Kings of the Challenge Show Genre

Joko & Klaas Gegen Pro7 is back on Tuesday nights in Germany, and we’ve been watching the last few series live in the Bother’s Bar Discord (do come and join, 7:15pm UK, you’re not obligated to contribute) and it has become apparent that really, nobody’s producing an equal right now. In it, Joko and Klaas, two anarchic MTV presenters a decade ago who leapt to mainstream TV and continue to bring in a young audience, are set seven challenges by “Mr ProSieben” – some against other Pro7 talent, some just to beat – the more of the first six they win, the more of an advantage they get for the seventh and final challenge for all the beans. The prize? Fifteen minutes of primetime access the next day they can use for whatever they want (within legal bounds) which they usually use for quite worthy purposes. But if they lose? The channel will punish them – make them host unusual shows, record all the break bumpers for a week, that sort of thing.

The challenges are funny, varied and inventive, frequently making good use of the projection floor, and there’s usually a pre-recorded outside broadcast one. My favourite one from last night was ‘What Does A Banana Sound Like?” where they were challenged by a pair of other Pro7 talent to a sonic duel – picking one of five things at random (first round: events, second round: fictional characters, third round: emotions), one of each pair gets thirty seconds in a soundproof booth filled with musical instruments of all kinds to prepare, then fifteen seconds to record their soundscape. These were then played back to their partners who had to guess which of the five things they were going for. This was a great challenge both from a visual perspective, and for playalong “how would you do it?” discussion. I’d like to show you this, but unfortunately they haven’t uploaded it at time of writing.

So two challenges we can show from last night though. The first involves destroying things, with the aim of doing so in such a way they can pick the heaviest fragment up which will get weighed against their opponents. The sort of thing that’d make a good Schlag den Star game, but with the benefit of not being live so you can realistically have the set-up.

Last night’s final involved turning a car around on a small platform. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to get seven minutes of entertaining television out of what is basically an extreme three-point-turn challenge (they were given five and earned an extra two minutes from winning four of the evening’s tasks), in fact looking at it you wouldn’t think the feat was actually possible, but it was actually extremely tense stuff. The stakes: 15 minutes of primetime access, or having to host nightly science show Galileo for the rest of the week.

And finally here’s one of my favourite punishments – having to do live in-vision continuity from 6am to 10pm the next day, much of which is comedy show marathons “what’s better than two episodes of Big Bang Theory? That’s right THREE episodes of Big Bang Theory!” also coming up with “Two Broke Girls, one cup” and spending the rest of the link giggling.

The only real issue is that recent editions are three hours long.

Edit: ooh, fun bonus as I tried to find this one: Stay The Fuck In My House (a parody of reality show Get The Fuck Out Of My House) – Joko and Klass have to stay in a house whilst American football players led by Evil Jared off of The Bloodhound Gang try and manhandle them out.