Lots of stuff starting to emerge about The American Song Contest coming to NBC next year. That it’ll be awful is probably a given.

However some stuff has come out regarding the format that’s a bit more interesting.

“There will be a series of qualifying heats to determine which states and territories move forward, followed by March Madness-style semi-finals and the ultimate grand final where the winner will be crowned.”

This does not sound like the Eurovision. It does, however, sound very much like Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s extremely popular national song selection competition, but I guess that doesn’t quite have the same brand recognition.

Well this is extremely exciting, there’s ANOTHER Escape Room film coming out, but this differentiates itself from all the other films called Escape Room by being a sequel i.e. Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions.

This one’s a sequel to the big budget Sony one (“This big budget high concept film sees a group of invited strangers take on a series of escape rooms, each of which is filled with DEADLY PERIL. It’s effectively a series of set-piece rooms each with only one real puzzle in them, but it’s schlocky fun and has a variety of settings and ideas. Think a slightly less lovable Cube but with worse characters and a variety of sets.”) and looks to have been made in a similar vein, with survivors from previous games playing again whether they like it or not. The last one left itself very open to a sequel, and if it’s basically going to be like a 15-rated version of Saw, increasingly ridiculous backstory and all, then this is something I’m prepared to live with.

Edit: And speaking of escaping, Amazon Prime have three of the five seasons of Escape From Scorpion Island to watch now.

Saturday, 7:15pm (UK) 8:15 (CET),
Pro Sieben and naughty internet streaming

Yo, what are you doing this evening? Not much these days I bet! So why not join us as two celebs battle it out for €100,000 in an empty studio across fifteen mystery games, one of which will be Blamieren oder Kassieren, live on German television?

As ever we will have our Discord open for live chat and quizzing and gossip and stuff. Remember it’s a privilege not a right so behave yourselves. To avoid cutting out, we advise turning Auto-sensitivity off and setting it to -85dB or so in your settings.

To watch it would be useful to sign up for ProSieben’s catch-up service – it’s pretty simple to work out, don’t click the box if you don’t want e-mail messages. You will need to put in a proper e-mail because it will send you a confirmation. You will need some sort of VPN service to watch live.

Unfortunately we will not be streaming our chat to Youtube this time round as I’m actually busy most of the evening, and moving forward it’s likely to become Discord only as this frees up the ability for us to do cool things (like *you* not needing a VPN to watchalong, ahem). There will still be people watching and chatting along though.

Here is a lazy post where I just repost things from Twitter as I can’t be bothered to write them out again. Let’s hope for future generations Twitter never goes down, or indeed does.

First though, an excellent tweet from News Craven’s John Round which made me laugh:

Now: audiences and that.

…BUT there won’t be the usual Youtube watchalong because I’m busy. There will be the usual live chat in the Discord so feel free to join in. Musician Wincent Weiss vs actor Edin Hasanovic.

In fact I’m considering dropping the Youtube element in future and tempted to go Discord only, the main advantage being I can naughty stream the feed into the Discord without too much hassle (I won’t do that if anyone from Pro7 is reading, ahem), and the Youtube doesn’t get many viewers these days anyway. Our Free ESC Discord Watchalong worked really well, lots of people just watching on mute if they don’t want to join in.

Edit: There’s some stuff on US Small Fortune and The Cube in the comments here.