Colour me as quite surprised and I don’t know how often I’ll play it after the initial launch but for a very quick burst of quiz Triviaverse on Netflix, which launched yesterday, is actually pretty good – basically three minutes of rapid fire multiple choice questions that get increasingly difficult after each minute (that’s right, it’s the The National Lottery The Third Degree reboot the nation has been crying out for), answering multiple questions correct in a row offers a streak bonus (and this is the key to a high score – you want to be earning 200pts a question rather than the basic 100pts), it has a slightly trippy background playing in the background, the music gets more exciting and intense as the clock runs down… it’s genuinely quite a fun quiz experience (right up until you get hit with a US sports question, at any rate). It even keeps basic stats like your high score and best and worst categories in the background. you can play against a chum sitting next to you on the couch.

Issues? There’s an argument that the harder rounds should be worth more points, as it is you’ll score biggest in the initial minute and there’s certainly a temptation to end early if you get a bad run of questions in the early round. It’s a shame there’s no official way to post your scores anywhere (my best score is 4800 if you want a target to beat). I’ve had one repeat question so far, and I’ve answered around 250 (around 40 questions a set which I accept is fairly fast) so I don’t know how large the database is, but I don’t think it’s keeping track of which questions you’ve seen which is a shame.

It’s certainly a more successful thing for me than Trivia Quest, and plays a better game than Cat Burglar (although Cat Burglar has other things going for it). Good.

Our new favourite thing is a clip from Flemish (it sounds like) mid-1980s quiz IQ-Kwis which turned up on the Discord last night. It looks like The Waiting Game but with logic puzzles, which is already brilliant, but my two favourite bits are 1) people absolutely just thumping the buzzers and 2) the speed of the tile shuffling in the endgame, where it looks like they’ve got to try and make a twenty-letter word (or as best they can in the time they’ve earned, my hint that this is the case is that an advert for the book after it suggests it has an official word list of 20 letter words).

We’ll be pitching Sonic Blastman: The Quiz to Channel 4 next week.

In other news, I can’t see us leaving Twitter whilst it still has utility value and until something better comes along (Christ I’m still occasionally posting to Facebook), but would always recommend looking at the Bother’s Bar Discord where stuff like this usually turns up.

That’s right, it’s time for more consumer advice with a RETRO Bother’s Bar Plays Badly as I’ve got a new headset to try out (I will let you determine if it’s “broadcast quality”, I’m not convinced) and it’s an absolute Saturday morning classic as we look back at Alternative Software’s Double Dare, released in 1991 for the ZX Spectrum (and other machines). Questions! Dare! Double Dare! The Physical Challenge! It’s all here, as well as the assault course which I could never complete as a ten-year-old, but now I’m 41 and a much better person, is it now possible? Let’s find out!

The BBC will be scheduling The Traitors three nights a week at 9pm for four weeks, according to Broadcast.

I don’t think there’s going to be a middle ground here, it will take off and go massive or it will be an extremely long month for the BBC (Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance).

Here’s the thing, it does OK in The Netherlands – it is still successful but it has failed to reach the heights of its first series, but the recent version on Australian TV has flopped quite hard despite the critics quite enjoying it and that had a similar schedule to the one our one is going to have.

It genuinely could go either way and I’m extremely excited to find out which way that is.

The Traitors, for the uninitiated, is basically a reality TV version of Werewolf/Mafia, a few people in the know must work together to take down an uninformed majority (who have no idea who The Traitors are) and must survive a series of votes and banishings. If any of the traitors make it to the end, they win the pot that everyone has been building through daily challenges. Different to something like The Mole, we know who The Traitors are and can watch the game through their experience.

Spotted when I was looking at the upcoming shows on Netflix list after watching an episode of Guillarmo del Toro’s Tales of the Unexpected Cabinet of Curiosities I mean, a new Netflix interactive trivia thing you’ll play about three times and then never play again, Triviaverse, arriving November 8th, although this one suggests the ability to play against a friend (or mysterious foe), I don’t know if they just mean couch play or whether there’s a social media aspect to it or what.

You can watch the trailer on the Netflix site, nobody’s put it on Youtube yet.

This comes hot on the heels of Charlie Brooker’s Cat Burglar, which was at least an interesting attempt with doing something a bit different with the form, and Trivia Quest, which wasn’t.

We’re still waiting for Netflix to buy the rights to Bamboozle, obv.

You’ve already read them so I won’t bother linking to any of them but the reports are suggesting ITV are in the early days of developing Deal or No Deal, with Stephen Mulhern being lined-up to host (they wanted Ant and Dec but the Banker called and offered them Stephen on an Ant and Dec/Vernon board etc etc.)

Obviously we go back with DoND a long way, we were writing about foreign versions of it before our version even started all those years ago, and of course for many years many of us were F5-ing like crazy following the live commentaries other people were providing here whilst in the office on an evening, and pointed out quite a bad security flaw. It’s a shame I never got to visit The Dream Factory in person, but it was still thrilling seeing it at Alexandra Palace as part of its farewell closing tour. I’m a lapsed fan, but at its peak it really was absolutely extraordinary – probably the first studio show of its kind where you watched people having to live with the consequences of their actions in frequently inglorious detail.

So I think it’s quite important to temper expectations a bit. For a start, this is *probably* going in weekly primetime. How many weekly primetime versions of it around the world have succeeded in the last few years? Only one really, and it’s the granddaddy, Miljoenenjacht with its €5m top prize. ITV are not about to put up a £5m top prize, they struggle to give away a tenner on Limitless Win. I fully expect them to up the top prize to £1m – but here’s the horrible little secret – upping the prize money does not necessarily make the game more interesting, it just means you’re going to hit the mean “£100,000, that’ll do” point much quicker. And they will have to reach that point because these are big prizes and they will have a budget – traditionally big budget versions have much more generous bankers, because they don’t want to be giving away £500k+ a game. Whatsmore UK players are unlikely to have the same mindset towards risk as their US counterparts especially during The Cost Of Living Crisis (TM), and no gamble (whatever it is we’re saying instead of “gamble” now), no game.

They could do it like a daily version – but these haven’t done that well recently either – They bought it back in France as COVID programming – not on any more. They bought it back as a daily show in the Netherlands in 2021 – not on any more. They are once again about to bring back Affari Tuoi on Italian TV, very much the granddaddy of the format as we know it in the UK, but they seem to do roughly every six months after it gets axed so not sure what to read into that really.

I think Stephen will be an OK host – I certainly think audiences (especially younger ones) are happier with him these days, and he’s certainly good with people which will be vital. I just think ITV have to be really really really careful with how this is pitched to the audience, it is certainly not a guarantee that people will care that it’s back once it’s back. Personally I think it might be a few years too soon. We will see.