This is our future for the next two or three years isn’t it? ‘X… but with a traitor mechanic.’ The Chosen Ten sounds a bit like ‘The Question Jury… but with a traitor mechanic’. Was extremely tempted to title this post “Unantenmous” as an in-joke for longer-term readers.

I am absolutely fascinated by this, The CheapShow podcast are doing an episode on the original Gladiators board game and I’m trying to work out how the hell I missed this as a twelve year old or whatever. At that sort of age I’d have absolutely scoured the toys and games bit of the Argos catalogue/John Moores catalogue/Kays catalogue/whatever my Mum was using at the time and I don’t remember this at all, because if I did I would have begged to get it for Christmas.

I was well aware of the action figure game sets they would go on to release later (and they wouldn’t have held quite the same appeal for me) but even so. Even looking back at old retrospectives I don’t think I’ve seen anyone refer to it.

Have you ever been surprised to discover gameshow merch?

Or a weekend anyway.

First of all this weekend, Holger on the Discord will be streaming the latest series of Wer stiehlt mir die show? variously live on Sunday nights (from tomorrow) or delayed on Tuesday nights going forward (check the Events Tab in the Discord for dates). Who’s Stealing The Show is basically the German answer to the question “what if you gave House of Games a big budget, and had each week’s winner present the next show?” and is extremely inventive and fun, this series, which is always helmed by Joko out of Joko & Klaas, features Klaas out of Joko & Klaas as one of the regular contestants, as well as Lena out of Eurovision.

But what are you doing March 16th? Well FOTB and modern-day Chris Goss Ben Lathbury AKA Persephone’s Chair AKA Royal Flush is running his 400th Game Night, except it’s another charity marathon one where he goes through all of his interactive Twitch formats and this time he’s raising money for CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), here’s the line-up:

It’s all good, although that final quarter in particular looks unmissable, big fan of The Escape Artist and Dangerzone as quiz formats, although I’m intrigued to find out what the Guest Games are, and how long it will all overrun. If you want a taster, Ben usually streams on Saturday nights from 8pm on Twitch and you can playalong in the chat and on your phone these days.

Finally apropos of nothing other than a lot of people have requested it over a little while, I’ve uploaded the entire series of BBC 3’s 2004 espionage crash course reality competition Spy to Youtube. It’s unlisted (for now) but not private especially, but having had the channel copyright banned once already many years ago I’m extremely wary of it happening again, as such don’t get overexcited about the possibility of more, we’ll see how this goes, think of it as an early 20th Anniversary Of The Bar present. The quality’s not amazing, sorry.

So here’s some fun spotted on the Discord last night. Non-hit Survivor UK, which was casting for a POTENTIAL second series and was due to close its inbox for applications next Friday, has mysteriously shut early – it’s disappeared from the BBC site, and the online portal has a message suggesting it’s closed/paused. Two possible reasons off the top of my head, perhaps you can think of more:

• They had so many incredible applications already, for a show that was barely watched, they thought they’d end it there and then as there’s no need for anyone else to apply.
• It’s done.

Option two seems more likely than option one, but who knows? Perhaps there’s a last ditch pivot to Celebrity Survivor happening.

Ahhhh! We were desperate to find a video of this a year previously when the first series of The Traitors came out, so we’re thrilled an episode of 2004’s Traitor hosted by ex-Sunday Sport editor Tony Livesey has turned up, the BBC’s first attempt at the Werewolf-style game which ran for a sort of pilot run of five-episodes back in the days when the BBC were happy to try all sorts of things out in the 6pm slot. Evidently didn’t get anywhere, little did anyone know almost twenty-years later…

We’ve been and gone! Watch the video below for a 90 minute results and discussion round-up, or you can head to UKGameshows.com for the written report.

Thanks to everyone who voted, all the statistics feature under the cut.