OK, this is rather more curious than anticipated. The Runner is an exclusive webseries for Verizon’s Go 90 mobile video service, and if you want to watch you’re going to need to use a VPN to pretend you’re in the US. It’s based on an idea of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that has been knocking around for about 15 years.

In essence it’s a manhunt show (see Wanted, Hunted) but really it’s not a manhunt show, it’s really more like an asymmetric version of The Amazing Race. Each day is effectively a different stage with both runner and the five Chaser teams having to solve a series of problems. The Runner’s tasks tend to be rather simpler – indeed they’re effectively following sets of instructions around a course ending with an escape vehicle. The Chasers’ puzzles are rather more involved and require help from people watching and playing along on social media. They are certainly not gimmes. The morning puzzle tells the team which city the The Runner is running to, and once teams get within a certain distance they’re given a second puzzle revealing the location of The Runner’s task which again the viewers can help with for cash rewards. Chasers are playing for money, the bounty starts at $15k and increases $15k every day, and if The Runner gets caught they’re replaced.

Viewers are also playing for money – people who solve the clues are put into a daily sweepstake to win cash prizes, and the Chaser teams (and now The Runner) also have money to give away to their social media followers and helpers.

The live shows are fronted by actor and Youtube sensation Matthew Patrick (aka Mat Pat) who is quite sharp and funny and indeed a highlight is his rather loose chats with the social media crew. My issue that it sounds like the show was conceived to be three five-minute highlight shows throughout the day, by Day Four we’re already up two lots of twenty minutes and a ten minute show. This could be fine if it was filled with substance, but of that fifty minutes only about 20 of them were filled with reality footage, for something that was intended to be bitesized there’s a lot of filler. The morning episode usually has the story of the day before turned into a ten minute edit and setting the teams off on their first task of the day, the second daily episode is about twenty minutes of Twitter reaction and occasionally some recorded messages from the teams in the field, the third one reveals prize winners and some of the early footage. Every episode features the words “social media” upwards of fifty times.

If you were to attempt to binge watch you’d get quite irritated. It probably really is better watching it as it as designed to be watched. As it is you’re not really getting enough compelling narrative across the fifty minutes to feel worthwhile.

But. But but but. When it’s exciting it’s really exciting, and I’d suggest that the story of Day three (seen on Day 4 Ep 1) is right up there with the best of this sort of thing on broadcast television – real heart-in-mouth stuff. Certainly worth dipping into to see how the experiment works out if you are able. As it is the official Twitter has just over 10,000 followers a week in, I don’t know how many they were expecting or wanting although I’d suggest with $1m in prizes to give out I suspect probably a bit more.

Join us from about 7:15pm where we will watch previous Schlag den Star winners Tom Beck and Daniel Aninati do battle live over fifteen games for €100,000, whilst we talk rubbish in the background.

They both look ready to punch each other if the promo photo is anything to go by.

I know it’s only felt like days since the last series of University Challenge finished, but both Uni Chall and Only Connect return for brand new series from 8pm next Monday night on BBC2, until inevitably some cooking show rudely bumps Only Connect down to 7:30pm for a bit in a few months time.

In the opening matches the University of Sheffield takes on Bristol University and some fans of the London Underground take on some Bardophiles. I will let you work out which match ups are for which shows.

Also this Saturday it’s Schlag den Star! We don’t know who the stars are yet, but it sounds like Ron Ringguth is subbing commentary duties for Franck Buschmann, who’s presumably too busy covering Euro 2016.

In other news Top Gear is now being outrated by The Getaway Car.

We’re going to give you a very quick primer into what we refer to as “the dark arts”. Fort Boyard starts on France 2 at 7:55pm UK time. Usually you would not be able to watch France 2 in the UK, but thanks to the internet you can cheat a bit.

• The easiest way is to watch on a naughty streaming site. The one we use to watch a livestream of Schlag den Star has one and is probably the easiest method. There may well be alternatives.
• You can use a VPN to pretend you’re in France. We use Tunnelbear, free and other paid for alternatives are available. The advantage of this is you can watch live on France Televisions’ pluzz.fr, but also use its catch-up service if you can’t watch it live. If you pay by the amount of data used, an hour of streaming will come to about 1.5gb. Fort Boyard is a little over two hours.
• It’ll probably be up on Youtube in the next few days.

Alternatively if you’ve got satellite or cable you can wait a year and it will probably turn up on TV5 Monde, which kicks off showing the 2015 series next Saturday (the 9th) from 5:25pm.

I have set up a page for discussing the new series, you can reach it from the menu or by clicking here.

The other advantage of a VPN is that you’re not limited to France, we hope to be taking a look at The Runner in the next few days (Reality Blurred have the details here).

In the meantime here are the Fort Boyard Of Thrones titles:

Here’s some fun that our French friend Cosser pointed out to me, an episode of La Chasse au trésor (singular, as it was then) filmed in 1980 for 1981 in Quebec where they hadn’t taken account of how the temperature changes would steam up the camera and decided it looked so poor they couldn’t broadcast it until TV5 Monde repeated the series in 1990 where it was broadcast for the first time. 

Are there any other examples of shows which were filmed and never broadcast until they come up in a job lot repeat run somewhere? I’m actually convinced there are, although I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. Anyway here’s an interview with the contestants (in French).

In other news Challenge have bought the rights to the first three series of Gladiators, so that’s nice.

On ABC in the US this last week an exciting new (old?) block of shows, Sunday Fun and Games, starring Celebrity Family Feud (a known entity), The $100,000 Pyramid and Match Game, all shows that have been done before (indeed C/FF has been a going concern for a while), Pyramid recently on GSN, Match Game variously in the 90s (and quite recently on Canadian television, both English language and Quebecois).

They are certainly findable if you know where to look and are willing to put up with pop-up ads (irritatingly if you want to use magic to use ABC Go you need to wait for over a week to watch “officially” unless you have a subscriber number).

The new shows are both very good, slick productions very true to the originals, albeit with more whooping. Also an hour of them feels a bit too much, Pyramid is tight but repetitive, Match Game has a bitty-ness that begins to grate three-quarters in. Both feature two full games (and Pyramid makes no secret of the fact it’s just two episodes from two tapings back to back), it’s almost a shame they don’t do The Pyramid Match Game Hour for twice the number of weeks.

I enjoyed Alec Baldwin hosting although the scripted gags felt a bit too scripted. Michael Strahan was confident, if a bit blandly competent. The sets terrific – loved the trilon screens on the Pyramid, for example.

Everything seemed to do fairly well, it remains to be seen if anyone will try anything like this over here, although with ITV apparently resting many of their remade hits maybe now is not the time.