Wowsers. It’s a twenty minute edit of the Richard O Brien Fort Boyard pilot, uploaded by Pierre Launais (one of the show’s creators). Be aware that the sound is *well* out of sync – like the visuals are running at a different speed to the sound.

It’s actually impressively fully-formed – about 75% of the games used were used in the first series of the actual show as is, a few more with a couple of differences, a few not at all. There’s no Pere Fouras character yet, The Sphinx serving much the same role, and I can’t work out what the scissors/paper/stone card bit at the end was all about (I wonder if this was the inspiration for the Time Chasers element bought into the show later on).

Also they cracked down on the “using your clothes as a sack to collect coins” between pilot and series. The treasure room in the first series worked differently to all the other ones – 18 chests, each key opened a chest, but you couldn’t go in and out – it was one way only, and “the legend” says if you won you could only take out what you could physically carry, so you had to strip down to the minimum before taking on the flooded underground to enter.

Still though, absolutely fascinating stuff.

It’s soft launched ahead of the official launch tomorrow. Knock yourselves out!

Or I can save you the seven-day free trial for when it might become useful:

Here’s a fun thing I saw a link to yesterday, a full episode of Channel 4’s Television Scrabble from 1984, hosted by Alan Coren. An exhibition match between the series champion and an actual Scrabble champion.

To be honest, the actual game is as dull as anything so it’s quite fun to see much joviality Coren can make from the proceedings and we also enjoyed the amusingly light-entertainment theme by Harry Rabinowitz (a name that’s popped up because his orchestra “did” New Faces with Marti Caine which I had been watching a bit of of late).

Yes, no longer wonder “what if they made Squid Game… but in real life” as it seems Netflix, through Studio Lambert and The Garden are making Squid Game… but in real life!

The losing contestants aren’t getting shot, the winner will be taking home $4.56m. Thrill to a full 45-60 minute game of Redlight Greenlight, except this time punctuated by quite annoying US-style confessionals! “So, right, there’s this doll, right, and you had to get from one side of the room to another, right, but if the doll looked at you you had to stand still! It was absolutely mental!” Get excited by huge amounts of contestants, none of whom you’ll care about! Discover that when it’s not in a dramatic form, the actual Squid Game process of playing kids games with no chance of death probably isn’t actually all that exciting!

Anyway you can apply if you want.

Look, isn’t it about sometime someone just revived Ultra Quiz?

If you’re missing Only Connect during the two-week off-season or however long it is these days, you’re in luck as FOTB Royal Flush has put together v1.0 his own daily version, have a look.