I’ve never done this before, but Danny Kerner has pointed out that there are recently released Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy games out on Switch in the US, and I’m currently in a bit of a WoF and J! mood.

Presumably some of you will have done this sort of thing before, is it easy? How would you go about doing it?

(I know I could probably just Google it, but we’re all about the community).

Incidentally, keep Saturday 15th December free for 13th Night: Bother’s Bar Festive Game Night. More details nearer the time.

Incidentally, if you have a Switch quiz itch to scratch, Trivial Pursuit Live! has just come out and presuming it’s a straight port of the (years old) PS4 one is pretty good fun. Closer to Buzz than the board game.

Also it’s Fireworks Night.

When I heard a few days ago that Netflix in the US has a collection of handpicked Jeopardy episodes up now, I wasn’t expecting them to be on UK Netflix.

But they are! 45 episodes. So there you are.

Right, I left my Anonybox open all afternoon, let’s see what interesting gossip you didn’t want to put your name on you have come up with:

• Letterbox is still boring. – Well, yes.
• In the U.S., a local station in Philadelphia has airing a local game show called “The Class-H Room” (no, really, that’s how they spell it) for about a month now. It pits teams of students and teachers against each other. All episodes have uploaded on YouTube. – I can’t work it out, is that meant to be a pun? It’s Canada’s Smart Ask all over again.
• The worst “Tell us a fun fact about yourself” response I ever heard at a quiz show audition was, “I’ve been arrested for murder twice”.
• I have been present at several pitches for pretty straightforward quiz shows at which someone has suggested “what if we made them wear shock suits?”. It has never once improved anything. – Yeah, I mean at most it’s a round of Distraction isn’t it? Where do you go from there? At least with something like Russian Roulette once you’ve comically screamed and fallen through the floor you’re literally out and the show progresses.
• Crystal maze live is moving its London maze to the trocadero in the new year. Completely new games apparently too. – yes indeed, 32 of them apparently. Little Lion had been trailing a mystery announcement for ages and people assumed it would be something new and exciting, and there’s me going “it’s probably just going to be a new Crystal Maze.” I am skill.
• James Acaster should be on every series of Taskmaster, in disguise if necessary. – When Taskmaster first started, I loved the idea of it but thought it should be a bit more argumentative. Seven series later we finally have an aggressively entertaining panel and it’s getting its biggest ever numbers. Good.
• Enjoyed inside number 9 live Halloween Ghostwatch remake, although compared to Ghostwatch in writing it’s a little lacking and the other program flashbacks are….we’ll there just a bit to silly in my taste. Needed to be PERFECTLY edited to work altogether. Though I will applied the crew for having the nerve to do a thing like this in this modern day and age and actually working, sorta…. makes me wonder what a proper official Ghostwatch remake would be like…. ( and I know there was a short story sequel by the original creator!) – fascinated by the puntctuation here but yes I watched it on catch-up having forgotten it was on and enjoyed it although I think there were probably one or two elements too many, less is sometimes more. I laughed when I heard it lost 30% of its audience about ten minutes in.
• Edit: Facebook considering an international version of The Mole. Ooh!

And there we are! Join us next time for your fascinating anonymous opinions and gossip the next time we open the Stool Pigeon!

Surprise us anonymously with things we ought to know, the postbox will close around 6pm and the best stuff, if any, will get put up later.

Edit: Box closed.

I want to talk about Big Brother, something we haven’t done for years and years really.

And that’s because, as we enter the show’s last ever week on Channel 5 (the final is Monday November 5th) there’s one thing I’ve been saying again and again on Twitter whilst watching it, and that’s “haha, this is a great task!” Gone are the “what did X say about you in the diary room” shenanigans of Channel 5 Big Brother’s past, largely gone are the stupid tasks where everyone is working hard to complete a task, only for the actual task to be to fail the task. No, this year they’ve been a bit more gameshowy, a bit more clever, a the ideas have been a bit more fun.

When it’s not been grabbing suddenly falling coins (or towards the end, balls in the garden, but only for people who have actually got out of bed), it’s been pretending they’re on a plane for hours with a crying baby, keeping a giant running sand timer topped up and most recently hysterical prison subterfuge (if you only watch one episode of C5 Big Brother this year, I’d like to point to the episode that went out Thursday 25th September as an episode of consistent hilarity and heroism). They’ve been entertaining and playful and great fun in a way BB hasn’t really explored for years.

If I have one problem with the series it’s that Big Coin hasn’t proved crucial enough and probably needed a bit more time in the oven. In the first week it was important, as the lowest totals would be put to the public vote, but since then not having Big Coin hasn’t really mattered, and there hasn’t been an awful lot to actually spend it on – the auction prices are typically very low and the decisions not that important, except in one or two cases where having the most bought power. I reckon there needed to be more opportunities for totals to rise and fall other than the one challenge during the week (most of which have been enjoyable), the auctions to increase with bigger jumps than the 5 to 10 they typically are, and something either really good to happen to the person with the most and/or something really bad to happen with the person with the least, like automatic nomination. Big Coin decisions should be difficult and relevant to position in the house and I’m not sure it’s quite worked like that here.

I can’t say I’ve watched BB much during the Channel 5 run – as I’ve said in the past, an hour a night for weeks on end is a lot to give up these days, but I’ve kept up with this one all the way through and it’s sad to me it has rated so poorly.