We haven’t had a round-up for a while

By | January 25, 2011
29 Comments

Right, new content alert – I’ve done an iDevice review for Lingo HD. It’s an unofficial game, but it actually plays the word game element quite well so have a look. Will try and do an Amazing Race app review at the weekend.

Meanwhile, the Digital Spy forums are suggesting that ITV have bought the rights to Zodiak’s popular-in-Denmark Sing if You Can, also known as Twist and Shout. In this show, celebrities try to sing whilst being distracted in a number of wacky, zany and painful ways like being lowered into a tub of ice, having dodgeballs thrown at them, that sort of thing. Saw the promo film for it a while ago, it has many of the elements of a potential hit (Celebrities! Singing! Mild peril!) but it doesn’t feel like a potential hit, shall we say. Make of that what you will. Edit: I don’t know where I got the idea it’s big in Denmark, but is has apparently aired on a minor channel in France. And also Turkey.

Also TNA Wrestling is coming to Challenge when it launches on Freeview in February. Are they going to call it Sky Challenge? Anyway, this is obviously Sky moving Bravo’s popular programmes across, it will be interesting not only to see how well it does but also what other plans Sky have in store for the channel – in theory they’re willing to throw some money at it, and it’s been boring for years so it wouldn’t take much to feel like a meaningful shake-up.

Appropos of nothing, despite my expectation that Fort Boyard would be axed in France following a couple of poor rating seasons, it doesn’t appear to have actually happened yet, and Olivier Minne has just signed to become a France 2-only celeb. Hmm.

Board of Non-Excitement 23rd-29th January 2010

By | January 23, 2011
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There’s really really not much on this week – Wipeout‘s both Winter and Total if you’re into that sort of thing (Thursday on ABC and Saturday at 6pm on BBC1 respectively), and a new eight-part run of The Million Pound Drop – LIVE!!! begins Friday at 10pm and also Saturday for the next four weeks, just don’t forget that we’re legally obliged to call it The BRILLIANT Pound Drop now, because it’s just so brilliant.

To make up for a non-exciting week on screen, it’s a more exciting week off screen – I’m hoping to have not one, not three, but TWO recording reports for you this week, one of which is one of the two exciting pilots for Hold On To Your Seat!, the other of which is Pointless which I am very excited about. So look out for those.

Meanwhile next Sunday night is the second edition of the world’s most exciting series of poker, the Bother Series of Poker. Last week I thrashed all oncomers, and I hope to do so again next week – it was nice to see so many new faces, so don’t feel intimidated and join in the fun. Last year’s winner Andrew Smith videoed it and put together a highlights package of sorts and here it is:

Details for Game two are up on The BSOP Page.

Hercule Poirot

By | January 22, 2011
9 Comments

I know “fun” and “Belgium” aren’t two words that tend to go in the same sentence, but I felt it about time there was a little feature on De Slimste Mens ter Wereld, a very entertaining quiz show from the country that bought us The Mole, and didn’t bring anybody Blokken.

They’ve recently been doing a sort of Champion of Champions series on Belgian telly with top contestants from the past ten years.

I think this would work quite well in the BBC2 Pointless slot. You could probably have Alexander Armstrong hosting and Richard Osman as the judge as well, then they could be on all year!

You Can’t Play Jack…

By | January 19, 2011
21 Comments

…or can you?

Doubtless you’ve gathered there’s a new You Don’t Know Jack! coming out in the States on February 8th – for the uninitiated, YDKJ is the mildly amusing outrageous trivia gameshow video game. You get asked a bunch of (in the main) quite clever questions of both high and pop cultures (frequently both at once) and get called a div if you get them wrong. There was a UK version with Paul Kaye (Dennis Pennis) hosting and written by popular studenty-comics at the time. It was nicely done and it was a cult success, although not as much as it was in Germany where they did several, and in the US this will be the seventh main game after a lengthy hiatus. There was even a TV show of it.

Well Alex Buzzerblog has a video of the new game in action which I can’t actually watch properly at the moment because my current computer is without sound, which removes a lot of the point. But what if you did want to play it in the UK? Culturally, you’d still be able to “get” about 70%-75% of the references in my experience (questions about US advertising and US sports may be lost on you), unfortunately it’s probably not going to be released over here.

But never fear, because if you did still want to play you probably still can – Amazon.com will export it over here for about $50 total.

Now, the PC and DS versions are going to be region free, of this I am 99% confident. Most PS3 games are also region free, so you could probably import that without worry. I’ve ordered the XBox 360 version as a large number (but not all) of XBox games are region free and I’ve got an XBox – fingers crossed, I will let you know when it arrives (the fact that Amazon will export it to our territory is probably a good sign). The Wii version almost certainly won’t be region free so import with caution.

This is only advice don’t take it as gospel although as ever I’m putting my money where my mouth is so if you can hold on wait for my copy to come through before committing yourselves.