It’s OFFICIALLY Autumn!

By | August 31, 2013
10 Comments

I.e. The X Factor starts tonight. Still, quite a few intriguing things happening today:

  • Fighting Talk – New series starts on 5 Live with rotating hosts ex-host Christian O Connell, Jonathan Pearce and (obviously) Matt Johnson. I reckon Pearce might be quite a good fit. It’s always a bit weird when they get a substitute host in, at best they sound a bit like a supply teacher (Nick Hancock, who at least did this sort of thing as stock in trade in the 90s), at worst they’re absolutely terrible. None of them sound very convincing with the in jokes. I hope the new hosts will get to write their own intros, initially anyway. (11am, Five Live)
  • That Puppet Game Show has been moved (let’s be honest, demoted) to 5:15pm on BBC1.
  • Stepping Out is a new dancing competition featuring real life celebs and their real life partners dancing and hopefully having a tiff on live television presided over by Davina McCall. Celebrities are Brian McFadden, Denise Welch, Oritsé Williams, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, Carl Froch and Dempsey and Makepeace. (ITV 6:30)
  • The X Factor – The fifth judge turned out to be you! I don’t think anyone saw that coming. (ITV, 8pm)
  • Through the Keyhole – If I don’t see you through the week I’ll see you through the keyhole. Keith Lemon hosts a comedy take on a panel show classic. For some reason Dave Berry is a regular panellist – I’m sure DB is a lovely guy but ITV’s recent obsession with finding a format for him is a bit baffling. Actually you could probably say the same for Keith Lemon. (ITV 9:20pm)

Not forgetting that Pointless Celebs, I Love My Country, Break the Safe and the last episode of the series of Fort Boyard France tonight, tomorrows ratings should prove fairly interesting.

Murder Mystery

By | August 29, 2013
0 Comment

It’s a slow news period, so in honour of Whodunnit? and the fact I quite enjoyed watching Wentworth on Channel 5 last night here’s the title sequence for Cluedo, in Italian.


In other news, just two and a half weeks until NEW Avanti un Altro! Amazing.

Fifty Fifty Thirty-eight

By | August 26, 2013
7 Comments

In the LANDMARK 38th edition of Fifty Fifty, Lewis Murphy and Dave Mattingly talk about all sorts of things with a US spin.

In other news, BBC2 are showing choice i.e. really hard repeats of Only Connect on BBC2 all week at 7:30pm.

Finally, thanks to Telly Spy to went and saw the recent Rob Brydon’s quiz pilot, the one advertised as having the mediocre prizes. A summary of his tweets follows:

It was a bit like Blankety Blank. Two contestants answering questions, with five celebs (Gary Lineker, Hary Judd, Larry Lamb, Deborah Meaden, Sally Lindsay). One contestant then booted and the remaining plays for crap prizes like a breadmaker, chicken strimmer etc. Round one questions are like ‘In a survey, what is the most annoying thing on a plane…’ And in Round Two, the answers are numerical- celebrities answer and then an average is taken and the contestant has to decide whether its higher or lower. I.e how many arguments do the average couple have a week. It was funny and is a lot better than the BBC’s current Saturday night output. Would be very surprised if it wasn’t commissioned. The entire audience were in hysterics.

Most interesting is that it seems to be called Rob Brydon’s Celebrities, and there was going to be a show called Mrs Brown’s Celebrities before Mrs Brown pulled out after the pilot and the suggestion is this is a similar format. I believe it to be a 12 Yard format.

The Genius

By | August 23, 2013
81 Comments

Right, thanks to Kevin G for the tipoff here, The Genius is a Korean reality game seemingly based loosely on the Liar Game manga series (which has been turned into several films and series of a dramatised Japanese TV show).

In it, South Korean celebrities vie to come out on top over a load of game theory tasks and psychological strategy challenges. Winning games earns garnets (each one worth 1m Korean Won, roughly £570) which can be used to buy advantages or trade with other players to buy their favour, at the end of the series the winner’s garnets are converted into cash. Doing worst at a game means you’re up for elimination and have to pick someone to join you in a death match.

