Get TV Abroad

With more than 10 seasons of the latest type of Mastermind we have grown to love it and hate it in equal measure. The difficulty of the questions can blow your mind more than any boffins on University Challenge, but it’s a joyous occasion when you manage to tot up your score and feel like you’d be in with a chance. John Humphreys takes the contestants on a roller-coaster ride of challenging questions that even stump them on some of the specialist subjects.

Taking the black chair with the darkened studio must be more pressure than the contestants are ever used to but it makes for intriguing and interesting viewing. The Mastermind champion will have to pass a few gruelling quizzes and make it to the final before pipping the rest of the challengers, but as this is the first of 31 shows they have to be in it for the long-haul. Starting on BBC1 at 8pm on Friday 10 August, the contestants in this programme have their speciality subjects as the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Fawlty Towers, the Life and Times of Elizabeth I and Jane Austen novels.

Again on Friday 10 August, at the same time as Mastermind (8pm) you can choose a little more down-to-Earth programme about food and budgeting with The Food we Eat. Starting on ITV1 Julie Etchingham takes us on an adventure about the food we shovel into our mouth on a daily basis. She looks at a mother of two struggles with feeding her two kids even though her husband has a job and yet the food shelters hand out food to the needy.

Julie shows us how to budget effectively to ensure that we meet all our dietry requirements without having to spend a fortune on fad diets, super foods and how to eat a balanced meal and have money left over at the end of the week. With food prices rising to astonishing levels this is the perfect Friday-night TV to make a change for the following week and start to look at what we eat, why we eat it and how we can make our grocery shopping cheaper.

Something a bit more fun and fast-paced is The Endless Winter a Surfing Special. It starts on Sunday 12 August at 7:30am and starts in England’s number one surfing hotspot of Cornwall. The show depicts how we gained the Californian surfing genre of living and laid-back attitude to the mysterious sport. Although the southeast is the most popular place for surfing the show travels around the UK to visit many surfing venues. Mitch Corbett and Mark Harris present the programme which looks at everything to do with surfing from the history to the gear you need and how to start or how to turn professional.

It comes at the midst of the summer when surfers from around the globe will be heading to the biggest, baddest waves they can find to ride them and practice their skills, gain new ones and hang out with life-minded people that love to live life on the edge. It’s a very different sort of show that graces our TV compared to the reality TV episodes that tend to dominate the line-up and give terrestrial TV watchers something to look forward to.