Do you wanna bet on it?

By | December 15, 2024
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Oh, how fun, a new Youtube channel from Mister Doc has been uploading some interesting old things in recent weeks but we really hit the jackpot yesterday – the very first episode of You Bet!

It is fair to say that we are not quite in imperial You Bet phase here, and looking back at it it’s amazingly weird for such a big show. Brucie coming down in a lift! The inaugural You Bet rap! The completely out of place chat show element they dropped in favour of another challenge in later series! Well I say out of place, they’re sort of aping the German show a little bit there I suppose, but it feels out of place in this context. It also doesn’t have the classic theme that we all know and love, instead the original is by Alan Lisk (who went on to do the theme from Men Behaving Badly), but you can certainly hear where the inspiration for Jonathan Sorrell’s music came from. Also it’s interesting and pleasing that there’s no attempt to hide the artifice of television here – cameras and staff in shot at every opportunity. We’re not quite in the You Bet Betsie stage, but I forgot they called the award an Oscar, can’t imagine The Academy were too thrilled with that.

This went out in February 1988 and I would have been 6, but I do distinctly remember Richard Digance’s builders vs artist challenge from when it originally went out, it’s funny the stuff you remember isn’t it?

Commitment to the bit

By | December 14, 2024
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To be clear I don’t think Pictionary is a necessary commission, although it’s nice to have a new 30 minute format for the first time in years and years, if the US one is anything to go by it’s a particularly uncrucial watch. But we will commend Mel Giedroyc’s commitment to the bit here, an old school #hostholdingaquestioncard promo shot (with extra points for pointing and facial expression) for an old-school kind of show.

Great stuff. Mel’s done this sort of thing before of course, with Draw It! on Channel 4 about a decade ago, it’s unlikely to be as piss-takey as Win, Lose or Draw in its pomp. Still though, two Christmas episodes on 23rd and 26th December, with the series starting at 2:30pm on January 6th and perhaps interestingly it will have five minutes longer to fill than the US show (after Tipping Point: Best Ever Finals at 2pm which is the sound of ITV giving up, and new 18-month-old Lingo going out at 4pm).

Show Discussion: You Bet!

By | December 6, 2024
31 Comments

Saturday 7th December 8:15pm,
Sunday 22nd December 7pm,
ITV1

It’s actually been a while since we last had a show that was a bit like You Bet! – Epic Win with Alexander Armstrong and Joe Lycett, Go For It! with Stephen Mulhern were 2011 and 2016, it was probably only a matter of time in our age of reboots that You Bet! was going to get a go, and I think certainly the expectations for this mini-series (of two shows) is high, certainly it would be near the top of many people’s “shows they’d like to get a reboot” lists, so now we get to live with the reality of You Bet in 2024. And there’s no real reason why it couldn’t do well – the yearly Wetten Dass…? specials were still absolutely huge until Thomas Gottschalk called it a day recently.

The format’s not really changed from the show’s latter Darren Day years – people write in with outrageous challenges, a panel of four celebs (one of whom is Rob Beckett as a regular) must decide whether the challenger will succeed or not, the audience votes and points are awarded to panellists who predict correctly. The celeb with the most points gets to donate £10,000 to charity, the lowest scoring celeb must do the comedy forfeit, different to the old shows but in line with the German one, the audience gets to vote on which challenge they thought was best and that challenger will also win £10,000.

Feels like there’s a lot of will to make it succeed – it took ages to film (into the early hours) so look forward to seeing them hide the diminishing audience towards the end of the show. As it stands, surely if it’s got a decent reworking of the theme and a decent reworking of the “da-da DUH-duh-dah” clock music, and success and fail tunes for the nostalgia they’re trying to tap into (and if it hasn’t something’s gone wrong somewhere) the rest of it ought to fall into place. Also it’s 75 minutes which is unusual and makes it hard to repeat, but should give it the same amount of content as the show would previously have (and some more adverts).

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Pop Culture Jeopardy

By | December 4, 2024
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#jostholdingaquestioncard

The one that might work on streaming, Pop Culture Jeopardy, is now out to watch on Prime Video and in actual fact the first three episodes are up in the UK storefront right now. New episodes go up every Wednesday, and it’s a 40-episode run.

Pop Culture Jeopardy sees teams of three battle it out in a series long tournament with $300,000 on the line for the eventual winners. New to the series is the ‘Triple Play’, a three part question/answer/clue/whatever that each person in the team has to give a response to win triple the clue’s value.

The show is hosted by the Jost with the most, Saturday Night Live‘s Colin Jost.

No word on plans for series two of UK Jeopardy, but it doesn’t sound like they’re giving it a New Year’s berthing/baptism of fire like last year. It’s been filmed.

Quiz Night Live

By | November 30, 2024
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I’m usually busy on weeknights these days so I don’t get to join in with Ash the Bash’s Twitch streams as often as I’d like, but they’re doing Quiz Night Live all weekend which if is anything like last year ought to be good fun (if the hotel Wi-Fi’s working). Twitch Link here.