And would you believe it, it’s a crunch period at my real life work so I won’t have much time to actually do or watch anything. We will see what we can do though.

It’s the Eurovision Song Contest this week, the semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday (8pm, BBC3 with Scott Mills and Mel Giedroyc) and the big grand final is this Saturday (8pm BBC1 with Graham Norton, Nigella Lawson is “doing” our points) which will see Electro Velvet STORM to a 21st place finish. Before that at 7pm on Saturday is a Who Dares Wins Eurovision Celebrity Special, I’m intrigued to find out how many possible Eurovision based lists you could do (“national finalists with ‘La’ in the title”) but evidently there’s at least eight.

International viewers can watch both the semis and the grand final streamed on Eurovision.tv.

MEANWHILE on Thursday Wednesday night in the US it’s the first episode of long-awaited worldwide quiz sensation 500 Questions. If it’s rubbish and doesn’t do very well remember that we told you so. However how will Richard Quest fare against the Demographics Dragon? We’ll soon find out! Edit: Here’s Buzzerblog’s review.

Here’s a super thing, The Extraordinary Story of The Crystal Maze on Buzzfeed, with interviews with Richard O Brien, David G Croft, James Dillon, Sandra Caron and a contestant.

In other news, Tellycopter (NBC’s UK formats branch) have a runthrough in London THIS Thursday (21st), although I don’t know for which of their formats because they seem to tweet me on rotation, but if you’re interested drop contestants@nbcuni.com a line.

Alright, this isn’t a full list, but they start filming next week and newspapers are starting to carry some preliminary details about new things at the Fort this year. (Read about them at Fortboyard.net and/or Fan-fortboyard.fr).

Here’s a round up, it will not be exhaustive and more detailed things will likely come out after the French teams have finished filming, we’re probably about six weeks away from the premiere on France 2:

• 10 Episodes, at a whopping two hours and ten minutes each. I preferred it closer to 90 minutes myself.
• They have to gain entry to the fort again. The team must find two medallions to unlock the fort’s front door and they could be in one of three places – the well (creepy crawlies), up the top of a waterslide, at the end of a wind-tunnel. Once found they can run up to the centre circle on the first level and put their hands on a plinth which “unlocks the cells”.
• Five new cells have been announced, this may not be exhaustive. Basketball-in-a-wind-tunnel game The Boyard Stadium, the Hammocks which they’ve been playing as a duel event internationally for a few years, The Metal Spider,  The Garage and The Human Wheel (pick things up with your teeth whilst strapped to a spinning wheel partly submerged in water).
• Judge Blanche’s twin sister has taken residence. And she’s played by the same person (the model and actress and former contestant Delphine Wespiser) and dresses in red. She will take on the team in a new intermediate section called The Cage where up to two keys are on offer, and helping her are guest contestants who have taken on the fort previously, now in Pere Fouras’ employ. It looks like most other characters – Chef Willy Rovelli, Vincent C the magician, Mister and Lady Boo also return.
• Prisoners will need to escape the underground again but this time they’re against the clock, and if they take too long it will start to eat into the team’s treasure room time.
• It’s been suggested that the team will no longer have to gamble time in the council.

More news as and when (there are some question marks as to how it all fits together), they’ve dressed up the old spiders and scorpions chamber as a creepy dolls house (which looks brilliant), so look out for that as well.

I hope it works well as a strong Boyard is good for television in general, but the last time the show felt like it threw everything but the kitchen sink at it it was 2002 and almost got axed, and this feels eerily similar. WE SHALL SEE.

This deserved more than a single favourite, frankly:

Catching up on this week’s Game of Thrones. Distracted that Sansa appears to have won the Power of Veto. pic.twitter.com/pthqDDlfGb

— Brig Bother (@BothersBar) May 14, 2015

If only she won it earlier, she could have taken her Dad off the chopping block and Joffrey would have been forced to pick someone else etc.

I can’t say I watch the show very much these days in honesty, although I do keep tabs on it, but I always love a good Big Brother launch night for the spectacle and the thrill and excitement of being able to legitimately judge other people from a VT made to make them look as daft as possible and then make jokes about it on Twitter. I can’t say I’m really a fan of telling people who was going in before launch night because a lot of the excitement is in the surprise but there we are.

