Sally Lindsay takes over Tenable at 3pm today, hosting the remaining 25 episodes of the series.
What other examples of gameshow job sharing can we come up with? Off the top of my head:
- Dermot Murnaghan and Jeremy Vine on Eggheads for a bit.
- Various rota-ed hosts on the old Channel 5 lunchtime shows, Brain Teaser, Memory Bank, Wordplay. Also the late night quiz phone-ins, no need to list them.
- Emma and Rylan on Big Brother’s Bit On The Side.
To be clear, not interested in co-hosts or indeed guest hosts, we want shows that had different regular lead hosts during the same series.
Could we count Alan Taylor and Derek Batey alternating on the early networked series of Mr and Mrs in the early 70s? I suppose not really as , with different studios (HTV and Border), sets and even signature tunes they were essentially two different productions. Even though in the early days each presenter would crop up on the last show of the other’s run for an official handover, which I found quite interesting at the time.
Countdown had Colin Murray step in for a bit
On the continent, Frederic Meisner and Peter Bond essentially job-shared for the entire Sat.1 run of Glücksrad (T’German Wheel of Fortune); the best part of 9 1/2 years.
What about Dick and Dom and Noel Edmonds on the two different versions of Are You Smarter….?
That always puzzled me.
I think they wanted a bigger name for primetime and Noel was the *next big thing* for Sky at the time (remember Noel’s HQ?!)
On a similar note, wasn’t there a short period where Cheap as chips still presented some short lived primetime Bargain Hunt after Wonnacott had taken over the daytime version? (which in itself has been ‘guest hosted’ for years, although from a pool of regulars now)
I noticed Warwick’s tweet earlier said he was in ‘pre-production for another project’. Which does beg the question why weren’t either project moved? It’s not like Tenable is on year round like the other 2 ITV quizzes, so it would’ve made more sense to move the filming dates…
The pre-production is likely for the Willow sequel series for Disney+, so there’s probably a ton of work involved in just getting things ready for filming…
I strongly suspect one or both of them had already been moved once as a result of a lockdown. It’s the reason Prue didn’t do Junior Bake Off earlier this year.
Although that contradicts the earlier reports Sally recorded 2 a day and Warwick 1, unless he did one in the morning then went off elsewhere in the afternoon I suppose.
I guess most examples will be where daytime/primetime hosts have differed, or previously regional/national hosts or a different host for a spin-off of the same format. Only addition example I can think of in recent years is Adam Hills and Sandi Toksvig on 15 to 1.
Bake Off is another one – may largely have the same hosts for the main show but seems to have different hosts for every spin-off, and even in the BBC days the celeb version just had Mel rather than Mel and Sue.
I think the BBC celeb Bake Offs were even stranger sometimes, I remember Sarah Millican hosting one.
To be honest, mainly happy they’ve dropped the “Ready! Set! Bake for Sport Relief!” from the SU2C specials.
It’s happened quite a few times in the US, including:
The 70’s version of The Jokers Wild had Jim Peck substitute host for Jack Barry a ton of times (and Barry was going to announce his hosting retirement in fall 1984 and name Peck the new host while he remained behind the scenes, but Barry died during the summer hiatus and the producers wanted a bigger name as a replacement, so Bill Cullen was named as the host instead for the last 2 years)
Daytime Wheel of Fortune had Chuck Woolery for the first six years, then he left in a contract dispute, Pat Sajak took over for the next 8 years, then left the daytime version while still hosting the nighttime version, Rolf Benirschke took over for a while, then Bob Goen took over when the show changed networks (and then changed back for the rest of the daytime run)
Slight correction to Wheel of Fortune: the daytime Wheel was canceled in 1991, so Bob Goen was the last host of the daytime version. The nighttime syndicated version with Pat is the one that continues to this day.
