I was trying to find a Doctor Who related clip for this weekend, the show’s fiftieth anniversary (you might have noticed). I thought about Tom Baker as the Captain on Challenge’s Fort Boyard but thought that a bit too obvious, so I tried finding Sylvester McCoy on Jigsaw or Starstrider but couldn’t find any. And then! And then! I thought Timebusters because that had Patrick Troughton’s son in it but that doesn’t exist on Youtube, and then I saw someone had put up an entire episode of Virtually Impossible and thought “sod it”. Except I can’t embed it.

So here’s the opening sequence of Cyber Zone with Craig Charles off of Red Dwarf.

Challenge are doing a season of showing first episodes of things over Christmas, including Deal or No Deal, hence the headline. Pat Sharp and Melanie and Martina have recorded links for it.

A lot of it is stuff Challenge already show on their various rotations anyway, but there’s some interesting stuff in there – Treasure Hunt is promised (that’s not been seen on Challenge for years and years), Whittle is on the cards (presumably a prelude to giving it its full time run) and Blankety Blank with Terry Wogan, which I’m very much looking forward to.

In other news The Million Second Quiz isn’t dead! Yet! The important thing is the app was successful, so perhaps they should just drop the unsuccessful television show and keep the app. I note the Ryan Seacrest Demographic Hourglass (TM) was “borrowed” for the Bushtucker Trial last night on I’m a Celeb, and anyone who says it’s actually quite an old idea like you might have seen in Batman is lying.

If you remember a few weeks ago Iain Weaver had a spare ticket going for a live action zombie event game theatre thing 2.8 Hours Later. Well in a LANDMARK Fifty 50 Special you can hear a piece Iain has made about it. If you already subscribe to Fifty 50 it should be already downloaded.

• Direct Download
• Show notes
• Subscribe to Fifty 50 on iTunes
• Subscribe to Fifty 50 via RSS

You may also note a new page in the menu bar up top – with The Genius Series 2 starting soon in Korea I thought I would set up a discussion page for it similar to the Wie is De Mol? ones we’ve done the past few years. Incidentally the new series of that begins January 2nd, so we will have a discussion page for that nearer the time.

Right, I’ve not listened to this yet, it’s Candice Cannes’ Are You Ready, which seems to star Noel Edmonds and various Deal or No Deal inspired phrases:

Is it better or worse than Echobass’ You Are The Weakest Link?

All we need now is someone to do a dance tune of Bradley Walsh corpsing over Fanny Schmaler, and Alexander Armstrong doing his repetitive Pointless catchphrases.

(Hat tip Digital Spy)

On ITV1. Not a surprise I’m sure. But I always think it’s worth tipping the hat to the task team every year who continue to manage to dress up the same four challenges (eat nasty things, put your hand in nasty things, get covered in nasty things, Celebrity Cyclone) day in day out in new and innovative ways and then hilariously don’t get used properly because of the horrific bullying nature of the great British public. 13 series now, so that must be about 200 different bushtucker trials? At least there’s a bit more freedom with the celebrity chests.

I hope they’ve found a more tension filled way of revealing the votes than “it’s NOT you, it’s NOT you, it’s NOT you so it must be you.”

In other news, Pointless is reaching 4.5m on an afternoon now. That’s not far off Weakest Link and Deal or No Deal at their peak but against much stiffer competition (Paul O Grady is doing 2.3-2.4, which if it wasn’t for The Chase wouldn’t ordinarily be something to be sniffed at). Incredible, especially as it’s taken a number of years to reach that level whereas WL‘s afternoon success came quite quickly.