• Wie is De Mol All Stars set to begin September 5th. This was promised as a twenty year bonus celebration, a bit of surprise they aren’t holding this back until next year since you’d assume COVID would make a new series in January quite difficult. But! WIDM September-November and then WIDM January-March feels a bit quick, I wonder if the’ll hold off WIDM ’21 until next Autumn going forward.
• Weren’t we meant to be getting those unaired ten episodes of Cash Trapped in July? Those poor contestants have been in their boxes for months.

Worker Bee, a subsidary of Endemol which was recently bought up by Banijay is looking for contestants for Surviv Wilderness (Working Title).

Or you can apply on eTribez. “We would like to remind anyone applying that we are unable to reveal…” it’s Survivor “at this time. It will be disclosed only to successful applicants.”

Admittedly it might not be so caveat emptor – that’s quite a stingy top prize. But we know there have been rumblings for a while, and there was a contestant call out for a similar show before COVID happened that sounded exactly like it, so.

Amazon Prime in the UK. Just series four for now.

The effort that’s gone into this, Russian university students did their own version of Fort Boyard about five years ago, sticking reasonably closely to their duel format of about ten years ago but with a couple of more modern additions. I really like some of the ideas here – dolphin in the attic (probably could use the attic and the basement for more), the way they’ve done Pere Fouras’ watchtower, their version of ‘equilibre a deux’ is surprisingly tense for being about a metre off the ground. The night mission goes on a bit, but still. You might need to turn subs on.

The Sun reporting that The Cube will have a seven-figure top prize (i.e. £1m).

To be honest this almost feels like too much money and at the very least is going to require some format reworking.

It’s not as simple as “add more games to the ladder” – if people were scared enough to risk £20/50k before, that isn’t going to change (and if the format hasn’t changed at all you won’t be getting to the upper reaches anyway), and you risk the ultimate problem in money ladder gameshows: Boringly Trending Towards The Mean. And you can’t just keep it at seven games and start at £10,000 (or make the early games too easy), that feels like money too easily earnt. More lives? I think there’s a good aesthetic to starting with nine they won’t want to mess with.

One solution suggested on Twitter was jump from £100,000 to £1m. THAT would lead to some intriguing decisions if the contestant gets that far.

Another suggestion is they go The Whole 19 Yards route, where failure meant dropping a level rather than dropping to zero.

I wonder if they might go down the route of recent Millionaire and install a movable safety net? Let’s not forget when The Cube was piloted all those years ago it had a “bank” feature, so it’s not out of the question.

BBC Press reporting that Michael McIntyre’s set to front a new BBC primetime show called The Wheel which involves members of the public trying to win big money with celebrity experts on hand. It sounds like it’s set on a big ferris wheel, which is quite a clever way to get round social distancing.

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