interested, especially if you’ve not been a panellist before – we’re always interested in new blood.

Traditionally we share a video on this day. Sometimes it’s a dating show, sometimes it’s a spin. Today we have the credits for little-remembered BBC afternoon tennis-based general knowledge quiz Matchpoint from 1990.

Some things from the last comment thread in case you missed it:

• Small Fortune is heading to NBC, because of course it is.
• Soon we have Possessed’s The Switch to look forward to, the gameshow of the Nintendo console, probably. In it Sanjeev Bhaskar (which actually feels like an unusual and decent choice) asks questions on the buzzers for money, and at the end of the each round the contestants face a number of hard multiple-choice questions, getting one wrong means potentially getting Switched out of the game if nobody else gets one wrong to take your place. Promises even more questions than even Alphabetical. Effectively sounds like two different games with neither having much of a bearing on the other, like the “bye-bye” rounds in Fluke. This is from Possessed’s new Manchester base Man Possessed (ho ho).