Thanks to Setsunael for tipping this off for us, there’s a Fort Boyard spin-off set in an abandoned theme park happening this year. Here’s the translation of the story:

It’s been more than a year since the teams of the ALP production company, directed by Alexia Laroche-Joubert, secretly work on this new concept, inspired by the 30th anniversary of the show.
This one will be entirely built around the previous life of Father Fouras (incarnated by Yann Le Gac), that is before 1989, when he was not still in the lookout, nor in the entrails of Fort Boyard. 
In the imaginary of production, the famous character with long white beard has made career as director of an amusement park, left abandoned since his departure. 
The idea is to reopen it today.

An old disused amusement park near Paris
This new story will plunge us into a completely different world. 
Exit the stone cells of the fort, ALP has found an old disused amusement park near Paris. It will serve as a film set in early autumn. 
The production has imagined new characters specific to this creation, but kept the fundamentals: candidates and tests. 

Les Parisien

This is both a) exciting and b) worrying.

Cast your mind back ten years to 2009, the show’s 19th anniversary (which is also its twentieth series). They went big on it, new graphics, new music, Eva Longoria as a contestant and about 40 daily best-of compilations. It felt a bit like overkill and the numbers divebombed.

This year for the 30th series (29th year, cough) it looks like they’re going all-out again. We have this exciting spin-off show. It sounds like there’s going to be a live discussion show after most of the episodes this year – does anyone really want three hours plus on a Saturday night? They’ve already started the celebrations, Fort Boyard was a location on La Carte aux Tresor this past week.

Still it looks like they’re pulling out the stops. Patrice Laffont, the show’s first host, is coming back as a character with a time machine to play old tests. And it sounds like they might have a proper A-List celeb playing this year, but they’re keeping their cards close to their chest.

They start filming next month for presumably a June broadcast. Summer’s coming back, but I hope they aren’t watering down the brand too much.

Most Fridays are pretty good, but *this* Friday is not only Good but Excellent, as Actual Real TV Developer Ben Justice counts down shows 50-41 in his Top 100. Some surprises in this one, pleasant or otherwise!

News this morning of Speedgate, the world’s first AI (with a lot of human help) created sport. Maybe it will become the next Tenball, who knows?

So this begs the question (ding!) which game or quiz show most feels like it’s been put together by AI? We’ve not disparagingly compared a show to Quizzlestick for a while.

In other news: FOTB Ash the Bash and this quiz show Twitch stream Wednesdays will tonight be taking on Duel from 8pm. This will be live but not interactive like previous games The Wonderwall and 1 vs 100 as far as I’m aware. Do check it out.

That’s right, the eighth and final series of Game of Thrones started last night so here is the best video we could find of nearest thematically appropriate show Ejector Seat, a show with quite a good idea that manages to stuff up its own punchline. SPOILERS.

The show’s only five years old, you can read what we thought about it at the time here.

He’s back! Yes, after a week unsuccessfully negotiating Luna’s fee with her agent, Actual Real TV Developer Ben Justice is back with positions 60-51, the top of his bottom. Some really interesting choices this time around (although we’ve said that about the last four vids, I hope the Top 50 isn’t going to be boring!).