Tuesdays, 5:30pm,
CBBC
New adventure show on CBBC heavily inspired by Knightmare by the sounds of it, by way of live action first-person style video game. Teams of kids direct a character from their own living rooms around a space station solving puzzles and escaping monsters.
It’s The Chuckle Brothers play Live Action Hitman writ-large basically, except with kids and new IP. Is it any good? Let us know what you thought in the comments.
Saturdays, 7:15pm,
BBC1
New singing show that answers the question “what happened to the 1 vs 100 set?”
Rob Beckett hosts as singers perform songs and if any of the 100 crowd of diverse professional singers, led by Geri Horner from The Spice Girls, think they’re any good they stand up and join in with them. Whoever gets the most people off their seats goes through to the grand final at the end of the series to win £50,000, second and third-place have a sing-off.
It’s mainly up against a Take Me Out in decline rather than fully against The Voice, which would have been brave. Watched it? Let us know what you thought in the comments.
As Dan Peake points out on Twitter, today is the fourth anniversary of groundbreaking internet television broadcast Schlag den Brig. Which means it’s four years since I decided I was happy to be in front of a camera. I almost considered doing it as Bandage Man from The Genius. #imbackingbrig
With thanks to the Bar regular who alerted me to this, here’s the newest entry into the we’ll-get-round-to-it-eventually Bother’s Bar Film Club (to go alongside the we’ll-get-round-to-it-eventually Host Holding a Question Card Tumblr): Dave Made A Maze.
This looks all sorts of incredible. The blurb:
Dave, an artist who has yet to complete anything significant in his career, builds a fort in his living room out of pure frustration, only to wind up trapped by the fantastical pitfalls, booby traps, and critters of his own creation. Ignoring his warnings, Dave’s girlfriend Annie leads a band of oddball explorers on a rescue mission. Once inside, they find themselves trapped in an ever-changing supernatural world, threatened by booby traps and pursued by a bloodthirsty Minotaur.
We’ll have some of that. Unfortunately although you can buy the film in the US, where it’s been out for about a year, you can’t currently in the UK. It’s been shown at a film festival in Manchester but that’s about it so far. Annoying.
6 civvy eps and 6 celeb specials, apparently.
Don’t fuck it up this time, yeah?
So Twitter was all abuzz last night (read: my Notifications tab) with the exciting news that writer and comedian Katy Brand revealed on Pointless Celebrities (incredibly a first-run episode with a 2016 date on it) that she used to be a production assistant on quizzes and had an instance where a wrong answer to a question she wrote slipped through and a contestant mistakenly thought they won thousands of pounds. IMDB suggests she worked on Challenge TV’s Stake Out but this incident was mentioned on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast where she suggested it wasn’t Stake Out, it was a show filmed immediately after with the same production team. She intimates that it was for Challenge, Eamonn Holmes hosted, and the final seemed to involve a question with four multiple choice answers and a five grand prize. Also that she couldn’t remember what it was. And also I’m frankly not bothered enough to enquire futher.
The problem is there are no shows that fit that criteria. Eamonn Homes did do TV Scrabble for Challenge, but that was about it. No, likely she’s embellishing the story for comic effect and people have heard of Challenge and Eamonn Holmes and it’s funnier to use those cultural touchpoints. In that sense there’s no real point trying to figure it out.
But if I was going to make a best guess, and it is a guess, there was a show on UTV around the same time called All Mixed Up, it was hosted by Holmes, it had a five grand top prize, like Stake Out it had connections to The Chatterbox Partnership. Although possibly it might be Pass the Buck for the BBC as well.