We can only be about six weeks away from the 27th season premiere of Fort Boyard on France 2 which means they’re filming very soon. Once all the episodes have been filmed the press will have a go and that’s when we’ll discover the new games and things that have been added this year (and some games which remained in the press pack even though it was discovered too close to filming that they don’t work and got dropped, ahem).

So if you’re on Twitter now’s a good time to follow Guillaume Ramain, one of the show’s artistic and creative directors, Pere Fouras and host Olivier Minne as they tend to drop oblique visual hints before and during filming.

What’s all that about? No idea. But he’s also put up a photo of a door in the shape of a monster’s head and what looks like a sort of 3D board-game of the Fort. Intriguing indeed. It will be interesting to see what they’ve nicked off The Cube this year and whether or not the show will be longer or shorter than last year, which frequently hit two hours fifteen and  was rather eye watering.

Doubtless you’ve noticed that ABC in the US are reviving a ton (two) of classic shows for a new Sunday night Summer gameshow block (Pyramid and Match Game aka Blankety Blank), both of which have been done several times before (and Celebrity Family Feud is a going concern) but this time they’ll work because of extra lights and Alec Baldwin.

Needless to say if it all works out I can’t wait for high-chrome remakes of Chain Letters, Crosswits and Runway on ITV next Summer.

Well I’ve just got back from a party (is it a party when there’s four people?) and I think that if it wasn’t the best Eurovision ever it was certainly up there with the best. Great songs in the main, great hosts in Petra and Mans and THAT voting system.

Now as the bets I had on this years Eurovision panned out suggest my knowledge of music not really in tune with with Europe’s. However on format points I’m much more comfortable, and I’m predicting that there are a lot of relieved faces at SVT and the EBU that it worked out precisely the way it did, with a very happy Ukraine and a fell-at-the-final hurdle Australia. It provided the shock moment the new system was hoping to provide, although of course it could have been different – if Australia ran away with the televote the same way they ran away with the jury vote everyone would have gone “well what was the point of that then?”

Last year we did a thing where we looked at the Eurovision algorithm, explaining the modern method for trying to hide the result as long as possible, but there will always be a point where the winners have to pull away. The idea behind the change this year was to modify the systems to make it as exciting as possible. Previously jury rankings and televote rankings were combined and averaged to make a country’s top ten set of votes. Now we have effectively two competitions played separately and the aggregate scores combined. It’s still 50/50, but it’s a slightly different 50/50.

The jury competition involved music professionals judging on performance, quality and originality of song. The televote contest has people voting on a wider range of things – performance, song, who their friends are, where they’re originally from and, if the party I went to is anything to go by, who they’d most like to have sex with. The EBU has tried quite hard to hide who got what from each country in the televote but with a bit of Excel knowhow you can find out by sorting through the Excel spreadsheet. This year a fairly wide disparity between jury and televote in certain cases.

Did it work? Evidently. One thing about watching at a party is that you actually watch it rather than spend all your time on Twitter as I did with the semi-final I watched. However I couldn’t resist the odd peek. Perhaps predictably everyone was pretty down on it right up until the shock Australia coming fourth in the televote moment then suddenly everyone (well, most people) started digging it. People don’t like change, as the various versions of the Pointless final will attest, but if it works people will find peace with it sooner or later.

Many people suggested they didn’t understand it and I think up to a point it’s fair enough (if you tried to describe it to someone quite simply you’d probably have a job) although you do have to remember the average viewer is really quite thick and resistant.

One of the benefits of the new system is that even if there *is* a runaway winner it would still be open until the second to last figure comes in to confirm it. This seems like a more fun thing to happen then knowing who the winner is ten sets of results out and then going through the motions anyway. Not letting on how many points are left in contention is a smart move.

One final point, for me going into this one of the more controversial aspects was reducing the jury spokesperson to just revealing the twelve points award. In the end, whilst having to read 1-10 was quite a lot to take in, this actually worked fairly well, helped by some unusual 12 point awards from some of the juries. Everything was done and dusted in around 45 minutes.

In theory they could reveal the jury vote in the same way as the televote, although I expect this would be a step too far. There are certain traditions I don’t think you can do away with and one of those is travelling round the countries, not to mention that the build-up is an important part of the effect of the new system. However, if they can do away with all the announcements in French (not just the voting, it looks like all night) perhaps nothing is sacred after all.

Edit: It turns out Petra did do the jury douze points in French, although I’m still disappointed they didn’t do the televoting with French numbers.

In Germany yesterday and today.

It’s a long shot but if you’ve been/are going do let us know what you thought.

Long term readers may remember we have some history with the My Man Can, apparently a successful worldwide format based on the German show Mein Mann Kann which we did a feature on back in 2012 in prep for the UK version filming that Summer, which was allegedly so bad that despite filming six episodes they decided not to bother broadcasting them, although I saw an episode filmed and later declared that “whilst it wasn’t amazing or anything it was not really much worse than a lot of weekend evening fluff. Surely you might as well put it out in the Summer when no-one’s watching anyway?”

Anyway we were alerted  to the idea that the show had been rebooted in Germany on Sat 1 last month and it was mentioned on the recent Schlag den Star commentary so last night I thought I’d check it out (with the dark arts you can as well). The first thing to consider is that it’s got a different name – Ran an Den Man (which just translates to Ran To The Man). This is also by produced by RedSeven so presumably it’s the continuation of the same idea which ended in 2013.

The first major point of difference is that it’s set in a large arena-style studio, bisected by a split level platform – a “party lounge” where the girls sit upstairs and a cage style “cellar” where the men sit downstairs. Also noticeably the covering music has changed from “wooooaaaaah mein mann kann! WOOOOAAAAAH mein mann kann! etc” to a dance tune where a female repeats the line “what I’d do for love” endlessly. Also! Frank Buschmann off of Schlag den Raab/Star is the new commentator.

One of the biggest changes is the betting. The original show tried to ape poker to greater and lesser effect. Here it works rather differently – each of the couples is staked €10,000 to begin with and after seeing the challenge the woman places a wager. The men who have the two biggest bets put on them will compete in the challenge and the winner takes all the money bet by all five couples, including the three who don’t participate.  There’s a minimum bet for each round (3x€500, 3x€1,000, €2k, €3k, €5k) and there’s an added filip in that someone can push a buzzer to go all-in which guarantees they’ll definitely compete in the challenge and can win everything bet if they win. After round 9 the two couples with the most money compete together in one final challenge to win €50,000.

The challenges this week were pretty good in the main, more SdR-esque than the original (although now they’re all duels possibly not that surprising), beginning with punching batons through a wall to your opponents side and ending on high-stakes beermat flipping via quite fun TV Theme Tune pelmanism, jousting with lances on bikes and a French skipping memory/skill test. One of the more surprisingly exciting and tense games involved racing to try and light fifty candles around a giant ice bath having to go back and forth to a big flame with matches to light them, with contestants trying to eke out as many candles out of a match as possible.

The grand final involved each couple sitting either end of a lengthy see-saw with the man chucking sandbags to his partner in a bid to lower her end which seemed quite the relationship tester. My main issue is that the couple going into the final with more money probably should have been given some sort of headstart.

I don’t know how well it’s doing in Germany but I’d suggest it’s a decently entertaining if not especially original 7/10-ish sort of show. It has been going out on Friday nights on Sat 1.