I was and am a huge, huge fan of the original version of Blockbusters, presented by the legendary (and sadly missed) Bob Holness, and I was slightly worried that the new series would not live up to the greatness of the original.

Happily the format is nearly identical, although there are some inevitable changes that I’m not especially happy with.

The most iconic thing about Blockbusters is the game board itself. In the original series, the board was an impressive feat of engineering that featured a floor-to-ceiling matrix of remote-controlled slide projectors, each hexagon in the board having its own projector. It must have generated a serious amount of heat. The advantages of this technique was that the board was huge, and also very bright and clear.

Nice board, Bob

Sadly, the board in the new series is what looks to be a single rear-projection screen. It is smaller, dimmer, and doesn’t even have a viewing angle sufficent to cover where many of the cameras on the set are placed! And, of course, it has been infused with computer graphics, causing the hexagons to spin around and make a “whoosh” noise when they change colour – a change which probably wasn’t necessary.

That board looks a bit dim...

The melody of the theme tune has stayed the same, of course, as it absolutely had to, but it has been re-recorded. The original was so amazingly epic that I’m astonished they changed it. It’s now become all “funky” with guitars added – much worse.

Simon himself is a capable enough presenter, but doesn’t seem to interact with the players in quite a light-hearted manner as Bob used to. This is only the first episode, though, maybe things will improve. I do hope he stops shouting “That’s a gold run!” every time someone wins it, though.

Other random observations:

• No mascots!
• The buzzer lights in front of the players have grown to enormous proportions for no apparent reason.
• Mathematically, it still doesn’t matter which letter you pick, yet players still try to complete the game as fast as possible. A strategy of filling as many hexagons as possible without finishing the game would in fact earn you more money, but no-one plays this way.
• The sports shirt and dictionary conciliation prize is gone. Now it’s a rubbish eBook reader.
• Gold run contestants are now encouraged to say “Pass” if they don’t know. It used to be you just shouted out the next set of letters if you didn’t know.
• Simon goes through the gold run questions you got wrong while you’re still standing on the hot spot. Bob at least let you go back to your seat first.

So, to summarise, I am of course hopelessly over-analyzing a game show, but it’s difficult not to with a show as iconic as this, and one that I was such a huge fan of.

DuckDuckGo has a silly name, but works well.

Exclusion: 431-432MHz not available within 100km radius of Charing Cross, London.

So says the RSGB Band Plan. But where exactly is that? Wonder no more.

So remember, if you’re inside the green circle, be careful where you TX on 70cm.

From a political and philosophical point of view, I would love to be using Firefox on all of my devices. All things being equal (or even nearly equal) that’s what I’d be doing.
But all things are not equal, or nearly equal.

I’m certainly willing to inconvenience myself for my political beliefs. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.

But in this case, the inconvenience is too great. Apple’s approach is resulting in a product that is just so much more usable than Mozilla’s (and especially Google’s) product that using it all day, every day would be just too much of a pain in the ass