It’s “the ultimate pest in the ultimate test!” Get ready for Man V Fly on GSN, a new short-form interstitial series premiering Wednesday, Aug. 12, in the 10:30pm ET/PT timeslot after Idiotest. In this battle of human against annoying winged insect, the contestant enters the padded, sealed Fly Dome with a weapon of his/her choice. The fly is then released into the Fly Dome, and the contestant has one minute to kill the fly. A successfully swatted bug wins the contestant a cash prize. Failure to defeat the fly will result in shame for the contestant and freedom for the fly.
Idiotest host and producer Ben Gleib introduces each Man V Fly segment for GSN. Each bout is introduced by announcer John Mate and includes play-by-play commentary and analysis from legendary 1980s Australian World Competitive Fly Swatting Champion, Pat Cowell.
The bouts will air regularly as three- to five-minute interstitials during regular GSN programming, and each new Man V Fly bout will be posted Saturdays on GSN’s YouTube channel.
GSN acquired Man V Fly from the U.K.’s Gogglebox Entertainment, which provides a Britishy description of the series:
“MAN V FLY is the centuries-old sport that codifies the epic battle between man and fly. The rules of the game are simple: one man (or woman, or transgender person, or child), one fly, one minute to kill it for a hundred quid.
The man and the fly inhabit a padded cell, the arena known as the Fly Dome. If the man kills the fly within 60 seconds he wins the money. If the fly survives for the entire minute it is granted manumission and flies off to freedom. There are 9,999 officially-sanctioned methods of killing a fly and each of these is a legitimate technique in Man v Fly. These include the fly being karate chopped by a martial arts blackbelt, slapped with a sea bass, squished by a ballistic pancake, terminated by a pantomime horse, or hunted in a mobility scooter and snuffed with an extendable mop.”
