Sad tonight to hear about the passing of legendary Gladiators referee John Anderson at the age of 92. Amongst other things like training the Glads, his stewardship of the role, with his instantly recognizable booming voice and no-nonsense attitude, was a massive part in setting the tone of the original show that made it the success it was with the public.

Thanks. The Sun reporting that ITV have bought the rights to Australian format The Summit, which of course is being described as The Traitors meets SAS, because everyone in TV is lazy and not worth your time. It’s had two series in Australia where it has done mediocrely and will be launching in the US in October, in a style that my Discord correspondents suggests is a bit weird, episode 1 starting after and NFL game on September 29th and episode two on October 16th. If there’s one thing I know about endurance events it’s the value of inertia and momentum.

In it, a group of people climb a mountain carrying (according to The Sun) £500,000 between them. If people drop out that share of the money is gone, but variously there are vote outs, and that money is kept and redistributed. Getting to the top means getting a share of the money, but if they don’t get there in time they lose. Edit: I’m being told by people who watched it voted out money isn’t safe either.

Deadline for applications is 20th September, if you fancy it. This link came up quite recently on the Discord, everything except the title matches up to the information, we’re 99% confident it’s for The Summit, but under a different title to throw you off.

We quite like endurance quests so we’ll keep an open mind on this one – we’ve not watched any of the Australian original. Also thanks to ITV for giving us something to talk about in these lean times.

Don’t have a go at me, it’s not my fault there’s nothing interesting happening on linear right now. Also it’s the Summer.

This may or may not end up being all that interesting to us, it’s about social media influencing, but it’s from South Korea so obviously it looks modern and incredible on screen, and feels like a new idea. The Influencer starts August 6th.

I don’t think we discussed Spanish film The Platform on here when it came out in 2019, which asked some faintly interesting philosophical questions based around its set-up of a vertical prison where food starts at the top and works its way down leading to horrible situations. Not for the faint hearted, but worth a watch. Didn’t need a sequel, but we’re getting one anyway and it’s out on Netflix on October 4th.

Note: Trailer contains scenes of horror.

Wie is De Mol?, the Netherlands’ long running domestic version of De Mol is hugely successful, running almost annually since 1999 and regularly achieving figures over 3m even now (to put that into context, scaled up for population, that makes it a hit equivalent to a good year of I’m a Celeb over here) but like many 25-year-old shows there’s an element of feeling a bit long-in-the-tooth, a bit resting-on-their-laurels, a bit running-out-of-ideas. We’ve joked for a number of years that it feels like the starter for the Flemish main course, which somehow never disappoints, in the Spring.

So we’re surprised and slightly thrilled that the current special series with a civilian cast for streaming service NPO Start feels like someone’s given it a bit of a kick up the arse, we understand this is the first series for a new showrunner so perhaps not surprising. Sexy new titles! Really neatly remixed mission elements! Car chat! Hila Noorzai! Oman! The show retains its reputation for a really good location shot. We’ve often joked that an average WIDM challenge is “Chinese Whispers going up a hill”, whilst they don’t yet have the Flemish comedy special sauce, they feel more involved and interesting (theme park logistic memory laser tag avoidance! Fun boat race with puzzles! Trying to identify things whilst being driven up and down sand dunes at speed!). Having the contestants drive themselves opens up one of the best things about Flemish Mole, funny and offhand conversational clips between challenges. And Hila’s great! An ex-contestant (as most WIDM hosts are), she’s much more present in the challenges and has a no-nonsense attitude throughout.

And they’re managing this putting out two episodes a week on Fridays, but relatively short eps at 40-45 minutes so a pair of them isn’t much longer than a normal broadcast episode. If you want to watch it you can, NPO isn’t geoblocked (in the UK at least). You can turn on the Dutch subs using the cog icon, and if your browser can autotranslate it will translate them on the fly. Four episodes have gone out at time of writing, four remain, two every Friday. We’re currently discussing it in the Discord.