Fave 0925 game show

Well, as mentioned, in Granadaland Cross Wits went out at 5.10 for a bit, and I vividly remember watching it on Christmas Eve 1996, surely the most appropriate festive viewing imaginable.

The Andrew O'Connor Chain Letters went out in primetime, albeit the opposite-'stEnders death slot at 7.30 on Thursdays, I remember watching it after Top of the Pops. I've got the Scottish Christmas TV Times from 1988 when STV are showing it at 11pm, which seems a bit pointless. Granada showed the Vince Henderson series at 5.10 which was great news for us in the sixth form because we'd got a bit obsessed with it, as we thought Vince was a useless host, coming up with all kind of hopeless catchphrases ("Make yourself a cup of tea, make me one").



Those titles, eh? Sledgehammer they ain't. One interesting thing about that is that there was a second series, but renamed Crazy Comparisons. I don't know if they lost the rights to the name (cos it was based on a board game) or they decided nobody understood what it meant. Not that Crazy Comparisons is any better as a name. That filled the 2.50 slot which was also home to a number of the 9.25 shows at one time or other - Win Lose or Draw, All Clued Up and Jumble were all there for a while, and of course when the 9.25 slot ended, that became the only slot for quizzes. Supermarket Sweep moved there for a bit, none of the others did.

The other regular slot for quizzes was 1.50 on BBC1. Would be nice if someone put together a list of those from Genome. Not going to be me, mind. And for a while they were also repeated at 10am the next morning (except on Monday, when they'd show The Flintstones instead). That would even be the case in the school holidays, I remember first seeing Turnabout in the middle of CBBC at Easter 1990...

http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1990-04-13



I never saw Born Lucky but I remember reading in one of the papers that they were having trouble finding contestants for it because every time Beadle went up to people and asked if they'd like to play it, they all assumed it was some sort of trick. Cheggers did the theme tune, fact fans, and indeed during his wilderness years he got quite a lot of gameful employment from ITV daytime as he also did the music for Keynotes.

The one thing I remember about Jumble is seeing the end of it one day and when the winning contestant was asked what he'd do with his money, he said "I'll make sure my grandchildren have a good Christmas" and Jeff Stevenson said "That'll sound good when this goes out at Easter!", and I have no idea why they didn't retake it. Funny the things, eh?

Just watching that clip of All Clued Up and David Hamilton's voice is rather irritating on it. The way he says the letters in such a high inflection like an overacting American child on an episode of Barney & Friends!

All Clued Up was never the greatest show ever, apart from (IMO) being incredibly irritating it lost one of the gimmicks from the American format which was the rollover contestants and jackpot in favour of being self-contained. That being said it joins the list of American formats that were more successful internationally than they were at home - and there seems to have been a lot of them in the 1980s.

Is that part of the reason they had numerous short run series in the early days then so multiple regions could have a claim on the slot.

Of course, it also lacked the US version's greatest gimmick of all -- it was the first show on US TV to give away $1m in prize money (albeit spread over 10 years).

The market for game shows dried up in the US in the latter part of the 1980s -- the great producers of the genre, Mark Goodson, Merrill Heatter and Bob Stewart went into semi-retirement, and Jack Barry died. The producers that replaced them never had the same success rate in a market that was already flagging and the whole thing pretty much folded. Merv Griffin then cleaned up with Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, both themselves old formats even in the 1980s.

Chain Letters was actually based on a failed pilot, hosted by Jim Peck -- a pilot that bombed so badly that Dan Enright doesn't even seem to have kept a copy.

Not really -- Tyne Tees had quite a few game shows on the go around that time, and UTV had produced Password from 1985 as a local show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAtU122B7wc&t=928s

I have to admit I used to (and still do) really enjoy nice simple Gameshow formats. Modern ‘nasty’ formats where people leave with nothing, get voted off, get sneered at (I’m particularly looking at you Weakest Link) never appealed to me. Most reboots of classic game shows these days seem to rely on ‘celebrity’ teams rather than ‘real people’. Crosswits was always a decent watch (though that admittedly combined ‘real people’ with celebrities quite well) . I quite liked Chain Letters and All Clued Up.

Thinking of the BBC slot in the afternoons, was Turnabout one of those? And wasn’t there a Paul Coia show with some Jean Michel Jarre music as a theme tune? (Maybe that was bbc2)

Turnabout was simple and fast, no padding... your thinking of Catchword.

Turnabout was also hosted by Rob Curling, rather than Paul Coia.



I agree, I think it's Catchword.

Most game shows of the 90s were like that when they stuck to half hour slots. So many formats lately have been strangled at birth by having to fill an hour long slot.

I agree. Some formats such as Millionnaire or The Chase suit an hour-long slot, but I don’t understand the need to pad out others that were historically 30 minutes long.

Deal or No Deal must've been the worst offender of that. Even during its original length, people were saying how drawn out it was. I stopped watching by the time it was extended to an hour so I can only imagine how they filled it.