Stool Pigeon February 2021 – The Results

By | February 22, 2021

Let’s open the box and dive in:

Might be a bit banal but the BBC are currently looking for a new daytime quiz show for BBC1, so there is a massive amount of companies pitching quizzes to them at the minute. There’s around 25/30 companies pitching with 6 of them being sent to the next stage, which happens aound the end of March I beleive. So expect ITV and C4 to get bombared with quizzes from the companies that didn’t get through shortly after!

I’ve already been a zoom contestant on 3 different ones so far, with one that’s incredibly fun that uses a grabber and another that was hosted by a former girlband member who did a lot better than I expected her to do at hosting.

I feel like there should be a show in all that.

By grabber do we mean arcade-style crane? Will the tension in the arms match the tension in the studio? I have to say, I look forward to high stakes buzzwire quiz show The Coil With Nadine Coyle. Or perhaps it’s Mutya, Cudja? CelebShaznay Squares?

CPL are searching for contestants for a new quiz show where you have to say funny answers. Rumoured to be a Channel 4 show, with Tom Allen in line to host.

Always a risk with asking members of the public to be funny. Sounds a bit like Quiplash.

At least five UK past and present game show hosts (as well as, surely, host-to-be Jenny Ryan) are available on Cameo, so you can pay them to produce short personalised video messages. Twenty-five seconds, fifty quid.

For a bit of fun, it’s Play Your Cameos Right! You have to say whether the next celeb’s cost is higher or lower than that of the previous one. Your row of five is as follows: Nigel Lythgoe, Jason Manford, John Robins, Pat Sharp and Omid Djalili. (You can look up the answers yourself.)

Higher, Lower, Lower, Lower, I reckon.

Casting now on for a fan version of The Genius coming to YouTube: https://twitter.com/squadbaechu/status/1363630703867432960

One of the major UK channels are looking at adapting the Dutch game show ‘Voor het blok‘ as a Saturday night primetime show.

Ah now this is quite interesting. For the uninitiated, it’s basically an entire show based on that round of Japanese show Tore! (Pharoah!) where people stand in front of a wall of 100 blocks (or whatever), and if they take too long to give correct answers blocks start shifting forward to push you off, so you have to contort yourself into various positions in order to stay standing. It’s the Tore! equivalent of the Planks of Life on Dero!

I can’t find any sharable videos of Voor het blok, although it’s a sort of kids family show, so here’s the original game played in Tore! Jump to about 1h 20m in if it doesn’t go there automatically.

Maya Rudolph and Kate McKinnon are on the shortlist for the US version of The Wheel.

There is a ‘slight’ possibility of Wipeout returning in early 2022 if covid restrictions ease and the US version does well

These we are, some fun stuff if not a classic edition of the Stool Pigeon, if you didn’t get in it’s because it’s fairly common knowledge or clearly a lie. Or something that smells like something that looks true but probably isn’t:

Rylan’s been pegged to host the UK version of Holey Moley. Must be a weekday.

10 thoughts on “Stool Pigeon February 2021 – The Results

  1. Danny Kerner

    i have heard that it will be a case of either holey moley or Wipeout being picked up by bbc hence them trying out the recompilation of total Wipeout last summer with paddy and freddy on commentary. Heard it was luke warm reception in regards to that so if they go to full commission on the new set they may need to recast. Holey moley is almost a given but with only 2 sets and both cost quite a bit to fly over contestants we need a European base otherwise only 6 could be commissioned for financial reasoning. ITV may need to be the ones to get holey moley and total Wipeout with the bbc.

    Reply
  2. Matt Clemson

    Seven episodes in, I thought I ought to report back about Girls High Mystery Class, the newest venture from the producer-director of The Genius, Society Game and Great Escape, because I’m rather liking it:

    Core premise: A fixed group of five celebrities (Bar veterans will recognise the wonderful Park Jiyoon from Crime Scene, I’ve recently been watching Mafia Game In Prison as well so I’ve picked up on Jang Doyeon and Choi Yena; Jaejae and Bibi were new to me) are playing transfer students who have just enrolled in a new school, and very quickly they discover and join up with the Mystery Class after-school club, then proceed to, well, solve mysteries around the school – individual mysteries at first, but there’s clear signs of an overarching plotline connecting them.

    It’s probably closest to The Great Escape among those; it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the core premise is “Could we make something that feels somewhat like The Great Escape, but make it so it’s not *quite* as expensive to produce new locations every time?”. That is, everything so far’s been set in and around a single large location, but it’s very clear that there’s a lot of interesting stuff hidden around the school.

