Always happy to plug anyone that plays along with #hostholdingaquestioncard, here’s Roman Kemp and Sarah Greene’s interpretation.

The Finish Line starts soon on BBC1 from the makers of The Chase. Do you remember Ejector Seat with Andi Peters? A really fun idea for a show that didn’t quite nail the execution? This appears to be exactly the opposite, instead of avoiding getting questions wrong to not make it to the end of a track, here you answer questions correctly to propel your chariot towards the finish line, inspired by those donkey derby machines you see at funfairs and the like. I love these machines, hope this is as fun.

Studio Lambert have just announced the OFFICIAL Traitors Puzzle book.

https://twitter.com/BothersBar/status/1686753296696942592

There’s an Amazon listing for a Traitors puzzle book, although it looks a bit different and the dates are all over the place so buyer beware. Edit Edit Edit: This one looks much better.

Edit: I don’t know when this came out but there’s already a new edition of the card game with some digital implementation.

Edit Edit: And here’s the board game out August 10th. Looks like a straight reskinning of an existing foreign version, which probably explains the prisoner’s dilemma endgame we have here.

The new Big Brother logo was revealed during the Love Island final last night. I wasn’t a great fan of it as a still, looks a bit cluttered, I think I like it a bit more when it’s animated. Anyway it’s supposedly coming for six weeks in October.

The best one is The Watchmaker – l’hologerie, a retheming of the old Percolator game. Stop the ticking clocks in the green, pulling the lever after each one to move the key around the grand clock and make it accessible at midnight, with the clear difficulty of a fast-moving spinning floor. Decently challenging game, plenty of opportunities for comedy pratfalls, I really like its room theming and lighting. Nice.

The worst one is the Pirate Planks – Planches de Pirate and this is a shame because they’ve really gone to town with the theming of the room, a big pirate ship but they’ve concentrated so much on The Funny Thing they’ve made the game practically impossible, and when no contestants make any sort of progress The Funny Thing loses a lot of its lustre. In tonight’s episode each plank has a “red zone” near the wall will disqualified the contestant if they go into it – I don’t know if it was added to stop people going up against the wall, or if they filmed it first and realised the game is not doable unless you let them go to the wall.

I can’t say I’m a fan of games where the main reason you win or lose is “a man off camera pushes a button at their whim” – I’m old skool and remember when the games were *mechanically* clever. Overall, now we’re halfway through this year’s run and it’s felt like a 7/10 season, but fingers crossed we get Season 35 next year and they might have some interesting ways to celebrate.

OK, quite a lot to get through this evening ranging from the quite interesting to the pretty crap, let’s have a look. Remember, everything’s been sent in anonymously, I’ve tried to remove anything that I suspect is an attention seeking lie, but I can’t make any guarantees of the veracity of what follows. Eyes down, look in:

Jeopardy UK board is 25/50/75/100/150.

Yes we’ve heard this, and also the way they’ll be getting an hour out of it is Single/Single/Double/Final. That means that I think the min-maximum, if they put all the Daily Doubles in the bottom row, of £121, 600. What will actually be given away a show is probably closer to £1,500.

SAS: Who Dares Wins – next series is taking place in the Arctic rather than the desert.

Chilling.

You were asking on Twitter earlier how Aussie Traitors has done on iPlayer and that it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that more people have watched it in the UK than in the home country. Well, episodes have been requested between 230k and 600k times but each request is being watched about 50% on average. So far!

Thanks, really interesting and yes given it was getting around 250k an episode in Australia it’s certainly close, and I suspect those figures don’t include the BBC3 transmissions.

Heard Lego Masters is officially canned. No xmas special this year.

ITV want another run of In With A Shout.

Can believe. Where’s Picture Slam got to, eh?

Tenable is almost certainly not returning. The repeats get healthy numbers and there simply are no more potato products to list.

I can believe this, there’s currently no contestant call out for it.

ITV has been kicking around the idea of reviving Don’t Try This at Home(!) in some form – live studio, VT challenges. Would make sense as a SNT replacement but feels very early to nail colours to the mast if that’s the thinking.

Don’t Try This At Home feels like the sort of show there are probably loads of TV people would quite like to make happen so I can believe it. I think you’d need to add stakes to it in 2023 though.

Is there any truth to the rumors regarding who “actually” owns Hollywood/Celebirty squares? I’m wondering cuz people on the buzzerblog discord suspect there maybe a “use it or lose it” cause (similar to the dispute over Sony/2waytraffic/CPL vs ABC/Disney regarding the rights to US millionaire, where contractual obligations force Disney to produce a version every couple of years lest they lose the rights.). This might explain why paramount made hip hop squares for mtv2 in 2012 and revived it for vh1 between 2017-19, and why its getting revived now under the clebirty squares name (which is what the uk version uses) for BET. Your take on these rumors? (It does line up…)

My “take”, like I’m sort of US sports commentator now, is that I could not give more of a toss about Celebrity Squares. Who is clamouring for it? If they’re going to reboot it in the UK, I hope the sound effects aren’t extremely anaemic like last time. We don’t need Celebrity Squares, we’ve got Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel. Perhaps they’ll make it really funny in the US, who knows.

Channel 5 interested in a revival of Total Wipeout.

Their parent Paramount does have a big presence in Argentina, where the Wipeout set is located, so that could be a factor in their decision.

Mmm. On the one hand I can see the logic, on the other it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to happen unless several countries are on board to film there, and I’ve heard absolutely nothing to suggest this would be the case – they don’t seem to have made the Cena/Byer US one for at least 18 months, and didn’t that one film in Texas?

ITV have plans for a series consisting of one-off programmes based on offshoots of their most popular shows, so think Celebrity Cyclone from IAC, Casa Amor from Love Island, Get Out Me Ear from Saturday Night Takeaway.

No tentative timeslot yet, but just personally thinking, could a Saturday night could work?

There was definitely talk of a Celebrity Cyclone spin-off wasn’t there? A series of one-offs might be quite interesting, although I suspect after filling out for an hour you understand why they’re better served as a ten-minute bit. What else could they do? 60 minutes of the think music from The 1% Club?

Popmaster greenlit for second series

I suspect this will be true even if it isn’t true right now.

ITV open to more sitting on a fortune. issue is moneyball and whether they will commission one as they came as joint commission

SOAF is an interesting one as it spent several weeks below 2m and suddenly had a bit of a spurt in the final weeks. I do think series two of Moneyball is an improved show, but it’s certainly not a must watch. Neither of them are must watches really.

Is your stool pigeon in the logo singing the Finnish 2023 Eurovision entry to the journalist?

No, he’s singing Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, as sampled in the seminal Gold Digger by The Dolly Rockers (gone too soon). And it’s to a policeman!

Christ I’m bored, so that seems as good a reason as any to open up the Stool Pigeon for the day.

Send us your TV formats goss, remember if it’s already been posted on Buzzerblog or TV Zone that’s not gossip that’s news so no need to bother. Also try to keep it truthful, it’s not me you’ll be upsetting with fake stories.

We’ll keep the box open until around 9:30 tonight.

Box closed! Keep an eye out for the results!