The Bother’s Bar Christmas Standby

By | December 21, 2017

Now seems as good a time as any to point out that Bother’s Bar is on low power mode over the next week and a half or so, as there’s nothing on and it’s unlikely there will be a great deal worth discussing. Also I’m knackered and want a bit of downtime.

I’m still about and will still be here and on Twitter to have opinions on things (people who don’t have yorkshires with Xmas dinner – what’s all THAT about?) and if anything does break I’ll stick a post up in due course.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers, and I look forward to opening the Poll of 2017 in the New Year.

In the meantime, I propose instead of The Twelve Days of Christmas you have The Twelve Episodes Of Series One Of The Genius, which I have been getting people at work into the last few weeks. It’s actually highly amusing how relatively downbeat my original take on it four years ago feels these days, suspect the later series rose-tinted my view of series one a little – except I recently watched it all back and pretty much loved all of it.

18 thoughts on “The Bother’s Bar Christmas Standby

  1. David

    A bit of controversy in the Survivor finale due to a new twist- at the final 4, instead of one person winning immunity and then a TC vote, the player who won immunity instead got to pick one person to go to final tribal council with them; the other two competed in a fire making challenge for the last spot. The fans were split- some said this was to give one person an undeserved 2nd chance, others thought that since the F4 TC tended to be anticlimactic (as most times three people decided in advance to vote the 4th person out), it’d make the ending a little more dramatic…

    Reply
  2. Mart With A Y Not An I

    Firstly, Merry Christmas to all our readers and thanks to Nick for all his hard work on this site over the past year – and looking forward to voting in the 2017 Poll in a couple of weeks time. Already tapped out and ready to cut and paste my Hall Of Shame top 5.
    Spoiler Alert – Cannonball is at Number 2.

    So, whilst it’s quiet – I’ve tried to email this to Brig, but kept getting a bounceback, so post it here and if he wants to promote it to ‘front page’ over the festivities, then be my guest.

    It’s American Television’s Wink Martindale You Tube Channel. Plenty of full editions (minus ad breaks) Amercian gameshows to gorge and loose entire evenings over – and a fair few pilot editions (some picked up, others quite obviously not when you see them)

    Of interest buried in there, is a pilot for a show called Pandemonium.
    Round 1 is an embryonic stage Everybodys Equal/Whittle/1 V 100. Round 2 has one to many mechanics for it to flow smoothly, The last Round 3 belongs in a totally different show altogether.
    https://www.youtube.com/user/WinkMartindaleGames/videos

    Reply
    1. Danny Kerner

      Hunted will return Jan 4th @ 9PM.
      I don’t know if the duration of the hunt has been decreased but is now only 25 days. £100k prize share still up for grabs.

      Reply
      1. TVs Michael Harmstone

        Does explain why everyone had worked out when the final day was supposed to be and there was nothing on social media. By all accounts, there’s some really devious tricks attempted by both Hunters and Fugitives this series.

        Reply
    2. Brig Bother Post author

      Cheers Martin, no idea why it’s bouncing, will investigate in due course.

      Saw Pandemonium a little while ago, I find the Bounce Out round really badly thought out but everyone else seems to like it.

      Reply
  3. Jason

    If people get into The Genius like we did, I’m not sure they’ll wait 12 days to watch the episodes!

    I was quite late to The Genius party – part way through season two, if I recall correctly – and it is one of the few shows I have binge watched in recent years. The initial curve is a little steep because of the language barrier, but thanks to the fantastic work of bumdidlyumptious (now retired) it is more than accessible.

    In case you missed it, Rob Cesternino (who does the RHAP Survivor podcasts in the US) played a couple of games from The Genius in October to promote their (paid-for) “know-it-alls” podcast series. If you look closely enough, you may see someone in the background that looks suspiciously like me on a dinner break…

    https://www.pscp.tv/robcesternino/1dRKZbBjVNbKB – Indian Poker
    https://www.pscp.tv/robcesternino/1rmxPOZLOlgJN – Black and White I*

    * They refer to it as “The” Black and White as they haven’t watched Season 3 or Season 4 yet.

    Reply
  4. Nico W.

