Celeb Beat the Chasers (Monday-Thursday, 9pm, ITV1) – New episodes.
The Eurovision Song Contest (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, 8pm, BBC1) – if international affairs suggest this might be a controversial Eurovision, just wait until everyone sees Olly’s staging, if the shots are anything to go by.
Double the Money (Thursday, 8pm, C4) – New Sue Perkins entrepreneurial gameshow format encouraging side-hustles, everyone starts with seed money of £250, they have to double and then keep redoubling it within time limits to stay in the game, using a different method each round. The last team standing presumably wins some money.
Celebrity Popmaster TV (Monday and Tuesday, 9pm, More 4) – I don’t know if Monday and Tuesday are the plans going forward (they’re also both repeated on More 4 at 6:55pm on Friday if streaming is a problem for you). A whole week of it felt a bit much last year, so it’s probably for the best. We discussed Series 1 here, we’re not going to do a new post for the new series.
The Fortune Hotel (Monday-Thursday, 9pm, ITV1) – Stephen Mangan encourages ten couples to play big money Find The Lady in a hot beachy part of the world to win £250,000. First ep goes on until 22:10 displacing the news, get over yourself frankly Mangan.
The 8 Show (17th May, Netflix) – new entry in our favourite GAMESHOW OF DEATH K-dramas.
Also more Taskmaster is being added to Netflix on Thursday, which I suspect is better news for our international readers than anyone who can just get All 4 or whatever.
It’s being reported in the French press that Des Chiffres et Des Lettres is finally being put to pasture (or out of its misery depending on your point of view) after fifty years.
That’s really not bad going considering it’s basically spent the last twenty years of its existence fighting to stay on the screen, after repeated asks to be more relevant and attract younger audiences. In 2022 they replaced long-running and popular co-hosts Arielle Boulin-Prat and Bernard Renard and moved to a weekend-only slot, neither strategies bucked the numbers.
It will end with some sort of bang, a celebration of sorts with original host (and sometime producer) Patrice Laffont and current host Laurent Romejko (who has been hosting since 1992).
Next week you’ve got The Finish Line series two (BBC1 weekdaily), Double the Money (C4 Thursday), I Kissed A Girl (BBC3 (Sunday), a week of Beat the Chasers (ITV1 weeknightly) and of course The Eurovision Song Contest (BBC1, Tues/Thurs/Sat). This week: Na-da. Nothing. Same old.
So here’s a regular feature from the Discord, some BARB Top 50 ratings highlights for The Sorts Of Things That Are Relevant. If you want numbers up to FOUR significant figures, you can find them and the entire top 50 on the BARB website. These are consolidated +7 numbers, including pre-transmission and devices.
Bother’s Bar BARBed Wire 15th-21st April 2024 1 – Britain’s Got Talent (Launch) 7.0m 2 – BGT (Sunday) 6.2m 4 – The Apprentice Final 6.0m 6 – Race Across the World 5.0m 8 – The 1% Club 4.7m 12 – Have I Got News For You 4.0m 29-32 (Various, 3 eps) Masterchef 3.3-3.4m 30 – The Apprentice: You’re Fired 3.4m 37-50 (Various, 5 eps) The Chase 2.4-2.9m 38 – Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr 2.9m
Over the weekend we’ve ended up watching all four eps of Adventure Line’s new French Netflix reality show Don’t Hate The Player (Mauvais Joueurs – Bad Players – in French). In it, a cast of 13 players hosted by Claude off of Koh-Lanta travel to Mexico to take part in a “social experiment”, one winner will walk off with €150,000. The catch? Some of them will live in a luxury villa, whilst the rest will have to make do in a jungle camp. The people in the villa have safety, the people in the camp can be eliminated. To be in with a shot at winning the money, you have to be in the villa at the end of the game.
If this sounds a bit like Netflix’s other show Surviving Paradise (Studio Lambert for Netflix) you’d be absolutely right, it’s the same premise. But what happens during these shows feels rather different to the point where I’m trying to work out if they’re the same format or not. We also watched a few episodes of Surviving Paradise when we were dog sitting over the weekend and it’s really standard voting and alliances stuff, as overwrought as you like. Don’t Hate the Player feels much more playful, a bit more game-y, a bit more aware – the players talk about it being a game much more and regularly talk about it as a production. Eliminations (so far) are based on challenges – the first one is basically Mega Carrot-In-A-Box. Most interestingly, the decisions (“predicaments”) offer some genuinely challenging strategic decisions, there’s a proper throughline that those with the power to make a decision must be prepared to sacrifice something – there’s opportunity aplenty for power to shift and for people to move about. There is an element that it feels basically a bit like a reality show by Monopoly Chance card. But it also feels a bit like the sort of show Rise and Fallcould have been. There’s quite a nice transitional shot of the sea turning upside down to represent the action going from the Villa to the Camp.
