Before we continue, happy Physical: Asia On Netflix Day to those who celebrate, this will almost certainly get discussed on #koreanvarietyroundup on the Discord. Also if you follow me through social media channels you might be expecting the Stool Pigeon to be opened today, however I forgot, so we’ll try again on Thursday if I don’t forget again. Get your anonygoss ready!

Or to give it its Russian title, Форт. Возвращение легенды which premiered on Russian CTC on Sunday night, and looks like its available to watch geoblock free for now. This is of course Russia’s knock-off version of Fort Boyard (what’s Adventure Line going to do, sue?), they’ve converted one of their own Forts in the Gulf of Finland and the results are… interesting.

It hits a lot of the same beats as Fort Boyard, albeit a sort of alternate reality version of it. A team compete to win Alexander the Great’s golden treasure by playing a series of timed challenges inside (and occasionally at the extreme outside of) cells of the Fort. Winning games earns parts of some sort of anchor symbol, and they need all five bits to open the Treasure Room. They also need to earn pictorial clues (inside what look like specimin jars) to work out the codeword that will release JCB bucket of gold. For whatever reason the team in the first episode was all male, which feels unusual, but I don’t know if that’s a cultural difference with the Russians.

It feels quite weirdly paced, certainly initially, feels like a lot of chat between games, feels like fewer opportunities in the 45 minutes to get the five pieces, feels like the in game editing is slightly off. On the other hand some of their takes on Boyard games are quite good – Bizutage in the dark with cockroaches feels like a reboot the French missed that feels like a missed trick, and Jenga with someone on top of the tower having to climb higher and jump off is a good and clever idea for a game that again, feels like something the French ought to have considered at some point (although probably a version that isn’t six minutes). But for each one of these there’s a version that falls a bit flat, their version of From The Earth To The Moon is just trying to launch a ball up a ramp. Their version of the aerofoil game is just a large flat bit of wood, and losing that doesn’t have the punchline of falling into the sea. There’s an absolutely bizarre game that involved trying to balance sacks of weights in the clues bit with seemingly no scary element whatsoever, when FB did something similar it involved an impressive prop you had to hang off. Their version of a phone riddle was being distracted by fireworks going off, which is different certainly. The chef doesn’t have have Willy’s chutzpah, but does give the team a lot to eat.

Part of an issue I think is unfamiliarity wih the location, but whilst Fort Boyard looks like a big stone boat, this fort (Fort Alexander, I think?) looks like it could be an office building on the outside, and thanks to the layout the courtyard feels compact even thought it’s probably bigger than Fort Boyard’s. It might be the same height, but it doesn’t feel that high when you see someone doing something. Indoors it all feels a bit dark and samey, I grant you for twenty years you could probably level that with Fort Boyard, but it was always well lit and it knew where to add an accent or something unusual. Nice sweeping staircases though, and I quite like their steampunk-esque light-tube clocks.

The Treasure Room’s a bit of a let down – they spell a word out on dials, eventually, and if they’re right a gate opens sl-o-o-w-l-y, they run to the end of a corridor, grab lots of coins the JCB bucket has released and then run back as much as they can – and they can use their clothes which is forbidden on Boyard. But the ending reveal is a bit odd – they dump the coins on a large set of scales, and when they let the scales go there’s no tension building, line goes up and down then settles element, it jumps straight to a figure and then the host tells them how much money they’ve won. Cheers then.

Peppered throughout are adverts for what seems to be a Russian credit card and a streaming service.

The Russians were big fans of Fort Boyard when it was on originally, several multi-year runs, so this feels like an interesting swing. But “interesting” is the word that best seems to describe it. I can’t say it’s a great interpretation, but I’m intrigued to see what else it has up its sleeve and I’m fascinated someone has has a go.

OK, Game.city have just released their latest gameshow based cash-in and it’s Million Dollar Money Drop. In fact it’s a sort of weird amalgam of US and UK presentation – US set, UK currency, UK theme tune, UK questions (or at least I don’t think many US players will have a chance at “What was the name of Jo Brand’s 2009 autobiography?”). It plays a fairly decent game of Million Pound Drop, although it did hang up on me during play which seems like a pity. Provided that’s a one-off, it’s a much more successful interpretation than their Deal or No Deal one a little while ago, it plays 1-8 players Jackbox-style and it’s £9.99.

If you don’t want to fork out for that, Ash the Bash is playing his own very good interpretation on his Twitch stream tonight from 8pm you can join in with.