It’s very stylishly done, and when the game is entertaining it’s REALLY entertaining. The problem is this really isn’t a show for everyone – when the game is a bit dull an entire episode tends to suffer and at over an hour each that’s a lot of people sitting at a table to get through – and this is something a fair few episodes suffer from – too much maths, not enough action. Whilst South Koreans tend to be smart, good luck in trying to explain the games to an average Westerner in a way that they won’t go “not for me” and switch over. This all said, a western broadcast hour is only about 40 minutes, so it’d be interesting to see how it would cut with 25 minutes lopped off.

Anyway you can watch the entire recent series for yourself with English subtitles thanks to one awesome Youtuber. This is episode one:


I’m currently up to episode 9, and I’d suggest if you just wanted to watch one episode as a sampler I’d pick one of the following (bear in mind it’s an elimination competition so you’d be spoilering yourself if you jump ahead):

Edit: These have been moved since time of writing, you can find them here.

  • Ep 4: Zombie Game – A fun game of subterfuge and logic and bluff.
  • Ep 5: Scamming Horse Race – This is probably my fave ep as it is based around a solvable logic puzzle. Each contestant is given a hint to the result of a fixed horse race, by themselves it’s not enough, but combined with other people’s hints the result is work-outable. Whoever bets the most chips on the top two horses wins.
  • Ep 7: Open Pass – A game based around deck-building which looks like being all luck until some of them work out how to game the game.

I expect a number of readers will really dig this, so there you go.

Out of the loop

By | August 21, 2013
3 Comments

Sorry I can’t guarantee excitement at the Bar this week, I’m off for the week which means being almost completely out of the loop, but I’m having great fun playing cards in London.

There’s a new Fifty Fifty show out, this week Lewis Murphy talks to David J Bodycombe and Travis Penery about the current state of Saturday night television.

Meanwhile it sounds like That Puppet Game Show is being moved to 5:15pm from 31st August, it looks like my prediction of it being “not a hit, but not a Don’t Scare the Hare style flop either” is only going to be half right.

Speaking of non-hits, Take on the Twisters pulled just 925k yesterday (a repeat of Pointless got 2.7m, for comparison). Was idly wondering on Twitter how many episodes of The Chase  it would take to build the ITV audience back to its usual level, it took about a week to lose it. Mark Labbett reckons about a fortnight, Richard Osman has plumped for one. I suspect the answer is somewhere in between the two. We’ll find out come September 2nd, and Richard has suggested he thinks new episodes of Pointless will start then as well. Summer’s over everyone!

In other news, here is an interesting discussion on some intriguing Korean shows, and Celebrity Big Brother starts tomorrow. Also The Great British Bake Off did quite well.

I Did It

By | August 19, 2013
4 Comments

whodunnitSo Whodunnit? finished in the US last night and certainly it was an odd little show for a number of reasons. I ended up quite enjoying it but the set-up was far from perfect.

For a start it never seemed quite comfortable believing its own fiction, and the last ten minutes of the final proved this right up until the end. Contestants who are murdered except aren’t being murdered, and a murderer led off by police car at the end when really if there were murders happening you’d think someone would have called the police right at the start. It didn’t help that people thought the contestants were really getting murdered and they had to point out that they weren’t, which spoilt the surprise of the final shot a bit.

The title is hugely misleading – working out who did anything was in fact the least important aspect of the entire show – you never had anything to figure it out from other than who you thought looked a bit funny, they had no real agency throughout the entire run and the reveal at the end – that it must be you because it isn’t me – I think it was meant to be dramatic but actually felt rather embarrassing, especially when they started rhyming unconvincingly. It actually would have been far better if Giles had done it, or at least it would have been better if they treated it as a series of procedurals with the murderer being a known but outside force to be revealed in the finale then the end would carry rather more impact. Or if its going to be one of them at least give the murderer something to do!

Everyone goes on about “ooh, it’s like The Mole,” well it’s only like The Mole in so much as its got some puzzles in it. Many of these were fairly entertaining to be fair and I’m glad they got a bit more interesting than the opening week. It’s a shame the only way to find the murder weapon was to successfully complete a riddle based treasure hunt, like in real life. I could take or leave the information sharing aspect but accept that splitting the evidence in such a way that you had to collaborate to work out the full story is quite clever.

It was nicely shot, and it would be a shame not to see Giles again (how unlucky would you have to be to sign up to work for another mystery murderer at the same house?), but the numbers aren’t looking good for another season.