Sorry, not much greatly interesting happening at the moment but this weekend we’ll have Show Discussion posts for You Bet On Tour and The Inheritance and there’s a new quiz podcast coming out next week that may or may not be interesting. And the following weekend has Postcodeloterij Win Win With The Postcode Lottery! September new season!

Meanwhile it’s the finals of Desty X tonight and tomorrow (the show everybody is ambivalent about), and The Fortune Hotel Thursday and Friday.

Edit: This has just come up on TV Zone and if I’ve understood it correctly it sounds potentially quite wild and interesting – basically Dermot O’ Leary introducing a live NFL game on Five under a NFL Big Game Night wraparound, and during the bits where they go to an ad break on US TV, Five will be doing a gameshow where members of the public helped by Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora and a celeb will do things decided by the action just gone to help members of the public win trips to the US. Unpredictable stuff happening on live TV! I love it.

First of all The Answer Run starts its new series this afternoon from 4:30 on BBC1, might as well use the previous Show Discussion post for it. Similarly 007: Road To A Million starts on Friday, and here’s the previous Show Discussion post for it to use.

However we were alerted to A New Thing that may well be of interest starting tomorrow on telly person Ben Justice’s Gameshow Guru channel on Youtube, The Loop, a quiz with professional graphics from proper telly people Marvellous Machines made on the cheap.

This seems like a very ‘in’ thing, we know there are some professional TV developers working on a quiz show podcast we’re just waiting to get details on – it will be interesting to see how well these skills transfer to new mediums, whether they gain traction, how much gumption they have if they don’t immediately take off in what’s probably quite a challenging space. Then I’ll make a Netflix documentary about it all and make millions.

Look it sort of works.

An interesting story came out over the weekend, Yann Le Gac, the man who has played Fort Boyard‘s Pere Fouras for 34 of the last 36 years, is thinking about joining close friend Olivier Minne (who is having to leave thanks to signing to a different network) out the door – basically he’s 72-years-old, it hurts to do the voice, the costume is heavy and there are so many flights of stairs, also he *really* got on with Minne and they’d often stay chatting until three in the morning during filming periods. Le Gac also works for Adventure Line in a producer and game designer capacity for things like Koh-Lanta (the domestic version of Survivor).

Minne leaving is a loss, he’s been a popular and successful frontman for the show since 2003 – over twenty years, but the story of him leaving for another network came too close to recording for him to be replaced, as such this being his last season is being acknowledged on the show. Whatsmore there are at least three people off the top of my head who could front it more than adequately (Feraud! Rovelli! Riccio!). Replacing Pere Fouras will be much harder – he’s the soul of the show, the one season in his otherwise continuous run Yann wasn’t playing him, 2002, the show was almost axed and it felt like someone cosplaying the role (actor and impressionist Didier Hervé).

What to do? Same character with a different actor is only going to invite likely unflattering comparisons, and if it happens next year they also have to deal with a new host as well. Doctor Who style regeneration? New character? It was always a pity that Francis Lalanne fell out with the show when they couldn’t have him on during COVID – his professor character felt like a natural person to pass the Master of Fort Boyard baton over to – and it’s not like this wasn’t coming! The character might be 200-years-old or whatever but the person playing him was always going to be limited.

I *suspect* the channel will be able to sweet talk him into doing one more year next year, for continuity, for the kids, to have a proper goodbye. This puts off the problem rather than solves it but at least buys time, for all we know next year might be a disaster in terms of ratings or the current high-profile renovations not going as planned and they might have to rest it anyway, then it could come back in a few years in Year Zero capacity, but I’ve always thought if they stop making it it’ll be really hard to start making again years down the line, and it’s not like loads of countries are chomping at the bit to make their own versions at the moment (this year is France and Belgium and that’s it). But if there’s one thing it will always have going for it is that you can have lots of shows that are *a bit like* Fort Boyard, but there’s only one show that has the broadcast history and the location, and that’s Fort Boyard. Until the Russians have done their knock-off, obviously.

