If you missed The Rock’s physical game last year you will be able to watch it on Netflix in the UK from next weekend – the games and set are genuinely impressive looking, but I hope you like inspirational backstory because there’s a looooot of it:

It’s a shame then that it feels like so much of it feels like it’s given over to each contestant’s “inspiring” backstory, over the course of the two hours you’ll see up to 16 video pieces (for whatever reason, one game was just a highlights package in the second of last night’s tournaments). If you add to that the 20% of the show given over to Dwayne Johnson being just a great guy, that means we have a frustrating situation where the key centrepieces, the events, begin to feel a bit like unwelcome guests at their own party.

Me talking about The Titan Games last year

This probably isn’t accidental timing, the second series of the show begins tomorrow (Monday) night on NBC and it appears to have become a pro-am tournament, with the winners of each of the best-of-three match-ups taking on a professional athlete on Mount Olumpus to become the reigning Titan. Here’s a ten minute sneak peek:

Edit: Or at least there was one, The Rock’s made it private.

Here’s something really interesting we were alerted to by gordygeorge88 on Twitter, a full episode of University Challenge‘s Pass the Baton game from the mid-80s, a curio and no mistake. I hadn’t seen this since I was about five or six. In these dying days of the show’s run, games were split across two episodes – the first played by traditional rules, the second by these ones.

So many missed questions – the advantage of the team based quiz is it only requires one of eight people to know the answer as opposed to one in two, and whatsmore many of the questions will be asked outside the expertise of at least one of the contestants. It seems unusual for someone to be able to start halfway through a lap and end the round after just one question. Also, for the effort involved in filling the baton, the team bonus question seems a bit undervalued. Also the highest loser’s scoreboard is “highest average” but seems to just be across the two shows, so what’s the point in that then? And why is one of them a .6?

In the meantime here’s a fun Wikiquiz on gameshow themes open competitively until Monday. 46/50 is your score to beat, although I’m kicking myself on at least one of the ones I missed.

Premieres at 9pm.

Join Ben plus special guests development executive Phil Treddinick and Friends Of The Bar Laura Conlon and Ash The Bash as 100 are whittled down to 40 – eight from each decade group. Did your faves make it?

If you watch live at 9pm, Ben should be around in the chat.

At 8:15pm after Britain’s Got Talent.

Which of the several remade gameshows will they open with? Only by looking at the freely viewable ITV Press Centre website after next Tuesday will you find out.

DO NOT CLICK THE FREELY AVAILABLE LINK UNTIL NEXT TUESDAY. PLEASE CHECK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF.

…bringing you the latest episode of The People’s Ben Justice’s Top 100 UK Gameshows of All Time. It was hoped to go up today but may be a bit late. Edit: Rescheduled to Thursday.

In the meantime, here is some music.

Do-do-do-DO-do-do! Woah!

With no 50/50 Podcast to speak of, we thought we’d debrief last week’s Internet Event of the Century (if you didn’t watch it you can find it here). In this action packed 90 minute video find out the game design processes, the technical challenges of bringing this all on screen (it’s much harder than you might anticipate), did anything go wrong behind the scenes, would Dan and or Nick have done anything differently in retrospect and what was the program David used for his dice rolls? And all whilst I look slightly more hot with an extra week’s beard growth.

Surely it’s time David Bodycombe’s Riddles of the Sphinx got a reprint.

There are a couple of edit points towards the end, amusingly we had more issues doing this follow-up video than we had on the night itself. Incredible.