It’s fair to say that a lot of our usual Belgian Mol chat has moved over to the Bother’s Bar Discord this year, for better or worse, but I don’t think you should miss this – RTV Warriors have done a follow-up interview with host of De Mol Gilles De Coster for their latest podcast. The first one a few years back was sensational – Gilles is the best – so I’m really looking forward to listening to this one.

In other news, congrats for this:

This Sunday I want to record a Plays Badly of Mario Party, now you can play it properly online, and I’m looking for participants. You will need: a Switch, a copy of Super Mario Party, and Discord for the chat. And you’ll need to be about 8-9:30ish UK.

I’ve already had some interest, but if you’re interested hit me up.

The recording will probably go out the next day.

Which means Twitter’s going to be unbearably needy for weeks.

For some reason you can vote for, quote, “Jason Manford’s Unbeatable” but not The Answer Trap in daytime. BLOODY SORT IT OUT JOEL DOMMETT.

You can vote and/or join ClubNTA (drinks aren’t free) for EXCLUSIVE ticket sales and vote alerts here, if you must.

Not much! I think there were some takeaways from last night though:

• What the bloody hell were we thinking with Amanda Holden? Forget even the content for a minute, we constantly mock and get annoyed by the vote givers building their part, thanking the hosts for a great show, explaining how beautiful world peace is and whatever and nobody gives a toss – sometimes in French! Smile, give us the result, take your money, go away again. So why are we messing about now? It comes to something when potentially the most irritating one of the night, a ten year old Greek kid, is actually the least embarrassing of the lot.
• Big Wodge Voting remains fantastic and dramatic television. Yes it is a bit on the nose for people who don’t score well, but I’m not sure there’s a way around that, if you’ve scored zero you’ve scored zero, rip the plaster off and get it done with. There *may be* an argument for going back to how it started, with the televotes being revealed from worst to best quite quickly and building up the last few, but the way they do it now accentuates the drama for when the juries and the viewers don’t agree throughout and not just at the end. There is an argument for a Pointless style tower graphic reveal.
• We’re not going anywhere. It peaked at over 8m and in TV terms cost us peanuts, £300,000 is the figure going around as our contribution. That’s about 45 minutes of a weekly drama.
• Complaining about Eurovision is the British way of enjoying Eurovision. Whilst I have enjoyed reading largely irrelevant po-faced opinions on Twitter, we don’t necessarily want to win, we want to feel hard-done-by – there will be nothing worse for us than a respectable 10th place finish. If we haven’t finished top three or bottom three, it’s not been a worthwhile Eurovision.
• It’s not really about Brexit so get over yourselves. About half the countries involved in the Eurovision aren’t in the EU anyway, they still didn’t vote for us.
• We still sent a song nobody really bought. Number 42 in the charts, apparently. Majorly flopped in the televoting. We almost scored a point from Poland’s jury.
• What do we do next year? Enya, probably.

And from various sites we have various bits of information. Thankfully, it looks like with all the testing they’re not doing the COVID everyone-stationed-at-the-treasure-room thing like last year, so should at least look like a regular series.

New treats include:

• A game where contestants must carry eggs between two kitchens through a long oven, but one of the kitchens is upside down.
• Metro Station: A new underwater game set in one of the fort’s cisterns. Looks like a key game as well.
• The Trapper’s Hut: A new character, Canadian Trapper Gary Boo, asks contestants to cross a room full of traps to reach his hut.
• A game which seems to involve transferring between two mid air ski lifts.
• A new telephone box game, this one suspended 25m above the sea, and likely to drop if they don’t get the riddle in time.
• The Bingo’ssbo – Pere Fouras’ favourite host Cyril Gossbo is back with a new show, contestants are put inside a rotating cage and have to pick out numbered balls to answer questions. They may not be alone.
• Pere Fouras is back in the watchtower, although we don’t know if this is permanent or for a new ‘bit’ – The BEEF (Bureau d’Etudes des Trials (Epreuves) du Fort), where he will try out experimental games on the contestants. This sounds a bit like it might be a bit like Patrice Laffont’s Time Machine, and it will be a different idea every week but without the scene decor.
• The prison’s been updated, and looks like a red clepsydre game now, which suggests adventure horror. It’s also been suggested it might be run twice a show.
• And Willy Rovelli’s been imprisoned after opening a speakeasy last year. He will host a new gross eating game.
• Magik and Megagaf are back, as well as Delphine Wespisier in her various roles.
• As well as the usual game updates and new Judgement and Council games.

Should be fun, and should be with us in about a month’s time along with more Toujours Plus Fort!, Fort Boyard’s Bit On The Side. Hopefully it won’t get pushed around by Euro 2020 too much. Also last year was probably the first year I can think of where I just stopped watching the series halfway through because it wasn’t really offering much so hopefully that won’t happen again.

But hold! A new season of Fort Boyard also means a new edition of the Fort Boyard video game (subtitled Toujours Plus Fort!), and this is promising an additional FIVE events over last year! Sensibly though, it sounds like you’ll be able to buy the new stuff as DLC if you have the second edition (Escape Game). Unfortunately we don’t know how much that’s going to be – £40 probably. Tentatively dated for June 24th release.

In other news, if you ever wanted to run round Fort Boyard in a Turkish free to play FPS, well apparently now you can.

Semi 1: Tuesday 8pm, BBC4
Semi 2: Thursday 8pm, BBC 4 (UK votes in this one)
Grand Final: Saturday 8pm, BBC1

It’s Eurovision week! It’s in Rotterdam! Hopefully Iceland won’t being everybody down! Or the Middle East.

Not sure what to add really, it’s more fun discussing it live on Twitter or whatever. Perhaps we should have a sweepstake as to how long the grand final interval is going to be (we’re not having a sweepstake as to how long the grand final interval is going to be).

That’s certainly how I’ll be watching the semi-finals, I’m fortunate enough with the unlocking to have a small group of people to watch the final with. If you miss that experience, Dan Peake is offering up commentary with guests on his Twitch channel for the semi-finals.

The UK entry is called Embers, it’s by James Newman, we’re not expecting it to win, although I’m going in pretty much blind so I’ve no idea what the other songs are like.