There’s a really interesting chat on the Discord right now (thanks to @setsunael) about how Les 12 Coups de Midi, France’s premiere lunchtime quiz, has irked the internet with the idea that the current champion is getting easier questions in elimination duels than his competitors, because long running-champions encourage long-time viewers. Here is an article on the matter, and here is a fun Twitter thread looking at it, draw your own conclusions.
But he bought up something else interesting I had no idea about – the Spanish show Boom! which you may remember for a team called Los Lobos winning over €6.5m after a two year winning streak, a combination of daily prizes and a €4.1m “bote” (jackpot) win which had been accumulating for more than two years previously, was axed last week by Antena 3 after a timeslot move.
Setsunael explains:
Axed in favor of a talk in its timeslot (rival channel Telecinco has their trash-tv talk Salvame airing between 4 and 8PM – they're trying to weaken their opponent further since they lost the Pasapalabra format and their ratings went down the hill)
Apparently this was uploaded in September 2021 so I hope it hasn’t changed.
Weekdays, 3pm, ITV1
As if Tenable and Lingo wasn’t enough, ITV selfishly look for a third successful show to add to the 3pm rotation with R¿dd?culous.
Good Morning Britain‘s Ranvir Singh is joined by Riddlemaster Henry Lewis (better known, for now, for The Goes Wrong Show) as three teams of two answer general knowledge questions to be in with a chance to tackle one of Henry’s riddles, the most successful team will get the chance to take on Henry’s Riddle Run at the end of the show for moderate-to-big cash prizes.
Riddles feel like an untapped idea for a quiz show really, and I suspect people are going to either take to them or get annoyed extremely quickly. I’ve not got much idea as to the sort of form they might take, but this interview with Ranvir suggests that many are going to be visual and rebus-like, and basically everyone likes Catchphrase don’t they. Apparently Paul Farrer uses THREE different types of harpsichord on the soundtrack.
To cash in on the new series beginning on Saturday night, Barnstorm have released the The Wheel app for iOS (and presumably Android very soon). Like a lot of modern gameshow apps, it’s quite aggressive in trying to persuade you to buy into the microtransactions, but where Barnstorm shines is that there’s usually a local multiplayer “play the show” option, and that is still here, and it’s a fairly accurate representation of the show (the shot selections are very good, but it doesn’t look like the experts ever get their question wrong out of selection so no chance of a double red, the experts are no help most of the time, and the ending if you don’t get the final question right is…quite off). The first half of the vid demonstrates that, the second half is a demonstration of the one-player “social” game, basically using lifelines and spending money and opening safes. It’s free to play, so draw your own conclusions.
God you wait ages for a post and then something breaks so you do two at once: Japanese adventure Tag show Run For Moneyis coming to Netflix from November 15th. I don’t know if they’re subbed old episodes or new episodes or what, but we got really into this years and years ago.
You may remember a US adaptation called Cha$e hosted by Trey Farley ages ago, this looks like the real deal.
I’m mainly annoyed nobody bothered to do a UK pilot set at Alton Towers.
Joko & Klaas Gegen Pro7 is back on Tuesday nights in Germany, and we’ve been watching the last few series live in the Bother’s Bar Discord (do come and join, 7:15pm UK, you’re not obligated to contribute) and it has become apparent that really, nobody’s producing an equal right now. In it, Joko and Klaas, two anarchic MTV presenters a decade ago who leapt to mainstream TV and continue to bring in a young audience, are set seven challenges by “Mr ProSieben” – some against other Pro7 talent, some just to beat – the more of the first six they win, the more of an advantage they get for the seventh and final challenge for all the beans. The prize? Fifteen minutes of primetime access the next day they can use for whatever they want (within legal bounds) which they usually use for quite worthy purposes. But if they lose? The channel will punish them – make them host unusual shows, record all the break bumpers for a week, that sort of thing.
The challenges are funny, varied and inventive, frequently making good use of the projection floor, and there’s usually a pre-recorded outside broadcast one. My favourite one from last night was ‘What Does A Banana Sound Like?” where they were challenged by a pair of other Pro7 talent to a sonic duel – picking one of five things at random (first round: events, second round: fictional characters, third round: emotions), one of each pair gets thirty seconds in a soundproof booth filled with musical instruments of all kinds to prepare, then fifteen seconds to record their soundscape. These were then played back to their partners who had to guess which of the five things they were going for. This was a great challenge both from a visual perspective, and for playalong “how would you do it?” discussion. I’d like to show you this, but unfortunately they haven’t uploaded it at time of writing.
So two challenges we can show from last night though. The first involves destroying things, with the aim of doing so in such a way they can pick the heaviest fragment up which will get weighed against their opponents. The sort of thing that’d make a good Schlag den Star game, but with the benefit of not being live so you can realistically have the set-up.
Last night’s final involved turning a car around on a small platform. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to get seven minutes of entertaining television out of what is basically an extreme three-point-turn challenge (they were given five and earned an extra two minutes from winning four of the evening’s tasks), in fact looking at it you wouldn’t think the feat was actually possible, but it was actually extremely tense stuff. The stakes: 15 minutes of primetime access, or having to host nightly science show Galileo for the rest of the week.
And finally here’s one of my favourite punishments – having to do live in-vision continuity from 6am to 10pm the next day, much of which is comedy show marathons “what’s better than two episodes of Big Bang Theory? That’s right THREE episodes of Big Bang Theory!” also coming up with “Two Broke Girls, one cup” and spending the rest of the link giggling.
The only real issue is that recent editions are three hours long.
Edit: ooh, fun bonus as I tried to find this one: Stay The Fuck In My House (a parody of reality show Get The Fuck Out Of My House) – Joko and Klass have to stay in a house whilst American football players led by Evil Jared off of The Bloodhound Gang try and manhandle them out.
