The BBC have announced a start date for The Traitors: Tuesday 29th November, 9:30pm, immediately after the England vs Wales World Cup match – they really believe in this, that lead-in is likely to be extremely big. It’s going to be on three times a week, but the three episodes will be up on iPlayer after the first episode of the week (this strikes me as a bit weird towards the end so I wonder if the final episodes will only go up after broadcast). I suspect the plan is ITV football game counterprogramming, but it’s quite possible they’ll go out after BBC games as well. It should finish around Christmas? Could it end on Xmas Day?

Again – should temper expectations – this hasn’t universally succeeded (and in fact has flopped massively in Australia recently), but Studio Lambert have shown they’ve got decent chops for this sort of thing so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

Colour me as quite surprised and I don’t know how often I’ll play it after the initial launch but for a very quick burst of quiz Triviaverse on Netflix, which launched yesterday, is actually pretty good – basically three minutes of rapid fire multiple choice questions that get increasingly difficult after each minute (that’s right, it’s the The National Lottery The Third Degree reboot the nation has been crying out for), answering multiple questions correct in a row offers a streak bonus (and this is the key to a high score – you want to be earning 200pts a question rather than the basic 100pts), it has a slightly trippy background playing in the background, the music gets more exciting and intense as the clock runs down… it’s genuinely quite a fun quiz experience (right up until you get hit with a US sports question, at any rate). It even keeps basic stats like your high score and best and worst categories in the background. you can play against a chum sitting next to you on the couch.

Issues? There’s an argument that the harder rounds should be worth more points, as it is you’ll score biggest in the initial minute and there’s certainly a temptation to end early if you get a bad run of questions in the early round. It’s a shame there’s no official way to post your scores anywhere (my best score is 4800 if you want a target to beat). I’ve had one repeat question so far, and I’ve answered around 250 (around 40 questions a set which I accept is fairly fast) so I don’t know how large the database is, but I don’t think it’s keeping track of which questions you’ve seen which is a shame.

It’s certainly a more successful thing for me than Trivia Quest, and plays a better game than Cat Burglar (although Cat Burglar has other things going for it). Good.

Our new favourite thing is a clip from Flemish (it sounds like) mid-1980s quiz IQ-Kwis which turned up on the Discord last night. It looks like The Waiting Game but with logic puzzles, which is already brilliant, but my two favourite bits are 1) people absolutely just thumping the buzzers and 2) the speed of the tile shuffling in the endgame, where it looks like they’ve got to try and make a twenty-letter word (or as best they can in the time they’ve earned, my hint that this is the case is that an advert for the book after it suggests it has an official word list of 20 letter words).

We’ll be pitching Sonic Blastman: The Quiz to Channel 4 next week.

In other news, I can’t see us leaving Twitter whilst it still has utility value and until something better comes along (Christ I’m still occasionally posting to Facebook), but would always recommend looking at the Bother’s Bar Discord where stuff like this usually turns up.

That’s right, it’s time for more consumer advice with a RETRO Bother’s Bar Plays Badly as I’ve got a new headset to try out (I will let you determine if it’s “broadcast quality”, I’m not convinced) and it’s an absolute Saturday morning classic as we look back at Alternative Software’s Double Dare, released in 1991 for the ZX Spectrum (and other machines). Questions! Dare! Double Dare! The Physical Challenge! It’s all here, as well as the assault course which I could never complete as a ten-year-old, but now I’m 41 and a much better person, is it now possible? Let’s find out!

The BBC will be scheduling The Traitors three nights a week at 9pm for four weeks, according to Broadcast.

I don’t think there’s going to be a middle ground here, it will take off and go massive or it will be an extremely long month for the BBC (Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance).

Here’s the thing, it does OK in The Netherlands – it is still successful but it has failed to reach the heights of its first series, but the recent version on Australian TV has flopped quite hard despite the critics quite enjoying it and that had a similar schedule to the one our one is going to have.

It genuinely could go either way and I’m extremely excited to find out which way that is.

The Traitors, for the uninitiated, is basically a reality TV version of Werewolf/Mafia, a few people in the know must work together to take down an uninformed majority (who have no idea who The Traitors are) and must survive a series of votes and banishings. If any of the traitors make it to the end, they win the pot that everyone has been building through daily challenges. Different to something like The Mole, we know who The Traitors are and can watch the game through their experience.