TV Zone reporting this evening that the host of upcoming ITV Daytime quiz Time is Money is none other than Sara Davies off of Dragons’ Den, a leftfield choice, but potentially quite a good one, in the past she’s certainly shown a lot of interest in the more gamey-entertainment ventures – this doesn’t guarantee she’ll be a good host but does suggest she’ll have a reasonable understanding going in of what’s required. Time is Money is a show where you start off with a load of cash and then have to answer questions correctly against the clock to keep hold of it which on paper doesn’t sound very new, it’s Quizzy Ant and Dec’s Push the Button, but we live in hope it’ll be a fun addition to the daytime line up.
Fans of walls of text will be happy that Jeopardy UK is back March 17th apparently.
Do you like DRAMA? Do you like CHESS? Well the dramatically titled Chess Masters: The Endgame (that’s an absolutely ridiculous subtitle for a first series, unless they’re also banking on it being the last) begins March 10th at 8pm on BBC in Only Connect‘s slot. Players will do battle across chess puzzles and it will end with a game of chess. An EDITED game of chess mind, it sounds as though they’re going to be showing the matches in full on iPlayer. But if you’ve just watched the highlights of as ten minutes a side chess game, and why would you just watch the highlights of a ten minutes a side chess game, are you really going to go back and check the whole thing out afterwards? Basically it feels as though this really ought to be a cheap and easy way to fill an hour slot and they’re going to have to rush to fit everything into 28 minutes. As ever, we hope the swing connects but we live in fear.
Finally Davina’s doing Stranded on Honeymoon Island, people who have never met each other marry and then have to survive living on a desert island. It’s Married At First Sight On A Desert Island. I get why the BBC are trying it, MAFS is a Channel 4 sized success on E4, but you know how some things just don’t feel very BBC? I fear this will end up being one of them.
I see Tom F’s popular gameshow blog thing Shouting At The Audience has been updating with some posts trying to explain the appeal of De Alleskunner, coming here as 99 to Beat in a few weeks: https://shoutingattheaudience.blogspot.com/
Very good. I don’t know that I’ll go back and watch more than the one full season I did, but I enjoyed it tremendously.
Is it just me or does the new Sara Davies vehicle sound a little like the gone but not forgotten Five Minutes To A Fortune with Davina?!
They essentially got their £50,000 prize money handed to them on that, the only probably was it was held in a rather satisfying giant turning hourglass
Stranded on Honeymoon Island is an official MAFS spin off from the same company but selling it to other broadcasters (as has also happened in Aus) just makes it look like a rip off and it really isn’t the sort of thing that would suit BBC1 – and throwing in the Survivor element after Survivor flopped isn’t going to help it either.
Might have been OK for BBC3 back in the day – Don’t Tell the Bride was a massive hit for them but when they tried it on BBC1 it just didn’t find an audience.