    5 gegen Jauch on RTL has changed a lot and I didn’t tell you guys, but I’m not sure it’s worth it anyway…
    Frank ‘Buschi’ Buschmann is now hosting instead of comedian Oliver Pocher (whose only good project 5 gegen Jauch was, because is vulgar, non-sensical humour was a good counterpart to Jauch stiff, but conservatively funny style).
    In the first two episodes that aired in the last two weeks 5 civilian contestants (instead of celebrities as it used to be) answer questions accumulating money just like Jauch. But now instead of having normal lifelines like ‘Ask the Audience’ or ‘Phone an Audience Member’s Friend’ they can play a Buschi-Duell twice. Which means Buschi will play against Jauch in a game with three rounds (yesterday they e.g. nicked Fort Boyard’s put coins in a glass until it sinks (but with coloured water) and classic Rock Paper Scissors) and every win for Buschi erases one wrong answer (so they could win get the right answer if Buschi is good enough).
    Jauch can play two Buschi-Duells as well.
    They players can win up to 300,000€ and then each one will face a duel with Jauch.
    Five tolics are given and the players each choose one. A maximum of 12 questions will be asked. Jauch bids on how many he will answer correctly. The player can raise or fold, then Jauch gets another chance tor aise or fold. Then the player decides for good, whether he will raise or fold. All the questions are multiple choice with only two possibilities. If three of the five players win, they split their jackpot. If Jauch wins, the money rolls over.
    The show is on from 20:15 til 0:00 and had really bad ratings with the two Buschi episodes. Buschi is really not a good host for this having a really terrible chemistry with Jauch somehow and he’s on too many shows now, social media seems a bit annoyed of him. I watched the second half of it yesterday and it was rather nice, but my parents and I didn’t pay too much attention to be honest.

    Reply
  5. Brig Bother Post author

    There will be a Show Discussion post for Alan Carr’s Price is Right going up tomorrow for Saturday’s broadcast.

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    1. Danny Kerner

      Don’t know if the information has been updated but Release the hounds starts on 11th Jan @ 9PM with a love island special. Will clash with the second episode of Hunted & will carry on for the rest of the series.

      Reply
  6. Mika

    FINALLY starting to watch The Genius. Shame I’m way too late for the discussion. XD Quite liking it, even though there’s a bunch of things that kinda bother me.

    One question, though – How “On the level” was this show? I dunno, it being celebs, and with a bunch of the decisions made, a lot of it feels awfully convenient for plot and keeping certain people around. Though that could just be me being paranoid.

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      Without giving too much away, there is very definitely an elimination in a later series the producers were very upset about.

      Reply
      1. Mika

        Fair enough. I’m 10 eps in, just feels like there’s one person who feels like they *should* have been eliminated a while ago but who keeps getting saved being put in certain roles, or “just happening to do the exact right thing at the exact right time”, and the people selected by the losing player consistently seem to be “not the obvious choice”. (Plus you’d think after the first couple rounds they’d realize that taking the player with the LEAST garnets into the death match would be the ideal situation.) And some of the garnet sharing just feels like bad game play.

        Still enjoying it though. Looking forward to seeing that one elimination you mentioned. (Is it obvious when watching that the producers wanted the person to stay, or is it one that you’d need to have read about outside the show? Guessing they got an A-lister who lost first round or something? :P)

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  7. Chris M. Dickson

    I’ve rewatched all four series of The Genius over the last month, mostly in the last dozen days. (You can do a series quite comfortably in two days if you don’t have much else going on.) It’s remarkable how different the approaches taken to victory are and how favourably or unfavourably I view the players as a result. Series one is not as good as I remembered it, but series two is rather better than I remembered; perhaps part of the reason we were a bit grouchy about S2 at the time is because we recognised the games from which the ideas were taken reasonably directly. Series one’s original games have some of the highest highlights of the whole show, but there’s just something about the confidence and understanding of the players in later series that really pushes the show along. The rewatch has given me course to revise my opinion of one of the major players; at first I thought he was an extremely talented bully, but you can definitely read his more actions more nobly if you go deeper than the bluster. My favourite player over the whole show remains someone who never wins a series.

    Reply

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