I don’t expect this will generate much discussion, being at heart a comedy quiz show more than anything, but I’ve got to fill the week up before Christmas with something. Anyway there is quite a fun twist in that each of the three panellists are playing for prizes for one third of the audience (the likes of which not seen in anything since, er, Winsanity on GSN earlier this year) so there might be some fun.
Here’s what was behind the calendar doors. TMPGN got deliberately dropped because it didn’t work with the Panellists vs Audience format, which otherwise worked quite well.
Saturday, 9:30pm, Here and on Youtube
“Snow is fallin’
All around me
Children playin’
Having fun
It’s the season
Love and understanding
Merry Christmas everyone,
Wish they’d let me in so I could find out what’s behind the green door (Green door)”
Merry Christmas Everyone by Shakin’ Stevens and good tidings of the season to YOU Bother’s Bar punters, we hope you can join us for a VERY SPECIAL Christmas and New Year edition of Bother’s Bar’s Game Night, join us as we find out, like Shakin’ “Shakey” Stevens wants to find out in his Christmas tune, what are behind the green doors? Games! That’s what.
And for the very first time you, the audience, get to crash this party in monumental style! For the first time the audience plays as a collective eighth contestant earning BotherPoints throughout the evening and could end up winning the whole night! Who will become champion of the night, will it be a panellist or the will of the audience? Frissons!
So get your second screens ready and join us here for Festive Game Night on Saturday night!
Edit: And he we are! This will be live from 9:30.
The codes so you can play Festive Quiplash and Drawful at home:
Before we continue a quick note to say that it looks like we’ve got enough people to make Bother’s Bar’s Festive Game Night worth going ahead for on Saturday but there may yet be one or two spots left, so if you’re interested in joining the panel, especially if you’re female as it’s looking all male so far, then do get in touch before I make my final “cast” decision on Friday.
In the meantime, have you ever wondered why the logo on the Every Second Counts clock that losing contestants received in the UK had a logo that looked nothing like the show’s actual logo? Well wonder no more. Just one thing: “television’s funniest gameshow”. Edit: Rather unsettling end to this video, I’ve just discovered.
[This post is quite poorly timed on my part really, so if you came here looking for Deal or No Deal on Tour or Time Commanders, scroll down a bit or click on the links.]
As is tradition I always put a bet on Christmas Day’s top TV show and make lots of money and normally let people on Twitter know. This year I thought I’d show you my methodology. You gamble at your own risk.
A couple of pointers before we begin, first I much prefer to bet for value over backing the favourite (which has only come in once in the last few years) and secondly the Betfair market, which is where I put my money, pays out on overnights only. Odds given are odds you can get at the time of writing.
1) The Queen (BBC One/ITV) ………………………………………..7.2m (6.1m on BBC One and 1.1m on ITV)
2) Downton Abbey – The Finale (ITV) ………………………………6.6m
3) Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special (BBC One)………. 6.5m
4) Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas Special (BBC One)………………6.4m
5) Stick Man (BBC One) ………………………………………………..6.4m
6) Call The Midwife (BBC One)……………………………………….. 5.8m
7) Doctor Who (BBC One) ……………………………………………..5.8m
8) EastEnders (BBC One) ………………………………………………5.7m
9) Coronation Street (ITV)……………………………………………. 5.6m
10) Brave (BBC One) ……………………………………………………..5.5m
Very interesting. And because of that I can now tell you that I’ve got three figures on The Queen on BBC1 being this year’s Xmas Number One – the combined total will not count here but you can see the split for yourselves. Normally The Queen is right up there (in fact it’s remarkably consistent, looking back it tends to get above six million whilst the trend is for everything in primetime to drop) but with this year being so incredibly weird in terms of news my gut is telling me that as something that hasn’t changed this year she’s going to rate massively. Half a million to make up in a year with Brexit and Trump? At those odds? I can’t turn it down, Christmas primetime really isn’t the monster it used to be. Odds: 14
However there are no guarantees, all I can do is read a situation and project. Therefore if you think I’m wrong here are the other major runners and riders:
