It is said that Einstein came up with the quote “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
The Sun has reported that we’re due for another Blockbusters revival.
In other news, Channel 5’s upcoming Celebrity Game Night is giving me all sorts of positive Win Lose or Draw-style vibes – the host in Liza Tarbuck and the captains are Danny Baker and Susan Calman. They’re filming over the next week at Elstree if you’re free and interested. It looks like they’re dropping the members of the public aspect of the original but that probably doesn’t matter too much.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40260230
“The IT Crowd star Richard Ayoade was joined by a plethora of celebrity contestants including Louis Spence and Ore Oduba as he blew the dust out of the Medieval zone last summer.
Channel 4 have now ordered more episodes for 2019.”
HOW?!
I wouldn’t take that as dead set recommission news. The BBC often rush together these entertainment based “list-icles” and often get the most basic information incorrect (usually about shows on the BBC). We’ll see
Not seen if you’ve mentioned / seen Elton’s new format that started on ProSieben last Saturday night called ‘Alle Gegen Einen’. It didn’t do very well however, and was 5th in the ratings out of the main channels as far as I can gather.
Money Tree so each round is worth 1000 euro more than the last one, with the last couple of rounds being worth a lot more. ( I think there were 12 rounds?). Contestant plays vs ‘Deutschland’ who play collectively via the app. Each round is a silly guessing thing, such as ‘How many seconds will it take for a car to completely sink’ or ‘how many helium balloons will it take to lift up a small girl’ etc. The contestant takes a guess, then they reveal the answer and show on a graphic how far away they are. Then ‘Germany’s’ guess via the app is revealed and the money either goes in the contestants pot or Germany’s depending who was the closest.
Rinse and repeat. The contestant also has some lifelines, such as ‘ask friends for advice’, ‘ask celebrities paid to sit in the studio and not do much advice’ and ‘find out what your home city has guessed on the app’. If the contestant ends up with the most money after the rounds they win the money. (This is what happened). If they lose then someone else wins, but I didn’t quite gather whether it’s someone in the audience at the studio, or someone in the audience at home.
From what I read on Twitter it seemed that someone playing along will be called by Elton if Germany wins.
I am a bit shocked that it’s just twelve rounds. The original Alle Mod 1 has done 10 or 12 rounds as well, but in a good hour, so this seems to possibly drag a bit. I read many negative things, but the few positives were actually very happy with the show. I’ll definitely have to watch it and lay along at some point!
Here’s something a bit different: effectively it’s a low-budget Last Commanders Experience. Someone has set up an escape room (actually, three of them!) in their own home and will solve it over Skype, with you telling them what to do. It’s all extremely amateurish, but the puzzles are apparently actually good, though.
It’s traditional at this point to end “60 minutes, £50”, but the truth is more exactly “60-90 minutes, $10 if you play with randoms, $30 for a team of you and your friends”. Very eeeenteresteenk.
The thing that appeals to me about Escape Rooms is the notion of taking the standard conceits of a graphical adventure and making them tactile and immersive; it seems an odd notion to have one built around *someone else* getting the live experience. Although then again, that said, there’s something to be said for the idea of *theming* it around you being a distant communicator reporting in.
There’s quite a nice short experimental text adventure called Fail-Safe which leans into that theming – your character is explicitly one degree of separation away from the player character, communicating with them through an unreliable link while trying to help them deal with the aftermath of an attack on their orbital station. An escape room over Skype that uses that fact as part of the story is something, I think, perhaps worth exploring.
These are decent points, but I still think it’s a really interesting idea, to the point that I’m surprised nobody’s really done it before (although I suppose there was the live action Hitman a few years back which strikes me as being conceptually similar).
I think you’re right about the tactility but the price I suspect will mitigate that – I’m not getting a proper escape room experience, but I’m also paying less than a tenner by the sound of it. How sustainable that is going to be I don’t know. I also don’t know how basic the ideas are going to be, and if they’ll work well being done through someone else who will know all the answers and probably accidentally end up pushing them.
I’d be well up for a live-action version of The 7th Guest or similar in this guise.
In other news, Series 9 of 15-To-1 has finally been given an airing date! The series starts on November 5th, so if I’ve calculated correctly, my run will begin on the 13th. If I recall right, both series 9 and 10 have 35 episodes each, so series 9’s Grand Final will be on December 21st, then I guess series 10 will start after Christmas.
That will be it though. No more after S10.
I didn’t realise it was still going. I thought they only did a couple of series of the revival.
Really? Series 10 will be the last?
Well, it’s certainly true that C4 haven’t treated FTO well in recent times. No reason why it and Coast vs Country can’t live in perfect harmony, IMO…
I struggle to see how they’ve treated it badly to be honest, nobody watched it and apparently they’ve decided they can finally get better value elsewhere.
It’s amazing it lasted as long as it has, really.
One of the main reasons 15 to 1 has managed so many episodes despite the low ratings, and the same can be said for Countdown and DOND, is that it’s an uber cheap way of filling hundreds of hours of their out of London production quota. If they don’t do it with one long series during daytime then that means they have to do it with multiple, higher cost series during prime time. Also one of the reasons why £100k Drop has been in Manchester since it came back.
Unless I’m going completely blind, where have they said that?
Well David’s a question writer on it…
Unrelatedly, if you ever wanted a physical Bother’s Bar, it would surely be The Brig. 60 minutes, £50, not even kidding.