Great to see the return of 2021’s HOTTEST host promo trend, the crossed arms, which looked like it was falling out of fashion for a bit.
Thursdays, 8pm, (8:15pm ep1) Channel 5
Historian host Lucy Worsley invites six people to compete in rounds involving various aspects of puzzle solving (words, maths, lateral thinking, observation, memory – it’s like the Olympics OF THE MIND) starting off as two teams of three and then the winning team competing against each other to find the show’s winner.
Might seem like an unusual commission for Channel 5, but it is the sort of thing that you think might suit its current audience targets (slightly older and upmarket than other channels try for) quite well, they have form here – Eggheads does alright for them, they tried Britain’s Best Brain years and years ago, and what is this if not basically an upmarket version of Brainteaser? The obvious headline here is it’s Channel 5 trying to tap into Only Connect‘s audience, how successful they are at that remains to be seen. I’m hopeful but sceptical.
Haven’t done this for a while, and my peak work period is over for the year which is just as well because look at this little lot coming up:
22nd June: Puzzling on Channel 5, 8pm. Lucy Worsley hosts new puzzly gameshow on Channel 5, two teams of three compete in challenges of logic, observation and mental agility, the winning team must then compete against each other to determine an overall winner to go through to the final. We’ll have a Show Discussion post for this in due course.
23rd June and various: Password with Alan Carr and Daisy May Cooper films in London and there are still tickets avaliable.
26th June: Popmaster on More 4, 8pm. Ken Bruce brings his music quiz to TV. Do you remember the Popmaster vs Ten To The Top Wars of about April 2023? Great days. A show discussion post will appear in due course.
27th-29th June: One Question with Claudia Winkleman is filming in Hammersmith, tickets are available.
28th June: Muscles and Mayhem on Netflix. You wait 30 years for a documentary on American Gladiators and then two come along at once – the recent one on ESPN was well received, what different stories this one will have remains to be seen.
30th June: Is It Cake Too? Launches on Netflix.
1st July: It’s the OFFICIAL start of Summer as Fort Boyard returns to France 2, 8:10pm UK time. Catacombs, a new big platform, watchmaking and a pirate ship all promised, amongst other novelties, and Pere Fouras has nine new assets (well, some are repeats from last year) to modify and shake up the format. Last year France 2 dropped their geoblocking between 8-11pm UK so you could watch it live if you wanted without messing about with a VPN so fingers crossed you can do the same this year. Discussion in #fortboyardchat in the Discord.
4th-7th July: Deal or No Deal is filming in Salford and there are still tickets available, although some shows are starting at 9:15am so God knows how early you need to get there for those. Also it’s being done by Applause Store, so they’ve probably given out three times as many tickets as seats and you’ll probably have to open a box to determine if you actually get in or not.
8th, 15th July: It’s the other two episodes of Die 100,000 Mark Show on RTL which are being burned off, which is a bit of a shame but there we are.
This new Korean show came out almost a fortnight ago on Netflix but thanks to peak-period work and, er, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I’ve only just got around to starting watching, I’m four episodes in now, and my Tl;dr opinion is: it’s good and an interesting idea, but it’s appeal isn’t quite immediate and you’ll need to be prepared to stick with it a bit.
Netflix are calling it a combination of Physical 100 and Survivor, I don’t think they’re terribly helpful things to compare it to to be honest but there we are. 24 women come to the Island of Fire to test themselves, they are in six teams of four each representing a different high-pressure physical job (police, firefighters, soldiers, stunt actors, athletes and security guards). First job – cross 1km of mudflats to get to a different island, grab your flag and pole (60kg) and come back across the flats to plant your flag in the arena. This is a race, as the fastest teams get to make a big strategic decision – on the island are six ‘bases’, each with their own pros and cons in terms of location, size, ease of access and such like. The map they’re given only shows the locations of the common amenities and their own base, they will have to recce to work out where everyone else is stationed. Every day, at any time, a siren will go off across the island marking the beginning of an eliminatory Base Battle – before each battle each team will hide a team flag somewhere in their base and each player will carry their own personal flag upon their back. If your personal flag gets captured you’re eliminated for the rest of the battle (and this is announced to the rest of the island so other teams have an idea of your team strength), but if another team manages to infiltrate your base and remove your team flag, your team is eliminated from the show and that team will take over your territory – so there’s lots of talk of strategy, who to attack, how much to defend, that sort of thing. There’s almost a fencing like quality to these base battles, lots of spying looking for an opening, feints, counterattacks and the like.
What there isn’t much of is a great deal of levity, at least in the initial episodes, these are Very Serious Women playing a Very Serious Game and it’s not really until after the first Base Battle the show chills a bit and gives us a bit of slice of life and gives us a chance to learn about the contestants so we can start backing them. Between base battles, the teams can buy food, equipment and defensive supplies to improve their base from the store, the currency is the calories burnt in the previous day – there’s a communal gym they can train in to earn currency although perhaps tellingly the team with the most to spend seems to be the one which does the most running. There’s also an Arena Battle, the one I saw was quite good, making and putting out fires and was probably the first chance anyone got to breakout and look quite heroic, the winning team wins equipment and timed-shield so their base can’t be initially attacked during the next base battle.
I think they could have done a bit more with the mysterious island setting, it seems a shame that other than each other’s bases there’s not much else to find through exploring.
I’m invested now so I will watch the rest, helped that episodes (other than the initial hour long one which dragged a bit) clock in at around 45 minutes. There are definitely some interesting concepts here – I don’t think defense building and base raiding has really been done before, but it’s not something that might click immediately.
We’ll probably update this Elton photo if he moves channel
It’s only been a fortnight since the last one, and this one might be *extra* intriguing as it’s come out this morning that Raab/Brainpool will be moving some of their shows to rival network RTL, including TV Total spin-off Blamerien oder Kassieren and Schlag den Besten, both of which set to be hosted by face of Pro7 and Eurovision vote giver Elton. What if anything is going to happen? We’re currently discussing the situation in #deutschechat in the Discord, and we’ll be watching Schlag den Star on Saturday night where Niram Farooq will be taking on Rebecca Mir for Elton’s €100,000 briefcase. Will he have many more €100,000 briefcases to give away on Pro7? Who knows!
We mentioned this a little while ago before the series started, but I think it’s worthwhile pointing out that the last few episodes of Gambit Game, a kind of amateur Youtube version of The Genius played over Zoom, have been very good and certainly worth a look.
It’s certainly not been a show without issues, contestants pulling out rather than fighting, multiple times where the editing hasn’t *quite* pulled the threads together correctly, not in terms of telling the timeline of the story but with the captions and graphics for example. Despite this, it hits a lot of The Genius‘ beats, and even if the first few games were highly derivative of its source, the more recent episodes have had some pretty top notch ideas. The cast has also been well chosen – not much deadwood really.
It’s Cory, Christian and Bob’s 24-Hour Gameshow Marathon this weekend raising money for Child’s Play. It starts at 5pm UK time on Saturday (the times on the page don’t seem to take into account BST, so you need to add an hour to the GMT signposts), Moneybags through to The Wheel which would be 11pm through to 2am looks like the most interesting bit to me, your mileage may vary.
Has anyone watched Siren: Survive the Island on Netflix yet? It ticks a lot of “I want to watch this” boxes – Korean, eliminatory, tasks, but I haven’t got much time going spare at the moment.
