…the return of the French Summer games. Fort Boyard starts tomorrow night on France 2, and seeing as the “ghosts of the past” episodes were clearly the most popular of weekly variants they’ve done the last few years they’ve basically themed this entire season around it, Les Origines, Pere Fouras is back in his watchtower and they’ve reinstalled loads of old games albeit with modern twists and loads of old characters are coming back seemingly in an Apprentice-style segment where they’ll get to prove their worth in setting challenges. It’s also seemingly Olivier Minne’s last season since the shock announcement that he’s moving channels this autumn. We’ll be discussing this in #fortboyardchat in the Discord.
But also! Intervilles made a successful return to France 2 last night having been threatening to return for a number of years now, helmed by Nagui and and made by his Air Productions alongside Bruno Guillion. Nagui is apparently channelling Pere Fouras these days. It’s quite an impressive and slick live production for what is quite a large scale and chaotic show and seems to have had some money thrown at it – big party atmosphere, big travelling circus vibe. A couple of interesting new features, as having a live bull threatening to run into contestants is frowned upon these days, each team has a time bank of three minutes for the show where they can deploy their own person dressed as Topo the cow to come on and cause extra disruption to the other team which is a really fun idea that didn’t quite translate into practice last night I don’t think. Another fun idea that didn’t quite work in practice was combining the traditional quiz and tug of war elements into one event – the hosts would ask questions to individuals in turn whilst they were tugging and if they got it wrong they had to leave, over a bit quick, would have been over even quicker when the teams were unbalanced I’d have thought. Also there’s a live viewer competition, you phone up and pick a team to back, one person who backed each team gets phoned back and asked an estimated guess question (“how many steps on the pedometer have the two coaches made since the start of the show?”), nearest guess won a cruise and an extra point for their supported team for the Champions Wall, which as ever feels like a lot of effort throughout the show for not much reward for an all-or-nothing endgame.
That last large paragraph makes it sound like a bit of a mess so to be clear by and large I thought it was a loud, confident and largely successful modern reimagining of the show – I even quite like the new theme tune, presumably they’ve taken the ‘Shananas’ and done it in house to save on licensing, I don’t know – although doubtless there’s a lot of first episode intrigue and its number probably won’t hold across the next month, the final’s on July 24th, we’ll have to see. I think it’s a more successful version of it than the rather soulless Biggest Gameshow In The World incarnation previously.
It’s good to see it back – in Spain, the El Gran Prix del Verano reboot of the same format has been going unexpectedly well for a couple of years now and just started a third series (though in a very strange – and slightly unsuitable – timeslot).
On the subject of El Gran Prix, the first series (which was called Cuando calienta el sol – ‘When the sun heats up’) in 1995 had perhaps my favourite title sequence ever. Merely by virtue of being so well-edited, with both the transitions between broadcast and animated being so well-done (and the music being perfectly in-sync): https://youtu.be/Qx_Z7yIe-y8?t=524