You’ll need to use various dark arts to watch this but Candy Crush, exec produced by Matt Kunitz (Wipeout, Fear Factor et al) and hosted by Mario Lopez (Saved By The Bell, The X Factor) began on CBS last night.

In it four teams of two vie to win $100,000 by crushing the opposition in variants of Candy Crush, the match-3 mobile game, played on, apparently, “the world’s biggest touch screens” – one horizontal and one vertical.

There are four King-sized (ha ha) challenges to choose from and to determine who gets to pick their game there’s a qualifying round where each team will usually have to race to make a certain amount of matches on much smaller screens under the condition of a minor physical obstacle, they might have to launch a giant candy prop into a bucket or make their way through some elastic ropes. The winner of the qualifier gets to choose their challenge and get their score, once a challenge is taken nobody else can choose it.

The big challenges make quite good use of the scale of the set – last night we had standing atop a giant swing using a giant hand on a stick to access the board and one person “attached to a balloon” and had to be guided and pulled down by their partner to get to the right bits of the board, amongst other things.

The two teams who made the most matches go through to the final round where both horizontal and vertical boards are split down the middle. One team member must get a key from the top of the horizontal board to the bottom to release an actual key which unlocks some joysticks to control the height of their partner on the vertical wall, and fifty matches on the vertical wall wins the game. Each team also gets a choice of power-up, with the people who made the most matches qualifying for the final getting first choice.

The set’s great. Mario’s fine. The format offers decisions and makes sense. The show speeds along, not much wasted content.

Really the only thing that lets the show down is that watching people play Candy Crush makes absolutely lousy television. The challenges are decent ideas in the main but they are not visually strong enough to be entertaining on their own merit and so we require a bit of play along and in this case it’s like trying to play Candy Crush but where it cuts away every other second either to a worse position or not at all. You get to watch people play Candy Crush badly (because it’s difficult to see the whole board in the positions the contestants are in) but you can’t spot winning moves to shout at the screen yourself because the direction doesn’t allow it.

Pity, really.

Freddie Flintoff is fronting Cannonball for ITV, alongside Frankie Bridge, Radzi Chinyanganya, Ryan Hand and Maya Jama. It films in Malta.

We’ve said this before, we reckon the idea’s too light to take off and it’s not really been successful anywhere although if anyone’s likely to make a good go of it it’s Potato. Here’s the Dutch version:

In other news Jason Byrne to host Don’t Say It, Bring It for Dave, a format that’s been knocking around for donkey’s years. We’ve briefly been discussing it here.

Take this with a bit of caution but The Mirror is reporting that Chris Evans is in talks to revive Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush either for Channel 4 or 5 promising Beyonce and the biggest cash giveaway ever seen on British television.

We loved Toothbrush in the 90s, it probably still stands as the height of the late ‘n’ loud entertainment pile, something it basically invented. And really it’s influenced so much television, particularly Friday and Saturday night entertainment, since.

But Toothbrush was almost 25-years ago. Are the kids going to be able to take a 51-year-old Radio 2 presenter (and one with some baggage) doing this sort of thing very seriously? He’d probably do it very well and I’d tune in to find out but…

His Radio 2 Breakfast Show draws a large audience but it’s aimed at people right at the top end of the demographic. The TFI Friday one-off did very well as a bit of nostalgia – better than The Crystal Maze one-off even, but the series that followed tanked rather.

In other news it sounds like series five of Taskmaster will be starting in September.

Here’s some fun, TV’s Greg Scott uploaded his full pilot of Hold On To Your Seat, the English language version of Tout le Monde Veut Prendre sa Place recorded on the French set some time ago.

Of course they filmed two pilots at ITV Towers back in 2011 hosted by Ben Shepherd and Michael Ball. We wrote about the Michael Ball one and at the same time was unfairly uncomplimentary about Ben Shepherd who we like these days, I think it’s because I’m out of the demo now. And will be out of it even further on Sunday HINT.

AVALANCHE.

This is a game I used to play the hell out of when growing up. Set up avalanches! Watch them all tumble! Great. This post inspired by this Kickstarter for a mechanical computing game.

I’ve not played it in about twenty years. Still, though.

Hey Gang, do you remember we pointed out a TV researcher job at the end of February and suggested it sounds an awful lot like Raven?

Well guess what? It’s medieval Mario Party Raven for CBBC.

As doubtless you’ve noticed: that’s a different person playing Raven – this is Aisha Toussant who plays Jules Belmont in BBC Scotland soap River City. It also sounds like James Mackenzie who originally played the role will also be appearing in some capacity.

We’re intrigued to see how it’s been reformatted, 15×30 minute episodes are promised and the press release suggests 16 contestants. That would suggest five cycles of three-day weeks, each one with four people, leaving four people for the final. But that’s speculation on my part.

Obviously I hope it takes a more modern take on proceedings, with fewer games so they can bring the personalities out (*).

(*) I’m being facetious.