In other news, Fremantle getting very excited about buying up Japanese format The Walls which they’ve called Inside the Grid. You can watch the Japanese pilot with English subs if you want. I think it’s got something, in the same way I really enjoyed Wall Go in The Devil’s Plan, but for an hour show it’s really slow to get interesting and the ending is an awful lot of a lot of time with not very much happening. The middle bit’s quite fun though – quite difficult to see it as anything but a one-off or occasional series really, as a regular show it’s going to get tiresome quickly.

A recommendation of The Sort Of Thing Of Interest for you this afternoon, Beat the Lotto on Netflix, a documentary film released a few months ago about the compelling story of Stefan Klincewicz and a group of unlikely lads who tried to win the Irish lottery by covering all 1.9m combinations during a rollover week, whilst head of the lottery Ray Bates tries everything in his power to stop them once he realises what’s going on.

It’s Challenge Anneka by way of a legal heist, and features lots of sidebars with lottery history, social commentary and early 1990s Irish media and ends up being greatly entertaining – it’s an-hour-and-a-half and it absolutely flies by. Absolutely teriffic stuff.

Do you remember TV’s Next Big Format Destination X? It actually finished six weeks ago, but BARB have just put out the final +28s so that gives us an excuse to do a lovely graph. And here it is!

What have we learned from this? Well mainly it’s eeriely consistent, in +28 aggregated viewing it stuck resolutely around 4.5m from episode four, but the gap between +7 and +28 narrows as the show progresses, so if you liked it you made more of an effort to catch-up sooner. Also helping that red line there is the way BARB has started aggregating showings (As Viewed) – the +7 figures also include the repeats added into the same figure – there are arguments for and against this, I’m broadly for it, if only because some catch-up figures in the past have been added to repeat numbers and not the original broadcast which doesn’t seem quite right – and PR has been doing this for a while anyway. Interestingly the consistent +28s suggests no traditional bump for the finale, but if you were watching it before you probably chose to watch the final live.

Now the next question which is how does it compare to series one of megahit The Traitors? The Traitors got off to a mediocre start but has become a massive word of mouth success. Do the numbers project that Destination X could do the same thing? And my answer is: probably not, but it’s complicated.

Some reasons for this: firstly the different episode orders – 10 vs 12, but you’ll also notice that this graph stops at episode 8, por quoi? Because up until the end of August BARB had a different format which conveniently changed from As Broadcast (which assigned a rating and its catch up to a specific showing, leading to some repeat catch-up anomalies as suggested above) to As Viewed before the final figures came out and this is how we can do like-for-like. We can speculate given the differences in the previous weeks were converging around 0.5m in aggregation that you can mentally put 3.4-3.5m for the final pair of episodes (but that’s only a guess). It’s certainly something, but whereas The Traitors really takes off in that final week as everyone starts catching up with it, Destination X… doesn’t really, it climbs, but it doesn’t take-off. Although we also must remember that Destination X was put out in the late Summer this year and the first series of The Traitors went out December 2022, but that shouldn’t really effect the trend.

What does this all mean? It’s fair to suggest Desty X isn’t a flop and that it’s certainly overperformed compared to how it has done internationally – it can probably justify a second go on all sorts of metrics if they want to. The question is was it worth the apparent outlay? It was a £20m tender with NBC and if we presume a 50/50 split it’s a million quid an episode, really high-end for reality and there are plenty of shows that do a lot better for a lot less money (including The Great British Sewing Bee which was on at the same time, and is some people sewing). Whereas The Traitors was the show everybody was talking about (eventually), people were talking about Destination X only to say “I wish this was better. Rob Brydon’s good though.” And what happens if NBC don’t want to have a second series? The point of the co-production is that it’s cheaper sharing teams and resources (economies of scale), but the numbers weren’t incredible for NBC, if they don’t add up then can the BBC justify the extra cost going it alone? How much would those extra costs be?

Speaking of Traitors, I note Werewolves has been picked up by Banijay for international use at MIPCOM. This is interesting, I haven’t watched it but my French and German correspondents really enjoyed it – it gets around a lot of the more “broken” format points from The Traitors with its use of roles and different winning conditions despite being basically the same idea. Interestingly Traitors is successful in France and Germany, which have had Werewolves adaptations, but it’s not the phenomenon it is in the UK. If Channel 4 wanted a smarter, “better” version of the idea it would probably fit quite well for them, but I wonder if it would invite blowback in the UK in a way it probably wouldn’t elsewhere.