This came up over the weekend, hot on the heels of taking on The Crystal Maze Live Experience, Youtube sensations and occasional The Wheel experts Sidemen take on the new The Cube Live Experience in Manchester. I’ve only had a chance to skip through thus far, it looks like you play each game for points and you don’t get chucked out as soon as you fail Barrier or whatever.

This has been getting a lot of discussion on the Discord, Paramount+ (launching in the UK in the Summer) is planning a The Challenge international tournament, War of the Worlds, where competitors in domestic versions of The Challenge in the US (a special version with CBS alumni), UK, Australia and (of course) Argentina compete in their own versions, the winners of which go through to the War of the Worlds finale series. It’s the modern reversioning of It’s a Knockout/Jeux Sans Frontieres we’ve all been dreaming about.

We’ve talked about The Challenge before – if you’ve not seen it, it’s sort of Survivor: Legacy – reality TV stars battle it out in often brutal physical (with some three-figure sums occasionally thrown in) challenges playing largely for eliminatory power, in the hope of getting to the season’s final where the money gets dished out. The overall rules for each series tend to be variants on a theme. Each series has a cast that’s about three-quarter veteran (which often where the soap-style drama comes in) and a quarter newbie. In recent years, many of those newbies have come from international reality shows, many of which from MTV’s stable in the UK (Geordie Shore, Ex On The Beach etc.) but this has been expanding to various international versions of Survivor, Ninja Warrior and so on.

The takeaway here is that evidently there’s going to be a The Challenge UK (EXCLUSIVELY on Paramount+) which might be quite entertaining, will it have the same production values as the US original and who is going to host it? Twenty years ago you’d have probably said Rick Edwards. Not sure in 2022. Also what is the structure of this going to be? A typical Challenge series has about 30 people in it to begin with. Is everyone going to have a full series and then let all the finalists go forward to War of the Worlds regardless if they won or not? Lots to consider.

No, but it sounds like Moneybags might be returning.

I saw this pop up on my Netflix feed and haven’t thought much of it thinking it was going to be similar to the other choose-your-own-adventure things that are already on there, but the advert seems to suggest it’s a bit more interesting and clever than that, a bit more quick reactioned Dis or Dat. Like Dragon’s Lair but with questions. Intriguing.

Here’s an episode of much-missed Solitary.