Broadcast reporting ITV Be is going to be shut down with its hit shows moving to ITV2, and the channel is going to become ITV Quiz, playing quiz and game shows “akin to a FAST channel”.

Quite interesting, it will presumably cost pennies to run if its not going to have any of its own commissions. Does anyone watch much of the FAST channels on ITVX? Is this just going to have The Chase, Tipping Point and Celebrity Catchphrase on a loop or will it be more interesting than that? Is that American BBC quiz FAST channel still going and has it added anything interesting in the last year?

Edit: Sounds like U&Dave’s Silence is Golden starts on May 5th, where an audience must keep silent as comics try and make them laugh to win a dwindling share of £250,000. This will need to hit the ground running early, Last One Laughing UK has been a big hit and the timing makes the comparisons inevitable, unfairly or not (this was revealed and recorded last year).

Looks like we’re getting many of the hits, the Zombie Infection game, what I originally thought was Middle Race but might on closer inspection be actually be Scam Horse Race (with some other animals), elements of some sort of flash-forward/flash-back at the end, phwoar at the set (although it does look, dare I say, a bit more cramped than the original).

Our season commentaries for the original seasons of The Genius a decade ago are still up on our Specials Board, if you are that way inclined. We will inevitably be chatting about this and other Brain Survival Spring games in the Discord under #geniuschat.

Well fans of the genre are about to be spoilt – already we have the surprisingly good LG Genius corporate rip-off Life’s Game on Youtube, adverts for ITV’s Genius Game have started going out – rumours suggest an April 30th start but we’ll see and this morning the trailer and date for Devil’s Plan 2: Death Room on Netflix has dropped – May 6th, and it looks goooooood.

The Devil’s Plan is a kind of legally distinct sequel to The Genius, made by the director of the original and some of the staff. The first series had lots of great moments, even if it was sometimes a bit more ponderous. And now it looks like we’re going to have Genius vs Devil’s Plan at the same time, which we wondered might happen when we knew DP2 was Q2.

Got To Get Out is the new Glenn Hugill produced show for Hulu starting next week (so no idea if this will be officially viewable in the UK anywhere) where a mixture of reality celebs and non-celebs try and escape a house as a money clock counts up to a million dollars. It looks quite fun from the trailer, although the trailer also details a major spoiler which suggests episode 3/4 will probably be worth a watch so you might as well not bother with any of the other ones. Also it occurs the reason it looks quite fun is because it was quite fun when it was basically Jailbreak with Craig Charles on Channel 5 about 25 years ago.

This was show piloted recently as The Winner Takes It All and we were wondering who the “top comedians” fronting it were. Well I don’t know if they did the pilot, although it makes sense, but it’s Mel and Sue which feels like a bit of a choice for a big Saturday night entertainment show but we’ll see, I suppose it’s been years since their version of The Generation Game.

A cohort of 40 in studio players every week answer survey based questions to win high-value prizes, ending with one lucky winner going home with £1m by the end of the series. However, the show is promising to be HIGHLY INTERACTIVE and you’ll be able to play along at home for a chance to win the prizes yourself, including that £1m grand finale prize. Whether these prizes will break the curse of the interactive app, where you get all excited in week one only to not bother because it’s effort for episode two onwards remains to be seen – and as there are prizes involved, it also remains to be seen how robust it is againist possible cheating and system gaming.

It’s being produced by Hello Dolly of Limitless Win fame, but it’s being co-financed by ITV and the People’s Postcode Lottery. Not the first advertiser-financed show (although I suppose they all are), The Krypton Factor reboot about 15 years ago and Cooking With The Stars were made with Sage and M&S money, and the Postcode Lottery has sponsored loads of Dutch shows (Miljoenenjacht being the most famous one) so it will be interesting to see how fruitful this ends up being and how much more of a thing it might be going forward.