Strictly Come Dancing Xmas: – this ought to do well and is current favourite but I’m not really feeling it, it’ll have a low lead-in from Doctor Who and I fear Paul o Grady’s For The Love of Dogs is very reliable factual and might nab a few viewers off of it. It IS Len Goodman’s last episode but I don’t anticipate that being too much of an extra draw, people will mentally say their goodbyes with the main final this weekend. However if Brucie carks it before Xmas than all bets are off. As it stands this is not a price I would consider exciting and it certainly isn’t free money. Odds: 2.78
Mrs Brown’s Boys: when I tipped MBB to a sensational 15-1 victory a few years ago there were a lot of signs people missed – that it was the biggest show on Boxing Day the year previous, that repeats would pull in 5-6 million. This year it ought to do well, and the live show did well, but the world has changed a little – repeats now pull 3-4 mill and people will probably watch on catch-up, I don’t think it’s quite the draw it once was and being on at 10:30pm is going to significantly hurt its chances. Odds: 2.74
Call the Midwife: Too long (90 minutes) and requires previous investment to really get the most from it. Odds: 4.3
The Great Christmas Bake Off: literally throwing your money away. After spending all day cooking your Christmas dinner, who now is going to want to watch an hour of baking, and before 5pm to boot? This should have been on Christmas Eve. It’s not even the last episode – that’s on Boxing Day at 7pm (a proper time slot). It might be the last time the gang are together, but everyone’s already said their goodbyes really, and Bake Off Specials only tend to do half as well as Proper Full On Bake-Off. Odds: 4.3
Eastenders: It barely gets five million nightly now, it doesn’t usually get much of a Christmas bump (although it is on very late at 9:30 this year). Odds: 5.5
Frozen: This is a real danger, everybody loves Frozen and animated stuff does well on the day and this will be its terrestrial premiere. It’s on after The Queen. But has everybody watched it already and does it still have the draw? If I was to put a covering bet on, it’d be on this. Odds: 5.7
Coronation Street: Basically soaps are no longer as dominant as they once were. Odds: 15
Maigret’s Dead Man: This is the day’s mystery for me, Rowan Atkinson playing the French detective. It could go quite large, although it does start an hour into Call the Midwife which won’t help it. Odds: 15
Doctor Who: don’t waste your money, it will do very averagely on the night and make it up on catch up. Odds: 16
This almost slipped past but thankfully we remembered just in time, food critic and wargame fanatic Gregg Wallace (yes, really) oversees this three episode reboot of Time Commanders.
This time two teams will take on the computer war simulation (Total War, if you were wondering) before taking on each other in the final. In the first episode a team of wrestlers take on a team of board gamers and recreate Hannibal vs the Romans. Will history be changed?
Being honest I didn’t really watch Time Commanders first time round (although we’re certainly open to this sort of thing so it wasn’t on taste grounds) so I look forward to seeing how fans of the original compare this to the original.
We are totally stoked for this, something I reckon they should have done *years* ago, for the next two weeks to bring eleven years of Deal or No Deal to a close the Banker is taking his boxes on tour. But not just to places like, I don’t know, Acton or Weston-Super-Mare, that would not be very Noel Edmonds. Instead we’re getting TV’s most innovative man Noel Edmonds in excelsis – they’re doing it on The Flying Scotsman! They’re doing it hundreds of feet underground in Wookey Hole! And they’ll be playing Deal or No Deal on an actual in-flight aeroplane!
The game is the same, the classic original 22 box formula without modern day fripperies like the Offer Button and the rubbish Box 23. The board is hysterically lo-tech. The point is you can play the game literally anywhere, and so we’re really interested to see how it’s staged in each location. Although actually we know how they staged it at Alexandra Palace because I was there.
Tour schedule:
Monday 12th: The Flying Scotsman
Tuesday 13th: The Eden Project
Wednesday 14th: Warwick Castle
Thursday 15th: Alexandra Palace
Friday 16th: Trafford Centre, Manchester
Monday 19th: Blackpool Tower
Tuesday 20th: Wookey Hole, Somerset
Wednesday 21st: On a Boeing 747
Thursday and Friday – don’t know at time of writing, but they filmed one in the Lion’s enclosure at Longleat, Wiltshire and at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow.
Monday 19th – Thursday 22nd,
