Hello I am Brig Bother (not my real name, obviously), and I write ‘will-this-do?’ game show gossip and opinion site Bother’s Bar and wrote loads of the encyclopaedic UKGameshow Page. I’ve been writing about the genre online for over fifteen years and, like most thirty-year-olds, don’t dare to re-read any of the stuff I came up with more than about three years ago.

Shouting at Cows has asked if I would like to write a piece on “brilliantly terrible game show conceits”.

At this juncture it may help to have a brief history of the genre. Basically, pre-1998, game shows were fun happy affairs where hosts always wore spangly jackets and the theme tunes were always created by Simon Etchell. The best person always won and they’d get to play an endgame where they’d win a thousand pounds if they could get six questions correct in a minute, otherwise they would go home with a Teasmade.

Great days. Unfortunately they were ruined when Who Wants to be a Millionaire? came along, got twenty million viewers and changed television forever; what swiftly followed was the reality game show boom. Dark metallic sets, jeopardy, lengthy pauses and high emotions became the norm. Games are set up so that the results are always in doubt and if something unjust happens, well that’s just good television. And if we can’t give away large amounts of money, then interpersonal conflict is always exciting, isn’t it?

People publically clamour for the old days, yet when Don’t Scare the Hare was on, nobody watched it. Public, it’s YOUR FAULT. And whilst it would be very easy to make jokes about 3-2-1 (but then there wouldn’t actually be much of a show if the riddles were as easily gettable as “Get in me/we’ll go far/but fill me up first/because I’m the car”), because of that here are some of the more interesting, less good ideas of modern times.

Heads or Tails

Peter Serofinowicz did this as a gag on his sketch show; Channel 5 decided to do it for real and apparently without irony in 2009, fronted by Justin Lee Collins. People try and predict if a coin toss will result in heads or tails, banking money when they get it correct. For an hour. It even included lifelines and celebrity guest advisors, such as Dane Bowers. In the show’s end game, players could double their stake up to a million quid with cumulative correct guesses, losing half if they get it wrong. Of course most people saw the five figures in front of them, said “thanks very much” and ran off quite quickly. Fun fact: the guy who created this show, JD Roth, hosted the US version of Fun House for a number of years.

The Big Call

This show was in development for an extraordinary length of time which made the end result (it’s a buzzer quiz where you team up with a celebrity partner) all the more baffling. The show’s big selling point was that if you won, you got a choice of prize: either £20,000 cash or 100,000 lottery tickets for that evening’s draw. Professor Geoffrey Grimmett of Cambridge University used various different systems, including the different odds of winning different amounts of money, to choose the lottery numbers e.g. covering most of the numbers, sticking all 100,000 tickets on the combinations of about 12 numbers, that sort of thing. The result was that anyone taking the tickets rarely won more than the £20k standard prize and sometimes considerably less, excepting the last episode where they lucked out with five plus bonus.  The prize not selected by the telly contestant was given to someone who called into a premium rate competition they advertised approximately every other minute.

Public Property

An immediate clamour for interactivity was one of the more interesting phenomena to come out of the Big Brother reality game show mould. Channel 4’s capitalisation on this was a show called Eden; it featured young people on an island and viewers voting in various polls determining aspects of island life. ITV’s attempt to cash in on the trend was Public Property which ran briefly in the post-CITV teatime slot. Three contestants had their entire lives dictated by voting members of the public, and the contestants could appeal to the “council” if they didn’t like the decisions. At the end of the series, the person judged to have made the most of the dictated decisions would win a major prize. Except we think it was axed before then. It didn’t do very well in America either.

Clearly there is something to be said for keeping grand interactivity pretty simple. We might be Big Brother, but our only real influence is in determining who we like/dislike the most.

The Moment of Truth

Not the Cilla thing; this is the format from – where else? – Colombia, that we knew over here as Nothing But The Truth with Jerry Springer (who is surprisingly decent as a game show host).  The US version of the show – called The Moment Of Truth – was presented by Mark L Walberg, a talented host not to be confused with the singer and actor Marky Mark. Contestants take a questionnaire whilst hooked up to a polygraph. In the studio, a selection of these questions is read back to the contestant and all they have to do is respond truthfully as per the results of the polygraph.

Naturally, friends and family are watching. And naturally, the questions get more embarrassing and personal as more money is accrued. The viewer ends up sympathising with the friends and family watching because the contestant is earning all the money but the shame is shared equally. They get a button they can use once if they don’t want to hear the answer to a question. This clip neatly sums the show up and you’ll want a shower soon after. I found it jaw-dropping and amazing for about three episodes, then took a long hard look at my life and got bored of it. It made two seasons in the US, but it sounds like they’re thinking about remaking it for syndication.

The People’s Quiz

The X Factor is for singing, Britain’s Got Talent is for, er, talent. Red or Black is for luck. But what happened when you applied all of Simon Cowell’s tropes for quizzing? Jamie Theakston, ably assisted by “Quiz Gods” William G Stewart (yep, fine), Kate Garraway (hmm) and Myleene Klass (eh?), intended to find out. What we learn is that a general format that relies on the personalities of contestants to provide a viewer ‘in’ struggles with a group of people that tends to be fairly introvert in a staging few can take seriously and even fewer bothered watching, despite the £200,700 on offer (so few in fact that The National Lottery dropped its association with the show a few episodes in). It aimed to find the best quizzer then employed all sorts of rubbish swerve questions to ensure the best quizzer didn’t have the best chance of winning, but at least runner-up Mark Labett now gets to answer questions on The Chase for a living.

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