Saturday, 5:50pm,
BBC1

Goodness me, this has put us through the ringer a bit. We really really want this to be good, but surely health and safety in 2023/4 will make this a completely pointless reboot. Fear not! At least two injuries happen. The Sheffield arena isn’t as big as the Birmingham one. But look at it! It looks great, like somebody’s just updated the 90s one but with beautifully metallic blues and purples everywhere, the only time it looks like a smaller venue than the original from all the audience pictures is during the Eliminator. Bradley Walsh, though. But Bradley competed in the original and met his wife who was the leader of G-Force, the cheerleaders, so it’s not like there’s no connection.

Alright we’re not getting Pyramid. Or Atlaspheres. Or Pendulum. But there is a new event where you have to run up and down narrow criss-crossing beams 30 ft in the air. We still don’t know how high The Wall is compared to the original. We don’t even know if there’s a prize underpinning the tournament, which feels like a bit of a step back if not. We know they’ve kept the iconic theme tune, but I hope the rest of the music package is suitably fitting.

Mainly, I think scheduling a big expensive show such as this at 5:50pm might end up being a bit of an issue, the audience around at the time is rather more limited than it would be at 6:30pm, for example, but then Wheel of Fortune almost managed 4m last week so who is to say?

Let us know what you think in the comments!

This period’s Netflix Not The Traitors reality show, The Trust: A Game of Greed, begins tomorrow (Jan 10th), dropping four eps initially and a further four eps across the following fortnight. In it, Brooke Baldwin who was a CNN journalist invites 11 players to a villa where they will split $250,000 equally amongst themselves, which surely isn’t going to last long because that’d be a really awkward looking individual prize, but provided they all stay in the game it is theirs to keep. Unfortunately, they are going to be given opportunities to secretly vote each other out of the villa – which may or may not happen (my money’s on it happening), nobody is obliged to vote and votes that end in a tie means no elimination – and perform in challenges with prizes that benefit the group or the individual. The video shows someone holding a card with Share on it, it’s not going to end up with a multiway Close Enough Equivalent Of A Prisoner’s Dilemma is it?

I’m not sure where I’m going to find the time to watch this in what is a pretty stacked period for shows competing for my spare time, but if you watch it let us know what you thought.

Saturday, 6pm,
ITV

The double for Whisper/Sony.

And I’m afraid I think this is another one of those “shows too prosaic to work here in 2024” and it is at least fun to see the hypothesis tested, it’s not really all that interesting a game and now there’s an hour of it.

I am a little less down on this than with Jeopardy! though, it sounds like we’re getting about 15 puzzles across the hour, although many of those form part of regular triple toss-ups. For the first time we’re playing for actual money, and it sounds like there might be a very reasonable amounts flying about (and the losers get to take theirs home, I understand), £500 for all the toss-ups, the money on the Wheel increasing to a top whack of a possible £2,000 in the final bit, a prize puzzle bonus round halfway through and up to £50,000 in the endgame if they get lucky, they have at least put some thought into this. The set looks terrific and Graham Norton’s a very surprising choice of host, although what a comic is going to be able to make jokes about (“sorry, there’s no D”) I don’t know. Ultimately it is just Wheel of Fortune. Perhaps interestingly, perhaps not, there’s no co-host/letter turner. Is this the first version without one?

6pm makes it quite difficult to criticise whatever ratings it gets really, but what’s of note is that it’s pushing ratings banker Celebrity Catchphrase – usually good for the best part of 3.5m-4m overnight leading into The Masked Singer (for ref, it was doing 4.2m in +7 last January) back to 5pm. I guess the best way to work out if ITV are happy with it or not is that it lasts all six weeks at 6pm and they don’t swap them around. And of course from week 2 there’s the Ultimate 90s Off as it competes against Gladiators on BBC1.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Monday 1st Jan 5:45pm, weekdays 4pm after
ITV1

For years and years and years nerds up and down the country have gone “we want a UK version of Jeopardy!” something that’s been done three times in the past now already and I for one am glad it’s finally happening so people might shut up about it.

I don’t hate Jeopardy, not at all, but having banged the drum for “it won’t work” for years and years it would be remiss for me to change now. So here’s a list of things I think are going to annoy the ITV1 afternoon audience:

• ‘Answer’ and question. It’s just stupid.
• Jeopardy is played for thousands and thousands of dollars in the US. The top value questions here are going to be £150/300. But at least it’s a real stake and not points. Someone might lose, I don’t know, £500 on a Daily Double.
• Contestants bouncing around the middle section of categories Daily Double hunting like they’re Jeopardy professionals or something? Irritating to the average viewer in the US, come and meet ITV1’s audience!
• Smugness of host and clue writing? Come and meet ITV1’s audience!
• This is going to to be Single/Single/Double/Final, effectively 1.5x the material of the US show, but with about 2.3x the running time. Irritating pacing!

In the positive column, Stephen Fry’s a proper get and I know at least some of the clue writers and they’re talented. Also I was very wrong about the prospects of the Deal or No Deal reboot and look how that turned out. I can’t wait to see how it all goes down, they’ve given it a proper push, saving it from a planned October launch with the berthing on New Year’s Day. Let us know what you think in the comments.