I was going to write about new Korean Netflix show The Influencer this afternoon, but I’ve just been hit with the news that the host, actor and producer Patrice Laffont died this morning two weeks shy of his 85th birthday so I’ll save it for the weekend (it’s good).

We of course knew him best as the host of Fort Boyard during the 1990s. As with many long-running shows, you probably liked the era you grew up with it the best, and for the 13-year-old me chancing across it on TV5, Patrice and Cendrine will probably always be the show’s most iconic pairing. There was palpable excitement at the prospect of the two of them reuniting to take on the Fort as one of two 35th anniversary specials set to be broadcast later in the year, even if there is always going to be a question mark on what sort of games you could expect an 84 year-old to be playing. That episode when it goes out will, I expect, be poignant.

But of course there is more to his work than a decade hosting Fort Boyard, alongside his film and theatre acting work, we’ll know him also as the original long-time host and eventually producer of Des Chiffres et Des Lettres, host of French Pyramid/Password mash-up Pyramide and a rather surprising turn (until someone told us of his love of card games) as the dealer/host of a poker tournament show on French channel D8.

Here’s the legendary episode from 1997 where pan-European boyband World’s Apart took on the fort mainly in English:

Edit: The 35th anniversary special episode he is a contestant in has been moved up to next Wednesday night (14th August), a documentary tribute is set to go out in September.

EXTREMELY exciting news this evening, TV Zone reporting ITV have ordered 2×75 minute episodes of You Bet! to be hosted by Stephen Mulhern and Holly Willoughby to standard Twitter presenter choice ennui. But I mean look, revamp the classic theme and the “da-da-DA-duh-DA” clock music correctly and it’s a home run, surely. This isn’t new territory for Mulhern, he hosted off-brand You Bet! knock-off Go For It! on ITV almost a decade ago which was OK but nobody remembers.

A couple of interesting points to pick up from the article. Notably it’s just two episodes, so how they put this out will be interesting – the German show is one huge annual event TV show these days so it will be interesting to see if they go down that route – or even Xmas and New Year possibly?

Also interesting is that along with the classic (towards the end) format of the audience voting and celebs getting points for correctly predicting with the winning celeb winning money for charity and the losing celeb having to do a forfeit, they’re adopting the “Wettkonig” from latter day Wetten Dass?, where the audience votes for the most impressive bet at the end of the show and they’ll be going home with £10,000.

Anyway we’re quite looking forward to this. Intrigued to see where they film it, it’s going to need to be a studio that can have do a bit of scale I think.

The Answer Run with Jason Manford is coming later in the month to BBC1 afternoons and here’s the press release. Contestants swipe to place things into A or B categories to build up money which they’ll play for in an endgame (i.e. it’s Tinder: The Quiz Show).

As we can see, Manford has done a Full Mulhern with his pose choice here, although we’re disappointed he’s ditched the striking casual look bought about by Unbeatable. Also we’re presuming this is a quiz show, but he’s not holding a question card in an unforgivable piece of PR shot madness. Shorthand is shorthand for a reason guys!!!!

I missed this tweet a few days ago, I suspect many readers will be interested.

Sad tonight to hear about the passing of legendary Gladiators referee John Anderson at the age of 92. Amongst other things like training the Glads, his stewardship of the role, with his instantly recognizable booming voice and no-nonsense attitude, was a massive part in setting the tone of the original show that made it the success it was with the public.

Thanks. The Sun reporting that ITV have bought the rights to Australian format The Summit, which of course is being described as The Traitors meets SAS, because everyone in TV is lazy and not worth your time. It’s had two series in Australia where it has done mediocrely and will be launching in the US in October, in a style that my Discord correspondents suggests is a bit weird, episode 1 starting after and NFL game on September 29th and episode two on October 16th. If there’s one thing I know about endurance events it’s the value of inertia and momentum.

In it, a group of people climb a mountain carrying (according to The Sun) £500,000 between them. If people drop out that share of the money is gone, but variously there are vote outs, and that money is kept and redistributed. Getting to the top means getting a share of the money, but if they don’t get there in time they lose. Edit: I’m being told by people who watched it voted out money isn’t safe either.

Deadline for applications is 20th September, if you fancy it. This link came up quite recently on the Discord, everything except the title matches up to the information, we’re 99% confident it’s for The Summit, but under a different title to throw you off.

We quite like endurance quests so we’ll keep an open mind on this one – we’ve not watched any of the Australian original. Also thanks to ITV for giving us something to talk about in these lean times.