The 1990-91 version of To Tell The Truth had no less than 3 hosts during it’s one-season run, first with Gordon Elliot (Who left due to a contract dispute), then NFL player Lynn Swann (Who was a regular panellist at the time) and finally the great Alex Trebek… and that’s not even counting the pilot episodes presented by Richard Kline (one of which was accidently broadcast in some states!) and producer Mark Goodson, who filled in for Trebek when, no joke, the latter’s wife went into labour during filming!
Also Roland’s Rat Race had two co-presenters during it’s one and only series, Roy “Stan” Sampson for the qualifiers and for the finals he was replaced by… Nicholas Parsons!
If we are allowing celebrity versions then the Toksvig/Hills 15-1 is one.
Are you Smarter than a Ten Year Old? had a third presenter too (or fourth if you count Dick and Dom as two people). It was some jolly gentleman.
I think we might have had a discussion on this on the Discord not too long ago. Oddly, my go-to is Saturday mornings, where I distinctly recall Skull from Ghost Train had whichever of the main hosts was free hosting the show. I’ve a nagging half-feeling Fully Booked’s Buried Treasure – in at least one of the iterations – swapped the role of ‘host’ and ‘team captain’ between the show’s two main hosts as well.
And, of course, there’s The Shiny Show.
I’ve noticed that Warwick hasn’t been his regular self on recent episodes, sounding very bored almost? He’s been trending on twitter a few times with confused fans asking about it when new episodes of Tenable air
Does Star In Their Eyes and its kids series count with the sort of transition from Matthew Kelly to Cat Deeley?
I think very few of the examples given really fit the bill, but here’s one that I think fits the spirit as well as the letter of your request. After Colin Murray exiled himself to TalkSport, Fighting Talk had a bit of a rotation in hosts for a while. There was one year where Christian O’Connell came back some of the time, Jonathan Pearce hosted some of the time and Wikipedia suggests Matt Johnson did others that year, and then there were a couple of years where hosting duties were shared between presenter Georgie Thompson and comedian Josh Widdicombe.
I had to look the details up, but I did remember FT as a member of the category.
Fighting Talk is a great example. I’m surprised FT survived beyond that first post Colin Murray year – the O’Connell episodes were great, but it was seriously dodgy the rest of the time – Matt Johnson I think the production team admitted on Facebook did his bare minimum contracted episodes (I think he disappeared towards the end of the season), and neither him nor Pearce had ever heard the show before.
Georgie and Josh were actually a good pair and the job share worked really well. Josh was a frequent panellist before he was host, so it’s a shame he’s never came back. A former hosts special would actually be pretty decent .
Yes, this is the correct answer really.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more. A reason why it is so rare among game shows is that, in many cases, many episodes or even a whole series tends to be recorded at a time and it would be unusually laborious, inefficient and expensive to have more than one host at the same set of tapings.
It does invite a question, though, as to which are the most recent UK TV game shows to have been broadcast live (or part-live as per Talking Telephone Numbers, or at least sufficiently close to recording that they can’t be recorded in a batch) – and, ideally, with such frequency that it might make sense for there to be different hosts on a regular basis. They’re not really A Thing any more, are they? (HIGNFY springs to mind, but as you noted at the start, they have a different host every week!)
Was always amusing back in the pre Fathers 4 Justice days when the main presenters of the lottery game shows had to turn up live for the draw trying to look as identical to how they looked in the recorded earlier in the week segments!
Must have been annoying for them to have to race to a studio every Saturday and Wednesday evening just to do 10 minutes of live TV!
I’m thinking The Vault, Magic Numbers or indeed lottery shows like Jet Set and Winning Lines. But there must be something more recent!
The original LIVE Million LIVE Pound Drop…LIVE.
The Bank Job was live for…some reason, wasn’t it?
Both great answers.
To be a cautionary tale for producers everywhere, and for us all.
I’m tempted to wonder whether TV transmission being much slower in the digital age than in the analogue one (due to encoding, compression, decompression, buffering and surely myriad other reasons) has made live interactive TV less feasible than it used to be, or whether it could still be done but only more like an old-school radio phone-in where people are told to turn their radio off and listen to the host over the phone, rather than to what they’re saying, after delay, on the airwaves.