Jommett on Jommett SMACKDOWN

By | November 17, 2023

We love it when this happens! Tune in on Sunday night for Hot Dommett Action as Joel Dommett hosts The Masked Singer I’m a Celebrity Special on ITV1 at 7:30pm – 9pm whilst also hosting Survivor on BBC1 8-9pm. It’s like the Joel Dommett multiverse. Who will win (The Masked Singer will)?

In living memory we had Craig Charles host Moneybags whilst also hosting his Radio 6 show. Are there other examples? My earliest memory of This Sort of Thing was Jools Holland’s Hootenanny shocking the nation as it was revealed it wasn’t live, as he was playing live on a New Year’s Show, probably in Edinburgh, on BBC1.

Schatzsuche

By | November 14, 2023

If you’ve nothing better to do tonight join us on the Discord as we’ll be watching the final ep of the series of Joko und Klaas vs Pro 7, but tonight is extra special as it’s also the final of a competition they’ve been running all week that’s a little bit like Masquerade, Schatzsuche, a briefcase with €1m has been hidden somewhere in Germany, all week they’ve been putting out vignettes, each one cryptically leading to three digit numbers which when put together make a co-ordinate. The first one to find the briefcase and open it wins the money.

The final puzzle will be going out before J&KvsP7 tonight, which is pre-recorded, but they will be cutting live to the suitcase if anyone finds it and wins the money during the broadcast. If not, Klaas’ chat vehicle Late Night Berlin will also be live tonight as the search continues, or if it has been found, to chat to the winner and explain the clues.

Could we have a mass punch-up on live TV tonight as people fight to get the case? I look forward to finding out!

Here’s last night’s:

Edit: and here’s the live reveal!

007: Road To A Million

By | November 9, 2023

Streaming on Amazon Prime from 10th November

Brian Cox (not that one) invites nine couples to try and win a million pounds completing missions around the world, the completion of each one ending up with a briefcase with a question in it – get the question right, bank the money, travel to the next mission. Fail and it’s game over. On paper looks a bit like a modern revamp of The Phone but with an award winning Shakesperian actor in charge rather than Emmett Scanlan off of Hollyoaks.

It’s an unusual use of the James Bond IP, but we bloody love a good adventure game show and it feels like a while since the last good one happened. Let us know what you think in the comments.

I’m a dog now, I’m a dog now

By | November 7, 2023

An excellent picture to wake up to.

The Devil’s Plan 2 confirmed by Netflix’s Korean TwiX.

The first series was great fun, if perhaps didn’t hang together *quite* as well as the original show, ticking a lot of the The Genius‘ boxes whilst adding some interesting meta-elements coming from living on set for a week – presumably these meta-elements will have to be changed for series two so we’re excited to see what happens.

Also can we try and manifest an official release for Spacecowboy’s soundtrack, or at least the opening and closing themes which go extremely hard.

Edit: English press release.

The stench of failure

By | November 5, 2023

We don’t yet know how Survivor is doing in the consolidateds – we should find out how the opening weekend did on Monday (it seems to be hanging around 10th in the trending list), but having said for weeks before the show starting that the post-Strictly weekend timeslot was quite a big misstep, well it’s not giving us a great deal of satisfaction in being right. There’s an extremely real chance that tonight’s episode might have an overnight that starts with a 1.

The irony of a show predicated on strategy being done over by the strategy of management is not lost on me. There was no need for the stakes to be so high – it didn’t need trailing for months beforehand during big primetime events. The papers are saying it cost £30m to make – I don’t know how much I buy that, the tariff for This Sort Of Thing will be between £500-750k per episode, maybe a bit more can be negotiated, £30m that suggests they’re paying £2m an episode. Have you seen the size of the Tribal Council firepit? The original show cost £10m and and that’s when there was money to throw about.

The sad thing is is that the show, or at least the bones of it, isn’t that bad. It’s not. I can understand the lighter tone being divisive (mainly split along tribal “have you seen the American one” lines). I think it needed to highlight Characters Doing Antics a lot earlier, we don’t have an awful lot to grab onto even three episodes in. Everyone’s a bit “polite BBC” thus far. They’ve picked good challenges, which clearly they’ve made the show’s centerpiece, they haven’t gone overboard on twists and the ones they have picked so far have simmered quite well even if it’s more through implication than conversation.

Unfortunately for the Beeb, there are no good options for it right now – short of pushing it later into the evening so something more appropriate can ride the Strictly wave (Blankety Blank, much more suited, but with limited episodes left). They’re not going to drop McIntyre in there – early next year they’ll have 11 episodes of Big Show and The Wheel to go with 11 episodes of Gladiators and that feels like a much more successful schedule, they’re not going to want to disrupt that. I don’t know what else the Beeb have planned for Saturday nights when Blankety Blank finishes. And they can’t just move it to Wednesday/Thursday nights like it probably always should have been because it feels like The Traitors will be launching there soon.

They would, I’m sure, like to do a second series, mainly in a “this wasn’t a commissioning mistake” capacity, but even if they did schedule a second one correctly, the show’s got the stench of failure about it now and that’s really hard to get back from. Twenty years ago Survivor outrated Big Brother, but BB was seen as the big success. The more things change.