Anyway, yesterday deigned to play with the form for a bit (showing them in make-up, sometimes interviewing them live backstage) but for once they had an opening night twist that lived up to the hype, partly because it had never been done before (Willis suggested on air that “they’d wanted to do it for years but were too scared”) and partly because it was basically the result that everyone (well, most people) wanted.

Viewers were given two minutes to vote on the app to pick five people to face a “devious twist”, where they might be rewarded or punished and it would effect their time in the house, also hinting that for one of them their time (they’ve gone big on the Timebomb theme which they’ll forget after a fortnight, but I digress) might be up. The five people selected, they went out into the garden and had to pick one of five differently coloured “timebombs” to stand behind. One by one the housemates were asked to pull the pin – the first contestant won three weeks of immunity, the second housemate has to nominate face to face throughout his entire stay in the house. The third player gets a personal luxury shopping budget she can use any time, even if the house fails a food task. This left two contestants left – they were told one timebomb was empty, the final one was instant eviction. They had the option to swap, they pulled the pins and BOOM! one of the more awful housemates goes just 90 minutes after arriving.

On a production level it was quite brave/stupid, effectively one HM going at random, there was a real chance that one of the more likeable characters would have gone and that would have backfired spectacularly, as it turns out it was a great telly result, and hilarious and well played by the production to have their “best bits” lined up.

We did ponder on Twitter if there was some quite clever production manipulation going on – @4randomwords (Only Connect writer and Plymouth Argyle fan Mike Turner) suggesting that early crowd favourite Jack was always going to go for the green one (which turned out to be immunity) as it’s the Argyle team colour (if you watched it you’ll note he mentioned his team about thirty times). Whereas Simon who clearly liked to be centre of attention with his vocabulary consisting of the word “SHOWBIZ!!!” was likely to go for the one in the middle.

Or possibly it really was just down to basic chance. About ten years ago we tried coining the term “situation gameshow” for reality shows like Big Brother – it didn’t catch on (it does sound a bit wanky), but it seems like a more relevant term for the show than ever, especially as the HMs are rarely allowed to just get on with it and there will always be some kind of activity laid on for them for them to react to on a daily basis.

BETTING: I am good at betting on Big Brother. Based on first night impressions…

• Look for people who look like they might have a good story arc. Joel the young Welsh Conservative politician looks like he might have an interesting journey waiting for him (and also young Welsh guys who look like a fish out of water tend to do well – see Glyn, more recently Sam who won it a few years ago).
• “Bad boy” Nick seems the anti-Joel in a way – clearly puts on a massive front but seems not very confident really underneath in a way that might prove appealing over the series. Also, he’s quite funny. Has the penalty of having to nominate face to face throughout.
• Chloe and Sarah look like decent Northern girls-next-door types. Sarah’s VT contained an above-average amount of bravado immediately betrayed by her entrance interview. Aaron seems like a nice guy as well.
• Jack (aka Pieface) is the people’s early favourite but I reckon you’d be throwing your money away – the early fave rarely wins, and I struggle to see what he’d bring to the house over ten weeks other than being a bit larger than average and having an accent.
• The lads Danny and Cristian, almost inevitably the more awful one will end up getting an early comeuppance, the other will float to the final where they’ll finish fourth.
• If I’m putting money on who will be the first evicted by the public proper, my money would be on Adjoa whose VT was a bit try hard.

We’ll probably continue to watch Bit On The Side as and when though.

I’m going to open up a private room about 8pm.

I’m hoping (although this is the first time I’ve done this so…) that if you go online -> Friends and Rivals and then find me you’ll have the option to join my room. There will likely be a limit of 12 people (which is about what previous tournies have had), if it’s full and spaces open up I will get on Twitter and let you know.

You will find this MUCH EASIER if we’re Wii Friends first – BrigBother (go to your friends list and add me) – I will check around 7:45pm for requests, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it when we start racing, so if you’re intending to come and play DO IT NOW before you forget. You will need both DLC packs – if you’ve not downloaded then DO IT NOW before you forget. If you’ve bought the second DLC pack it should start downloading if you boot up MK8 if you haven’t done so already.

There will be voice chat in between races, you can turn it on or off with your – button.

If the worst comes to the worst I’ll set up a tournament last minute, but the point of this is so we can all race together without splitting up. I’ll have my iPad open with Twitter running, so follow @bothersbar for updates.

I’m aware that Nintendo have decided to crash my party with a Splatoon demo at 8pm, we’ll still be going until about half nine so feel free to join us after.