But next week might be quite fun. The [Celebrity] Inner Circle starts on Saturday night with weekdaily episodes minus the celebrities (and some of the prizemoney) starting next Monday – bafflingly they’ve put it on the same night as Weakest Link, either side of Strictly, which for reasons that may become apparent is a choice, but it’s great news for fans of two-to-two-minute-thirty rounds of general knowledge questions and voting. And then next Tuesday young/old travel competition Worlds Apart begins on Channel 4 after Bake Off (and wisely not clashing with Celeb Traitors starting next Wednesday). Both of these will have Show Discussion posts in due course.

We have almost finished watching Alice in Borderland series three on Netflix, the first four episodes were great but episode five is a rather stodgy, albeit with an interesting idea, and I shall look forward to seeing how it ends tonight probably.

Also Big Brother started last night and it’s great to see the return of Big Brother having to get narky with the contestants because they’ve just entered the house and are overexcited and there’s a complex set-piece twist (this one involving a live vote and some plastic eyes podiums lighting different colours) to be getting on with on live television, which is usually the best bit of any launch night.

Friend of The Bar Royal Flush is having his 500th Game Night on Twitch on Saturday from 3pm until about midnight which you can join for live interactive quizzy fun. Tomorrow it’s an an exciting sort of tournament format, people earning points throughout the afternoon to make it to the finals, here’s a run down of attempted timings:

Games
DangerZone (3pm-4pm)
Cryptex (4pm-5pm)
Distinction! (5pm-6pm)
Bamboozle! (6pm – 6:30pm)
The Abyss (6:30pm-7:30pm)
The Pyramid (7:30pm-8:30pm)

Battlefront (Wild Card) (8:30pm-9pm)
Face/Off 2×3 players
Buzz Off! (10pm-11pm)

6-1 points for 1st-6th, top three performances plus the Battlefront wild card winner go into a pair of Face/Offs, with the winner of each playing a final Buzz Off!

Although it’s going on all afternoon, feel free to dip in and out as and when – I’m busy tomorrow night but hope to drop in variously. Join in on Royal Flush’s Twitch channel.

What an fun choice! You can give Rob Brydon any old rubbish and people will still go “oh, but that Rob Brydon’s good isn’t he?” Are there enough characters for a Gavin and Stacey round?

Trying to figure out the last thing Brydon did for ITV – there’s Director’s Commentary and Annually Retentive, but those were years ago. Actually I’ve just remembered it’s voiceovering that Noelumentary, so perhaps this isn’t the big poaching of BBC talent it initially looks like.

Oh this is an interesting thing to have land on your doorstep (Discord) on a Thursday evening. Iain Lee has uploaded the pilot for a UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and it’s extremely interesting – it was made before the US one went out and it’s much closer to the computer game. But is it more successful?

“Not sure” is my answer to be honest, there’s a lot here that doesn’t quite work – evidently half the questions if the scores jumping about were anything to go by. Early 2000s Iain Lee was extremely punchable. The flow isn’t quite there, the humour is very of it’s time i.e. isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly which I don’t remember the games really going into, and the answer explanations don’t feel very convincing, probably because this was probably designed for Friday nights and they’d expect lots of “isn’t the celebrity a bit ugly”. The players either didn’t understand the Jack Attack or were completely useless. But if you want the computer game in TV form, well it hits a lot of the feature points, but I’m not sure this would have been a great TV show. still, an early writing credit for Victoria Coren which I’m sure she remembers fondly.

The timeline is quite interesting, YDKJ UK came out in 1997 (it’s interesting seeing who did the writing on that, people like Mel and Sue, who aren’t involved in this), Princess Productions piloted this in 2001 but even though it didn’t make it to air they evidently liked it enough to take the same sort of high-culture-meets-pop-culture ideas that underpinned it but without the license and came up with The Deadly Knowledge Show (which I believe somehow came under the schools/education remit) in 2005 with Dave Berry. I remember quite liking it at the time, although that was twenty years ago now. It’s got Not-Screw-Your-Neighbour and Not-Dis-Or-Dat, jokes which may or may not land after some questions, although they haven’t quite merged both cultures into questions so much as gone “here’s a reference, now here’s a sort of connected reference”.

In other news I’m off to see The Long Walk at the cinema tomorrow (which is when it comes out), the film of the Stephen King novella based on a deadly dystopian endurance event, likely to be The Sort Of Thing we’ll enjoy.