The last episode of the season, Minne’s final episode, featuring table tennis prodigies the Lebrun Brothers and host of the recently axed Des Chiffres et Des Lettres Laurent Romejko, airs on France 2 August 30th.

TV Zone reporting that The Floor is indeed for ITV, as if we hadn’t guessed already. Ten weeks, 81 players, looks like they’re using the variety of rounds the show can provide rather than just “identify the the thing in the picture”, although that will probably still be 70% of rounds. No idea of host yet (The Sun seemed to have a headline that suggested it was a ‘Hollywood Star’ but I think they got confused about Rob Lowe and they’ve modified it since).

Probably about time. We watched the first episode of the Dutch one almost three years ago and thought that it was not rubbish, since then it’s been a bit of a monster in terms of sales, and it even seems to have worked in most of them. It’s an extremely malleable format, and even though I think the strategy element is overstated, fun to watch. I look forward to seeing how it does here.

There are a lot of interesting shows new and returning in August, so here’s a kind of signpost as to where you can put some thoughts down.

• Destination X – Continuing Wednesday and Thursdays on BBC1 – we’ve got a discussion post for it here.
• The Fortune Hotel 2 – Wednesdays and Thursdays on ITV – The big summer reality clash. Looks like they’re making a bit more of the location this year, which is good because last year could have been filmed in a Travelodge in Croydon. It will be interesting to see if there’s growth, we’d expect Desty X to beat it initially but it might get much closer as both series progress. The Show Discussion thread for series one is here, you might as well keep it together.
• Final Draft – August 12th on Netflix – it seems a bit odd for Netflix which does Physical 100 to do a show that looks similar to Physical 100 but for retired Japanese sportspeople but here we are. Luckily we like Physical 100, so we’ll give this a watch, and they’ll be a show discussion post set up for it in due course.
• The Answer Run -August 18th on BBC One – Prepare to swipe both left and right. I hope they haven’t front-loaded all the winners this time. Original Show Discussion post.
• 007: Road To A Million – August 22nd on Amazon Prime – It wasn’t universally popular but actually I enjoyed the first series of this, or at least other than episode one spent spectacularly in a Scottish bog and the last episode which was a bit disappointing, overall it was quite entertaining – and spectacularly shot and edited. Series two is promising some format developments – doing worst in the challenge means having to answer a question to stay in the competition. First series discussed (lightly) here, may as well reuse it.

Don’t forget the Bother’s Bar Cinematic Universe is bigger than the website which is a bit of a loss-leader these days, more-up-to-the-second discussions can be found on the Discord and I’m still on X.

Something came up yesterday, an advert for contestants for what is going to be The Floor – and probably about time as well – I’m 95% confident that it’s got ITV written all over it, but £50,000 feels like a crap prize for an arc-ed Saturday night show on the same channel and night as Limitless Win, The 1% Club and Millionaire (albeit on Sunday). Possibly it’s destined for 99 To Beat‘s slot but the show feels more premium than that. So I’m also pondering – could Sky be using it as something to lead into their planned domestic version of Saturday Night Live? Are we looking at Rob Beckett’s The Floor on Sky Max and NowTV? Or are ITV just being a bit cheap. We’ll find out in due course.

Edit: Gary Lineker revealed as the host of ITV’s upcoming import The Box which feels like… a choice. Not least because I was under the impression that it was mainly done in voiceover. Anyway I’ve seen a sizzle reel and it looks quite fun, celebrities are transported in striking yellow boxes, are released and have to figure out what the challenge is and then get on with it (could be the middle of an ice hockey match, could be 10m above the sea, that sort of thing), although they’re already suggesting it’s “like I’m a Celebrity meets SAS: Who Dares Wins” and anything that compares itself to I’m a Celeb has invariably just come across as a crap version of I’m a Celeb, so be careful. Lineker had already presented two series of Sitting On A Fortune for ITV.