We watched the first episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (hashtag #FFS LOL) which promised to fill the Apprentice shaped hole currently in BBC1’s Thursday night schedule. It was quite interesting – Ramsay going big on investing in the person not just the business and as such there will be tests of character as well as business acumen, starting with a swim to a cliff than a forty foot jump off it – who knows how important these tests are, followed by a proper business-y task of selling street food on a Cornish beach. To its credit, the business element felt far more real and on the level than a similar sort of task on The Apprentice, which these days are mainly entertaining contrivances based on how business is run only really on a homeopathic level, with a much bigger emphasis on costings and margins, but it’s not nearly as amusing as The Apprentice and by the end of the episode I can’t say I really gave much of a damn about any of the contestants to be honest. Ramsay is coarse but constructive throughout as you’d expect, although his “we’re DONE” walk off after elimination was inadvertently comic rather than dramatic.

In short: it’s alright. It marks itself as being different from The Apprentice quite successfully but I don’t feel all that compelled to continue, although I’ll probably give it another week at least.

However there was another show that combined adventure with business acumen, and that was The Rebel Billionaire: Branson’s Quest For The Best, Fox’s spoiler for The Apprentice about twenty years ago. In it, Richard Branson challenged 16 people in challenges consisting of tests of character and business acumen, to the point where I did wonder if these shows are related somehow. However, whilst Ramsay seems much more about the business, Branson is more about the adventure. One of the contestants has posted a potted version of the show, the finale seems to be available in full.

Happy 25th birthday to Channel 5! For the first five years or so of its life it was probably THE place to go for The Sort Of Things We Like – four series of Fort Boyard, two brilliant series of The Mole, The Desert Forges, Whittle and of course a show that predated the escape room craze (even if it didn’t know it at the time) by a good ten-fifteen years or so Jailbreak from 2000. Someone uploaded another episode last year, look:

Escape rooms as TV shows is still the nut everyone’s been trying to crack to not much success – our favourite being Race to Escape, but that was only a one-series wonder.

Of course we can’t forget Big Brother, of varying quality, but “David’s dead” is the greatest reality TV moment of all time, so there’s that.

Nowadays there’s not much on Channel 5 that we watch, unfortunately. But we hope that one day they dip their toes back into adventure.

The Can An Average-To-OK Quizzer Do As Well As A Mastermind Semi-Finalist On A Specialist Subject They May Once Have Considered CHALLENGE

Expect lots of Pulp and incredible applications of Adobe Premiere Pro.

Always happy when an episode of Every Second Counts turns up on Youtube, this one features A Bit Of Business with a bird which some may suggest probably isn’t quite worth the effort of passing things back and forth for an entire round, but does at least give us another example of when this show just did something weird for a laugh sometimes.

We knew this ages ago didn’t we? Anyway it sounds like it’s going to be a bit more Gladiators. And why not?

Anyway, thanks go to Buzzerblog for the extremely cheap laugh:

Got a cracking DM from @metaboatchris last night, which I shall repost here. Perhaps you know something?

I was talking to my fiancé’s mum recently, who mentioned a contestant she knew who took part on Big Break in the 90s. According to her, he made it through to the “Make or Break” final round, and won two prizes (not sure which, but presuming the red ball prize and a blue/pink ball prize). On the show, you can only win two prizes, however because he claimed that it was not adequately explained to him at the time, he said that he should have won every prize between red and blue/pink, not just the two prizes the contestant normally does, and took the producers to court. In the end, he was given all the prizes, and as a result later episodes of Big Break make it clear that it is only two prizes that are won in Make or Break. I’ve tried looking for information in relation to this on the internet and in news articles, but I can’t find any information relating to this, and I’m wondering if it was ever reported at the time. He may have settled at the time, so it may have never made it to court, but I wasn’t sure if it was ever made public. I know that the contestant was called Ian and he was from Northern Ireland, but don’t know any more information than that. Would you know if there is any information out there in relation to this? I know that Big Break had its transmission delayed for several years, but I think this was due to legal issues regarding the rights to the series, rather than this issue. I also read on a forum that there were several episodes of the series that were canned, but I don’t know if it a) that’s true, and b) if it was in relation to this.