    The nature of the setting means that there’s quite a lot of roleplaying aspects to it as well – there were some Great Escape episodes that leant heavily on interaction with characters, and that’s true with this. It does feel like each shooting day is roughly structured around half the day being “class” – the interaction with characters aspect – and half being “investigation”, more of an exploration and puzzle-solving aspect. That’s not a rigid split, just how the first few filming days have worked out (Day one, for instance, was ‘getting oriented around the school’ for the first half, and ‘figuring out how to access the Mystery Class’ for the second)

    The puzzles seem okay, with the caveat that they will occasionally hinge on language (again making sense given the setting), which doesn’t quite translate that well for us. That said I was quite pleased that I managed to solve *one* aspect of a puzzle in the first filming day before the participants!

    It’s structured a bit weirdly. You’ll note I’ve been talking about filming days, because I find that that’s the easiest way to think about it – a single filming day follows one clear chapter of the story; at the start they arrive at the school on the school bus and are given an envelope containing their broad objective for the day, which they’d conclude by the end of that day’s filming. However, the *episodes* are a split in a way that’s a bit odd; it’s got surprisingly reasonable episode lengths compared to what we’re used to from Korean TV – 35-45 minutes apiece – but thus far it’s taken three episodes to get through a single filming day . And they release two episodes a week, so we get two-thirds of the first day’s narrative, then a week later the conclusion of that and the first third of the next, then the week after that we get the final two parts of the second day’s narrative. It may – possibly – be more appealing to watch the episodes in blocks of three (which in turn brings it up to the familiar Korean “Get comfortable, this is going to be a couple of hours!). This may change somewhat – I believe there’s sixteen episodes in the series, so that’s not going to go into three perfectly (I’m wondering if it might be fifteen episodes then a reunion, possibly?)

    The leads are pretty good, although I’ve latched more onto the three I was familiar with over the other two. They might be leaning a bit too much into personality roles, but I’ve been increasingly getting the impression that’s something of an intentional thing among Korean variety productions. It does make me wonder how much the hand of the producer is involved, I have to admit

    Production values have that typical Genius slickness, and the subs by BaechuSquad are *excellent* (and if you’re not already aware, the same team have been producing improved subs for Genius along with getting 1080p sources)

    Amusingly, I mentioned there’s some Korean language puzzles, but it’s worth mentioning that there’s some English appeal as well – the school has an English teacher, and occasionally in class they’ve had to answer questions about English – it’s actually been a bit interesting to observe that just as a cultural comparison point. I may have paused the videos to read the questions!

    So yes, I’m enjoying it a lot. Halfway through now, pretty much, and I’m expecting to be sticking with it to the end.
    Weirdly, it kind of reminds me of TimeBusters. Or at least, what I *remember* TimeBusters to be like, in terms of the mix between interaction and puzzle-solving. Whether that has any basis on what TimeBusters was actually like is another matter!

    (Oh, I’d avoid the Next Time trailers, they do go more down spoiler territory than I’d like!)

    Reply
    1. Matt Clemson

      Oh, I should have mentioned: The Korean Variety reddit is probably the best way to get pointed towards the actual episodes!

      Reply
    2. Mathew Palmieri

      is there any “Failure” states during gameplay? or is it more like TGE1/Busted!, where the scenario will be completed, even if it requires the producers to give hints to the cast when they get stuck?

      Reply
      1. Matt Clemson

        I haven’t seen any signs of any, but the stakes have only just ramped up in the story so we’ll see if that happens. Given it’s a serialised narrative, I suspect there’s not a great deal of provision for going too wildly off-piste, although there’s a character who’s supposed to be the club supervisor so that may be an avenue for guidance if necessary.

        There is a notable instance in the first filming day which does look like they may have been given an external prompt due to not knowing about a particular reference – that’s the one I alluded to in the big post about how I got one part of a puzzle before they did.

        Reply
  3. Kniwt

    The first episode of The Cube Australia is available from The Usual Sources. It’s basically the same team version as recently from the UK, with a top prize of AU$250k. Moves at about the same pace. The host is much much more casual, not a Schofe clone. Has a live studio audience.

    The most interesting change: They’ve given The Cube a personality. When the hosts asks, The Cube now tells players how much time they had left when they completed a game. And it makes an occasional wisecrack with the host, such as “The Cube has friends.”

    Reply

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