I'm a bit confused about all the seasons and series. Does series 3 start on Thursday, the game which I believe is the first after the recording break?

As far as I'm concerned, it's like this:

Season 1: Episode #1 to #234, 31/10/05 to 22/7/06.
Season 2: Episode #235, 28/8/06, finishing in Summer 2007.

Series 1: First 66 episodes commissioned
Series 2: The next set of episodes commisioned (200?)
Series 3: ?

And then there's the recording break to consider...

Yep, that's pretty much the size of it.

I think this November-December break doesn't count. Not entirely sure why they're doing it...maybe because the backlog is ludicrously huge at the moment, being June shows, and they wanted to cut down on it?

June shows?! You means the ones that are being shown at the moment were recorded in June?! (Which they were.) I was just wondering where the June - October filming break fitted in... did that mark the end of series 2 and the beginning of series 3?

I just found this on Wikipedia:

I don't think that takes into account the fact that a week of shows near the end of Series 2 was lost due to Noel being ill...Series 3 will start a bit sooner because of that.

So there'll be a gap of a few months between Wednesday's show and Thursday's? Crazy. I guess that explains Ken's early go, though - they must have wanted to play him before the break in case he got ill again before October.

I think your right

I think we'll know for sure on Thursday - someone's bound to have a different hairstyle or something (I think Kelly has curlier hair, looking at the picture in the Guardian article)!

They might do something even more obvious like add new captions or change the box appearances....

Eyes peeled for tomorrow's game... possibly the first to be recorded after the June - October filming break... in fact, I'm pretty sure tomorrow's game is the 1st of the October run.

Look out for:

New hairstyles
People getting fatter
People getting thiner
Tans changing
People acting as though they they are refreshed after a break
People slipping up and saying "It's good to be back" (although I bet they'd edit that out)
People forgetting about the "past few games" (although who could forget Jeff's, and I'm sure they'd be briefed before the show to remind them what happened in June anyway)
Watches changing (I'm obessessed with wristwatches )

I'll keep my eyes peeled

And of course, the 'Spoiler' thread is now safe to read from all posts up to the beginning of October. I never ever read it usually (hate spoilers), but I'm reading the April-Early October posts now to see which spoilers were real, and which weren't!