It’s not the next big thing, but it’s fun enough (the contestants are there to play) and there was one episode which suddenly finishes and I wondered where the time went which is probably about as good a recommendation as there can be – eps are 35-45 minutes, and new episodes drop on Wednesdays. Episodes are subtitled.
Happy Tirtthaday, everyone! And well done if you got that puzzle at home.
That’s right, happy birthday to us and what an exciting time to be a gameshow website, a dying genre in a dying medium. What does the future hold? Spoiler: it will probably a bit like how it is at them moment, with infrequent updates when new shows come on, new videos to promote, poll results and the like, whilst urging you to join the Discord (link in the sidebar) which is probably closer to a Bar in spirit than I could manage here. An expensive signpost really.
The grand irony is that I originally didn’t see the Discord doing much, you know those sheets you can get that you put on top of homemade soups that skim off the fat and the like? I thought all the lower-tier comments would find themselves attracted to it leaving the website for the quality stuff. In reality it hasn’t quite worked out like that, it’s enabled discussion to be a bit nimbler, a bit more wide-ranging, a bit more democratic (although be in little doubt, there’s only one person in charge and that is me, no your hysterical Late Show-esque opening topical monologue hot takes are not especially welcome). It makes events and watchalongs much easier. We’re pleased that some of the great and the good of the industry drop by (“the good,” mainly). My main annoyance with it is that’s it’s completely ephemeral, once it goes it goes. It has crossed my mind a few times to jack it in, but it’s quite good right now.
What have I enjoyed about the last twenty years? I’ve really enjoyed watching something new and being able to shout “this is a great show,” especially if it’s something international that requires a bit of effort – I maintain that a good show is a good show is a good show and if something’s been directed properly you should be able to understand and follow regardless of language barrier even if the details are fuzzy. I miss people making TV in London as I love going to see pilots even if there’s an element of masochism to this i.e. it’s rarely much fun actually in the minute-to-minute, especially when it’s the pilot of Don’t Scare the Hare, and now everything is filmed in Salford or Glasgow it’s a bit too expensive and time-consuming to do it when it’s on offer, I’m in my 40s now I have other responsibilities these days unfortunately.
We miss knowledgeable people from the early days who are no longer with us – the Travis Penery’s, the David Cooper’s (fucking hell, it’s absolutely criminal that’s he missed out on Genius Game). We had suspicions but never found out who Endemol Joe was. Congratulations to everyone who got a job or similar out of Bother’s Bar – and I know that’s at least one of you. Everyone does well out of Bother’s Bar except for me, etc.
If I have one frustration it’s a lack of practical video-making ability and endemic laziness, at one point I was going to make a pilot/proof-of-concept episode of something that has been sitting in my head for a while for this: the site’s 20th birthday, but it turns out I couldn’t be bothered. Still, you don’t get many crap formats these days do you? Except for Deal or No Deal Island, obviously. I like to think we’ve gone some way to help basic understanding, we hope people can remember the need to be a bit more aggressively entertaining. It remains extremely frustrating to see a good idea that’s *almost* there.
We never did get round to doing a Host Holding A Question Card Tumblr but you can rest assured we continue to have our beady eye on the HOTTEST promo trends and Boring Press Release Quotes going forward, you are never far away from a crap attempt at spin and I for one cannot wait. We will still be doing our best-in-field consumer journalism i.e. buying the latest Fort Boyard videogame and going “oh.”
Thanks to David J Bodycombe for hosting the site in the early days, an extremely generous man. To everyone who has turned up and contributed in the last twenty years, thank you for doing so. I have enjoyed throwing bouquets and brickbats from the sidelines of the industry for the past 20 years here (and almost another decade on top elsewhere), I’ll probably always be around whilst there is competitive unscripted entertainment in one form or another even if it’s just Netflix doing an elimination show in a jungle AGAIN, but as I say the website updating is likely to be closer to once a week or two from once a few days going forward – the site’s not really a destination these days. Our other branches are more active and fun at the moment so give them a look.
Edit: Incredible present from Little Timmy Halbert – I got 9 on my first go. Edit edit: Took me four attempts to get ten. LOVE the slightly gothy, Toccata-esque stylings of the music.
This looks Very Much The Sort Of Thing We Like, a new Format Of Death K-Drama starting on Netflix 17th May, apparently based on the web series Money Game. What’s on Netflix, via AsianWiki, has the plot down thus:
“8 people in need of money are invited to appear on reality variety show Money Game. The 8 people are to stay at the studio that consists of nothing but concrete walls. If they are able to hang in there for 100 days, they can divide the winning prize of 44.8 billion won equally. But, everything they spend for, including necessities like food, water, electricity, costs 1,000 times more than normal prices and are deducted from the winning prize.”
