…this makes me quite sad.

That being said, I’m intrigued to find out what was cut from the first episode of Solitary 4.0, as my problems with it (entertaining as it still was) went a bit deeper than what may or may not have been cut out by rubbish channel execs. Namely that the make-yourself-sweat task shouldn’t have eliminated someone, because Solitary isn’t about elimination by workload, it’s about elimination by giving up. Also whilst I approve of the strategy element (and indeed, Solitary‘s increasing strategy elements) of the unappetizing drinks treatment (contestants picked at random to combine two foodstuffs to form a drink but have to drink it themselves before everybody else has to do the same), my gut feeling is that strong stomach treatments should come mid-series, when you can play on the contestants’ hunger. Series opening treatment should be something more visual, I think.

In opther news, it is very important to take a minute to note that TV Ark have the titles for top army gameshow Combat, with Emelyn Hughes and Anneka Rice up right now.

Via two lines on Broadcast, then better via Quizzlestick, via The Independent, on shows Channel 4 have lined up to replace Big Brother:

Bellamy talks often of “the national conversation”. He hopes it will be reflected in The Drop, the first commission from the newly-appointed Channel 4 head of entertainment Justin Gorman. Ironically, this is a show made by Endemol, the production company synonymous with Big Brother. Bellamy plans to screen the hour-long show across six nights of the week. “It is live event meets game show,” he says. “I’m very interested in taking different genres and colliding them.” Contestants are given £1m, but must answer 10 questions or watch it all disappear through a series of trap doors.

The format, untried in international television markets, contains “a whole bunch of smart interactive thoughts, twists and turns” and allows viewers to be rewarded for questions which fool the contestants.

So it’s a live million quid quiz, not seen since the glory days of The Vault all those years ago, with added physical set element and where the people set the questions like The People Versus. I’m not generally speaking a fan of shows where you get a top prize that gets reduced as a penalty, because it gives people the opportunity to switch off if it’s not going so well – it doesn’t feel like risk even if they dress it up to look like risk. We’ll see.