Challenge - June 2016 onwards

And Flash?

https://twitter.com/ChallengeTV/status/882562273860046849

Starting on 31st July at 6pm, The Cube with Philip Schofield - Looking forward to watching this.

It's a shame they're commissioning so many modern shows that are often seen elsewhere. The Cube is so stranger to a late evening repeat or a random scheduling on ITV2. It's insane to think they once broadcast Telly Addicts and The Golden Shot.

As its been said many times before, The Chase, WTTBAM, pointless all brings in the cash which helps cover the cost of broadcasting gems.

I know that, but the gems are becoming more and more sparse.

Does Challenge really fit Sky's portfolio? They should sell it to UKTV.

I'm still happy to argue that Challenge has been a better channel under the ownership of Sky than under Virgin Media TV/Flextech in its latter years.

From a technical and branding perspective, yes. From a programming perspective, maybe not.

It definitely is. By the end of the VMTV era pretty much all acquisitions had stopped - from memory the last one was Winning Lines in late 2009/early 2010, and before that Golden Balls (which had literally only just been cancelled). The oldest content they had was the first series of The Crystal Maze - I'm pretty sure the only Bullseye they were showing at this point was some of the badly hacked up 90s stuff and the Dave Spikey series.


The pool of programmes they had to show at all was so sparse - it was pretty obviously being allowed to run on empty. And that's after years of trying to monetise it with participation TV of some type or other and of course all the bloody poker stuff.

Touchè, the poker epidemic passed me by completely. Perhaps I'm thinking more about the Takeshi's Castle days rather then the years that followed.

I'm surprised to read that - certainly during the early-mid noughties the channel was on absolute fire, the Christmas Cult Selection in 2002 possibly being its peak when it brought back a ton of programmes that hadn't been given an airing in decades. Takeshi did dominate for a fair while, but even then there was plenty of variety and they had an excellent forum that regularly kept in touch with questions and requests. I'll always remember when they stopped showing Knightmare , and I protested on the forum as I was halfway through recording the series they were on...so in response they broadcast the remaining few episodes of that series at about 4:00 in the morning, for what appeared to be solely so I could finish my tape!

Are we talking around 2009ish for the channel's low point? The BARB top tens for the channel around then show some surprises - I'd completely forgotten they were showing 8 Out of 10 Cats, Auntie's Bloomers and long-forgotten Deal or No Deal ripoff Take It Or Leave It during that time.

The forums were brilliant pre-Sky. You could tell they cared about their audience. Whereas after the takeover and Challenge were endlessly showing the revived series of Gladiators, I asked if they'd ever show the ITV series' again. I was firmly told "no".