6pm Sunday is an unusual timeslot for such a big money quiz with a big name host (it’s Dara). We have our doubts about it, but it’s dangerous to bet against King of Daytime Hugh Rycroft.
Edit: sorry got a bit overexcited, it’s 13th March not this coming Sunday. Apols.
Also great news for fans of the theme tune for Lightning! The new series begins March 14th on BBC2.
We were alerted on Twitter yesterday evening that the entirety of the 1978 series of The Krypton Factor had been uploaded to Youtube. And that is, frankly, pretty exciting. A few series one eps from 1977 were already up there and it’s always fun to see a format progress. Thank God they dropped the personality round.
However we explored Anton’s Youtube Channel and there’s some absolute Krypton Factor gold on there. Here’s an ep from 1982.
I love this so much. The bombastic nonsensical title shots, also featuring Apprentice-style contestant introduction shots. GORDON BURNS HAS A MOVING DESK. Gordon Burns being able to deliver pieces to camera whilst the desk is still moving. Pre-assault course chat. The intelligence test having a Taskmaster-esque secret solution. Everyone looking about twenty-years older than their age suggests.
This might well be the peak of the show before its big 1986 revamp, there’s quite a lot of fun (read: largely unnecessary) stuff here which didn’t continue on.
If you’re stuck for something to do this weekend, from 12pm until the early hours on Twitch on Saturday Ash the Bash is doing another marathon 500 Questions stream for Mind UK (donate here), and if you watched the last one you’ll be intrigued to know that Lewcario is returning to continue his epic run with 168 questions to go.
The TV show frankly wasn’t all that. Or any that, really, but as a proper endurance quiz (they will actually get through 500 questions) it was quite compelling last time around, so worth dropping into throughout the afternoon.
New ITV quiz R¿dd?culous is looking for contestants. Also Henry Lewis looks a little bit like Alex Horne apparently, so that’ll attract people just flicking through the channels. We have no idea how exciting the cash prize is (my guess is £10,000 as I think it’s set for the 3pm Lingo slot so better than a kick in the teeth) and I think this is the first contestant flyer we’ve had with a QR code like it’s 2015. Nice.
In other quiz news, Beat the Chasers is filming in March, tickets SRO.
Finally, a bit of an end of an era – series 33 of Fort Boyard this Summer will be the first without its iconic tigers who are being pensioned off – they’re deciding to get in before new French laws will force them in a few years time.
The show is likely to have to go through some sort of creative renewal in the upcoming years anyway as it’s likely all the animal content will eventually need to be removed. The question is: what do you replace it with? It’s not going to be easy for a show to lose an integral part for thirty plus years, there are surely only so many combinations of rope, height and water, and without the chills where are the thrills going to come from? Still, if 32 series have taught us anything, you can never write Fort Boyard off. Should be an interesting Summer. We’re currently discussing this on our #fortboyard channel on the Discord.
There have been reports today suggesting Sitting On A Fortune is coming back – fine, not offensive just whatever, something’s got be wasted against Strictly.
But nobody seems to have reported that it appears to be a two for one with Moneyball. The Moneyball they had to change the title of. The Moneyball where they had to halt filming because the apparatus stopped working. The Moneyball that was just a ball travelling left to right quite slowly for big cash prizes. The Moneyball that was pulling about 1.5m on a Saturday in Winter. The Moneyball that was, reportedly, axed.
Yep, that Moneyball. That’s the proper story!
New interactive cartoon thing from top Gilles De Coster lookalike Charlie Brooker hot off the heels of originally doing this sort of thing with Bandersnatch a few years ago. We said the trailer for this looked interesting last week. Well now it’s out, what’s it like?
It’s fun! If you grew up watching old Looney Tunes/Hanna Barbera style cartoons you’ll immediately feel right at home here – it nails the aesthetic (not just in the nicely granular looks but in the use of music and sound as well), weirdness and frequently violent slapstick gags excellently.
Your job as Rowdy the cat burglar is to steal a painting from a museum whilst the guard dog tries to stop you. The interactive bit comes during each scene where whilst they’re tussling you get about fifteen seconds to answer three A or B questions where you need to pick the answer that fits the statement – most of these are quite easy with a fairly obvious gag answer, but occasionally they’ll swap it round with a fairly funny question and slightly harder options to catch you off guard. To move the cartoon on you have to get three out of three correct or you “die”, get shouted at by your ghost, then redo (you only get three lives before losing, yes he explains why he doesn’t have nine). To win you have about six scenes to get through and a game takes about ten minutes.
But there is apparently around 90 minutes worth of material. Each “cartoon” has the same story beats to it, but the situations between those beats change each time – so without spoiling too much, the first bit is always the cat trying to get over the wall, but each time you play he’ll have a different method of doing so. It *looks* like there are six different winning endings (again not going to spoil the reasoning) but there may be more. There may be some sort of Super Ending once you’ve seen them all I don’t know. I don’t know if it remembers what you’ve seen and only shows you new material (it does remember your winning endings) or whether there are about 40 scenes but thousands of potential combinations. And of course if you’re correctly progressing through, you’re missing out on the death sequences which is another reason to go back.
It’s a really interesting use of the tech – effectively Quizzy Dragon’s Lair. Or Hanna Barbera-y Weird Dreams On The Amiga Off Of Early Series of Motormouth With Neil Buchanananan. It’s definitely worth a look, and it’ll be interesting to see what if anything they do with the idea next.