Happy New Year, we will have a Show Discussion post for Lingo on Friday 1st Jan and the Poll of the Year 2020 will open Saturday 2nd.

In the meantime we pointed out a little while ago that Amazon Prime Video UK have added Aussie Survivor season 3, soon after joined by seasons 4 and 5, but they’ve basically added loads of US reality games from that period where big fun stuff was coming out and took a bit of effort to watch, stuff like Wipeout, Beauty and the Geek (plus Aussie versions!), Fear Factor et al, fingers crossed for Solitary at some point and DOUBLE fingers crossed they’ll get the rights to all of US Survivor in the future as well.

Don’t worry about the new Tier restrictions, this bar will stay open for the forseeable. This post is going to be pinned to the top – a signpost of sorts, so you can jump to relevant things that will be going up over the next week or so. You should use this post for general comments for the period. And don’t forget we have a Discord!

• Celebrity The Celebrity Wall Versus Celebrities Thursday 6:55 BBC1 – Probably not worth its own post, but there’s the link to the original Show Discussion post.
• Epic Gameshow: The Price is Right Christmas Special – Thursday at 8:15 on ITV. No point starting a separate post for this, use the linked Epic Gameshow Show Discussion one.
• One Night In Hamleys – Thursday C4 9pm. Likely to be of interest even if not specifically a competitive format.
• Miranda’s Game With Showbiz Names – Thursday, BBC1, 9:45pm. Kevin Hart’s Celebrity Game Face comes to the UK, and now it has Miranda.
• Boyard Land – France 2 have basically given up on this, burning three eps this week in the afternoons on Xmas Day, Boxing Day and the 27th, and further episodes next weekend. Pity, quality of life improvements abound for series two but it’s just not taken off.
• The Celebrity Wheel With Celebrities – Friday (Xmas Day) 6pm, BBC1 Not sure how different this will feel with celebs in the middle as well! Show Discussion post linked.
• Blankety Blank – Friday, 7pm, BBC1 – Filling a space in the Christmas Day schedule.
• The Story of SM:tv Live – Saturday, ITV, 9:25am – Note the am here! Likely to be of interest. Hopefully lots of Dec shouting at kids. Note this is repeated the following day at 8PM for those who can’t be bothered to set their alarms!
• The Masked Singer S2 – Saturday, ITV, 7pm – Not sure this is going to be worth a Show Discussion post – we know what the format is and it’s unlikely to be greatly different, it’s more fun playing along on Twitter or whatever anyway. Here’s the link to the original Show Discussion.
• Big Fat Quiz Of The Year – Saturday, 9:05pm, C4 – usually an entertaining enough watch.

What else is likely of interest across the next week? We’ll open up the Wie Is De Mol? 2021 page in due course, and The Poll of The Year will open January 2nd.

Edit: WIDM page is open!

Seismic news, although if you read the Stool Pigeon the other day there was certainly a hint that it may have been coming.

Great to see Pointless and House of Games will Still Be Things, intrigued to see what’s going to happen to shows he’s been producing like Cats Does Countdown, Would I Lie to You? and the like.

In other news, I had no idea Bradley Walsh’s How To Win At Gameshows was on last night on ITV, we answered a few questions during the initial planning stages of the doc when they were trying to work out what it was, I hope it was useful.

Something that ‘dropped’ on Netflix this last week that might be of interest to punters, Alice in Borderland, an eight episode Japanese mystery drama based on a popular manga. It’s a little bit like Cube, a little bit like 3% and little bit like Lost (the mysterious island TV show rather than the reality show). It’s also *quite* violent, it’s rated 15 but I reckon it’s on the cusp of an 18 really.

Loser Arisu and his loser friends are larking about and hide from the police in a toilet stall. Suddenly all the lights go out, and when they come back they discover that (almost) everyone in Shibuya has suddenly disappeared, the streets are deserted, all they see is a screen light up telling them in which direction the Game Arena is located. Without spoiling too much, everyone in this world is forced to play cruel and unusual games – winning a game earns days on a “visa” where they don’t have to play, but not playing means laser death from above and losing games mean death by other means. What are they prepared to do to stay alive, and how will this affect them? And what IS going on?

Some of the games have entertaining Mole-like elements, but none of the “a-ha!” moments are as strong as something in Liar Game, for example (please buy up Liar Game Netflix, thanks). Still if you, like me, are a fan of This Sort Of Thing and you have the stomach for some exploding bodies then it’s well worth a watch.

I need to get round to watching the second series of Kakegurui at some point as well, which is something else you might enjoy.