In it, groups of people are driven around Europe on a blacked out bus. The bus stops, and given what they can work out from what they see, real clues and fake ones, and doing challenges to earn further clues, they have to mark where they think they are on a map. The person who is furthest away gets eliminated. Presumably it’s a different place each episode and you’ll get to play along at home.
Might actually be good fun – great ratings on VTM in the Flemish region of Belgium, and we love a Flemish format here at The Bar which tend towards more imaginative than most. And there’s De Mol, which is the best show on television.
It does strike me that popular Youtuber GeoWizard, amongst his travelogues and straight-line challenges and his playing of GeoGuessr, basically did this a few years ago, although I’m surprised he only seems to have done it once.
Apparently the first reality show to be named after a Steps Top 40 hit (although surely there’s a gameshow called 5, 6, 7, 8 waiting to go somewhere), Scared of the Dark sees Danny Dyer challenge eight celebs (one of whom is already blind and presumably there as a sort of control subject) to live in the dark for a week with all the challenges and travails that involves. Undoubtedly it’s being pitched as an interesting experiment into sight loss, in reality it’s probably just going to be a week of celebrities going ‘ah!’.
And here lies a bit of a problem – this sort of thing has been done quite successfully in the past – Total Blackout, In The Dark With Julian Clary/Junior Simpson, er, Noel’s Hole from Noel’s House Party, but really these shows were pretty short lived – ultimately there’s only one joke with it – look at their lack of spatial awareness! – and by its very nature you can’t do an awful lot visually with it. You can get an extremely fun 10 minutes out of the idea. A thirty minute show is possible. An hour a night for five days, ninety in the final? I can’t see it. Ironically.
Channel 4 have gone big on this as well, moving all their big hitters like Hunted and Taskmaster out of their slots for the week. Is the lure of Gazza arguing with Chris Eubank in pitch blackness going to be too much to resist? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Joel Dommett presides as two teams of three shout answers at televisions in a bid to win up to £20,000.
Thanks to this Radio Times article we’ve an idea of the principle of the show – basically select a category and you get 80 seconds worth of three-second clips (I wonder if this is a mistake, 90 seconds would make more sense, no?). You just have to identify the things in the clips – right answers move you up the money ladder, wrong answers drop you down. In front of you is a big red button, hitting it freezes the clip and you can take however long you need on it (perhaps this doesn’t stop the clock, in which case 60 seconds of clips with 20 seconds thinking time makes more sense), usable ten times throughout by each team. Winners get a chance to quadruple their prize pot in the final, if the original press release was anything to go by.
The entertaining thing is that there’s another show coming to Saturday nights with a very similar name-the-thing-in-the-picture premise: Picture Slam with Alan Carr on the BBC. We don’t know how long that has been in development for. We do know this was piloted late last year and recorded recently and with ITV usually so happy to sit on a light entertainment show for ages, I ponder if this has been hurried out to act as a sort of spoiler. There is probably room for a 7/10 banger Saturday night picture quiz, whether there’s enough for two remains to be seen.
Well the revival is anyway, the original US format’s almost forty years old now and I’ll just let that sink in for you.
And what an incredibly solid performer it has been over the past ten years, anchoring ITV’s weekend evenings and filling in on ITV2 all the time extremely successfully. And why not? It’s irresistible. What sort of person comes across an episode of Catchphrase and decides to turn over? An absolute monster, that’s who.
There was certainly no guarantees that the change to 3D graphics would work – there was a real chance of alienating the audience. But other than sometimes seeming a bit busy, and occasionally the amount of detail is a bit distracting, they’ve worked well – the extra dimension allowing for a greater variety of ideas than the colour-ed up Dingbats of the original tended to rely upon. Whatsmore, and importantly, under Stephen Mulhern they kept things both light and fun, lots of money for everyone (unless you’re a civilian who didn’t get past the qualifying round obviously). They iterated on the iconic buzzer look and sound of the original. They’ve kept the “end of game” sound effect, although it’s been clipped quite badly. They’ve pointlessly added some sort of M Square feature to the Super Catchphrase even though it makes little sense. It’s all been great stuff.
We remain thankful that between recording the pilot and the series they softened Mr Chips look up from PSYCHO ROBOT OUT TO KILL YOU to the lovable rogue we know and love.
Of course the best episodes are the ones where one of the celebs is clearly very good at the game and they’ve been put together with some right thickos and you can feel the grimacing as they try and let them win some money for their charities but are totally useless at it. Emotionally blackmailing celebs into picking Box 11 in the Super Catchphrase so they can double the losers totals and then making it quite difficult remains quite the production choice when they do it.
Roy Walkered so Stephen Mulhern could run. He’s only three years off Walker’s tenure, and he’s only 45. How long can he run? There doesn’t seem any reason the show couldn’t run for years and years, it quietly outrates most things on a Saturday night even still.
