Right then, FOTB and Schlag den Star commentator Dan Peake is recording a new podcast game called Codebreaker recording in the next few weeks. He is after contestants. If you like general knowledge quizzes and codebreaking, drop him a line. And here’s the Code Breaker Twitter.

And several of you have enquired about The Smartest Person at Bother’s Bar. Here’s where I currently am: about half the questions are written, this is intended to be a four night LIVE event the week after Easter, three heats and a final. You will need a webcam (non-negotiable). You will need to be free between 8:45pm and about 10pm on the 17th (that’s Easter Monday), 18th or 20th PLUS the final on the Friday 21st April. There will be a trophy – it’s getting engraved right now.

In my head this is brilliant, hopefully this will be good in actuality. A contestant form will be going up in the next few days so look out for that. It would be nice to have some diversity (i.e. one or two contestants of the nine I need who aren’t white male nerds), but I’m only able to select candidates from the people who do apply. I’m afraid this will probably have to be limited to UK players because of the nature of the questions and timezone differences although it’s not set in stone.

Let’s take a look inside the Bother’s Bar Filler Bag… yeah why not. Thanks to Brian Moore for sending us a link to this, the Japanese version of LWT’s ‘hit’ 1976 show The Sweepstakes Game, more popularly (and originally) known in the US as Celebrity Sweepstakes. It’s kind of a bit like You Bet meets Winner Takes All – the audience votes on which celebs they think will be able to answer a question, the computer calculates the odds from that then the contestants wager on those odds.

Probably worth pointing out as it’s easy to forget, the new series of fun multiple choice true/false quiz The Code with Matt Allwright and Lesley-Anne Brewis begins Monday afternoon on BBC1 at 2:15.

I don’t expect many format changes, so you can read what we thought of the first series here.

Edit: Actually it sounds like there’s been a change in round two.

Just popped into our Inbox, the peeps behind Go 8 Bit are doing a twelve hour live broadcast in association with Comic Relief from 9am on Friday 17th with their gaming and celebrity chums, details can be found on comicrelief.com/gameraisers and the stream can be found on Twitch.

To celebrate GSN’s doomed to failure US version of Pointless, here’s another version that I thought did a pretty good job but didn’t last, the German version Null Gewinnt (Zero Wins) from 2012 on ARD. Each episode was self-contained, no rolling jackpot, but you got €1,000 for every Pointless answer you gave anyway. Of course the German Richard Osman is cheating by actually having his computer turned on.

And Paul O’ Grady’s doing Blind Date! Wowsers.

Yesterday I was turned away from a recording of ITV’s Babushka with Rylan, apparently they had already run out of space for general ticket holders 45-60 minutes before door opening on a show that they seemed pretty desperate to give tickets away for if my e-mails box is anything to go by, so we won’t know if it’s still basically Wipeout except with an actual hatred of its contestants and without the entertaining bits dragged out to an hour meeting another show that basically misunderstands Deal or No Deal as the format trailer suggests until broadcast. Applause Store are insistent that the show is “big in America”, which has our American friends scratching their heads in bafflement. This originally had Ryan Seacrest’s name attached to it, although they don’t play it up very much now.

On the upside I did go and have quite a good cash game session at a poker table at the Vic so every cloud etc.

In other news the new Big Brother Canada house looks stunning and GSN are working on a US version of Pointless, which I suspect will go down precisely as well as most other international versions, only more so.