Extremely excited about this! Mister Doc who has been hitting it out of the park with his archive Youtube channel recently is going to put up two episodes of Trick or Treat, the first one Monday at 6pm.
So for the uninitiated this was LWT’s take on Let’s Make a Deal, albeit through the prism of the IBA’s games of skill and prize limit rules which went out on Saturday evenings in 1989. It was hosted by Mike Smith and, in one of his earliest regular TV gigs, Julian Clary as The Joan Collins Fan Club – would expect this to have been quite a brave decision for ITV in 1989.
I distinctly used to remember the endgames where all the show’s winners came back to win the star (or not so star prize) which usually involved picking one of several keys, Julian going off to lie down in a darkened room, one player trying a key and getting eliminated and Julian then “finding” another key off-stage, too late for the eliminated player – I wonder if you could get away with that wheeze now.
The eight-year-old me remembers really enjoying this so it will be interesting to see how well it stands up 35 years later.
Trick or Treat is really interesting, the low rent Bits of Business and Julian genuinely make me laugh but ultimately I’m not sure Mike Smith can sell the games and they seem to go on a bit.
Two fun things of note: produced by Michael Hurll (lots of Peak Noel Edmonds stuff amongst other things), and John Mealing did the theme (Bob’s Full House, Every Second Counts etc al).
Another episode of it’s up. The casting of Mike Smith is strange in retrospect – you only hire Smitty if you want Little Noely and can’t get him, and I’m not sure that even Little Noely would have been the first choice of host.
There’s a world in which Beadle makes this his next big weekend show instead of You’ve Been Framed, which becomes a cheap evening filler instead. (Matthew Kelly plays second banana rather than Julian Clary, at least to begin with, making it feel a bit cosier.) The exciting thing is that Beadle is able to ride it through to the point when the prize limits are lifted and he’s able to pull off some really pretty mighty juxtapositions of good and bad prizes for effect. Raise The Roof wants to give away houses? Beadle wants to as well – just some of them happen to be derelict / doll-sized / in wartorn countries.
I pose a counterfactual, you write fanfic, he makes crap up.
The Tutankamhun/Tooting Common gag is quite funny, God knows how convoluted they made the idea of picking cards to get there. And why the bloke who didn’t get his question right in the first place? Crazy.
It feels like Smith is reading the games off his cards and this is his first time seeing them. You’re right, Beadle would have been brilliant at this.