I hope you’re all enjoying HEATAGEDDON, you might be interested to note that Challenge TV (it will always be Challenge TV, even though it’s just been called Challenge for the best part of 20 years) is repeating Britain’s Favourite Strategic Quiz Cash Trapped weekdaily from 6pm tonight.

As it’s hot it’s time for our almost annual visit to the Desert Forges, or the Quebecioise Les Forges du Desert today, probably the most successful version of the format in that it got not one but TWO series. At least it’s much easier to empathise with doing stuff in those temperatures, although the heat in the desert would at least be dry so in many ways they’re better off.

• Can’t be bothered to wait until 8:10-ish for your weekly dose of Fort Boyard and Toujours Plus Fort on a Saturday evening? The France 2 website uploads them from 6am on Saturday morning. You’ll still need a VPN though.
• Bother’s Bar’s favourite 7/10 Saturday evening quiz The Hit List is back tonight, with civilian contestants to boot, 7:10pm (it’s like they know) on BBC One.

Colin Murray hosts from tomorrow. Bafflingly he’s still not been revealed as full time host yet, so if not him, who?

The latest chapter in the Bother’s Bar Film Club is Most Dangerous Game, which I had only recently discovered was a fifteen part Quibi series which has been omnibussed and can currently be seen on Amazon Prime as a two-hour film.

In it, Liam Hemsworth, loser, is persuaded by Damon Killian (played by Christoph Waltz) to go on the run in a deadly game of cat and mouse around Detroit. He earns increasing amounts of money for every hour he stays alive, mainly for his wife and unborn child who have no idea what’s going on, but he can escape the game if he can survive twenty-four hours. There are five stalkers hunters after him, each with extremely one-dimensional character traits.

To be honest most of the plot points you can see from miles away and the script and the acting is largely pretty ropey, but there is fun to be had here in some of the set-ups and ideas which I shan’t spoil. Quite impressively for something that’s been put together from fifteen episodes of A Thing the joins are pretty well hidden – certainly nothing wrong with the pacing, and it doesn’t just feel like 15 vignettes stitched together.

If you’ve got Prime I think many of you reading this will basically enjoy it if not be blown away by it. Perhaps you would be interested in the 1920 short story by Richard Cornell it is loosely based on, and indeed seems to be the genesis for a lot of fiction where people get hunted for sport.

Edit: Right, there’s a 2022 version of the 1934 film coming out next month and it stars CT off of The Challenge.

TV Zone reporting that Broadcast reporting that Britain’s Brightest Family‘s been axed.

Of interest, the quote from ITV controller Kevin Lygo:

We extended the news by half an hour and shifted the soaps – and the programming that’s gone, you can’t remember…

It was perfectly good, honest it was, but it was for a gentler age when there wasn’t so much choice. It doesn’t work when there’s an amazing five million pound an hour drama to watch on Netflix.

Poor The Quiz Show genre 🙁

It’s not incredible (we basically wanted to show you Looping), but this four minute highlight video actually shows off some of this year’s new stuff (that’s been used) pretty well, if you can’t be bothered to seek out the full two-hour version:

Things mainly of note:

• Of the new cells and adventures shown, Looping was my favourite – a 360 degree evolution (I hesitate to call it a revolution) of Cloche. It’s a bit like that game from Dog Eat Dog where you have to swing the swing to do a full turn except here you’re forty foot in the air, you’re not strapped in to some box device and you use CO2 jets to get momentum. It looked great fun, and when his legs come off the bar, dodgy as all hell.
• The Infernal Cell is OK, it uses the elderly go back and forth through this obstacle mechanic, but it’s fair to say this is probably the most Wipeout-esque obstacle they’ve used in a room to date. The Propeller looked really hard. The way The Revenge Of Cyril Gossbo ends just reiterates the idea that when I’m producing Fort Boyard UK, Dave Benson-Philips is getting the auxillary character role.
• This year’s big new idea – the nine assets of Pere Fouras – where each episode is played under special conditions worked pretty well this first episode. It was The Night of Prohibitions, so some games were played under different rules – you mustn’t play this game alone (game played handcuffed to another player), you stuffed this game up last time you were here, you mustn’t stuff it up again (win or go to prison), you mustn’t touch a laser, you mustn’t scream, you mustn’t play this game with any light (for the snake pit) – enough added spice to remix what’s already there. Next week is “Time Ghosts” where loads of old characters and games might turn up, I can’t wait to see if and how creative the rest of the series might get.
• I’m not a big fan of the new running-around-the-fort music, but in a nice touch they’ve bought back Pere Fouras asking a riddle from the watchtower with the full-on 90s running music leading to it and 90s tower music.
• Heavens be praised The Cage is now an optional extra – at Judgement you can choose either sister, Blanche in her Hall of Judgement or Rouge in The Cage to set you a task. On the one hand, the odds on losing to a Boo in a fight are extremely high. On the other, Blanche’s new game of “drop this cube into a massive box of water so it lands in a much smaller box” is bastard hard. The real joy is that it knocks 20 minutes off the runtime so it’s a slick two hours (and five) now.
• Sheriff Willy is funny.
• The CGI tigers are certainly CGI tigers.