I was trying to find a Doctor Who related clip for this weekend, the show’s fiftieth anniversary (you might have noticed). I thought about Tom Baker as the Captain on Challenge’s Fort Boyard but thought that a bit too obvious, so I tried finding Sylvester McCoy on Jigsaw or Starstrider but couldn’t find any. And then! And then! I thought Timebusters because that had Patrick Troughton’s son in it but that doesn’t exist on Youtube, and then I saw someone had put up an entire episode of Virtually Impossible and thought “sod it”. Except I can’t embed it.
So here’s the opening sequence of Cyber Zone with Craig Charles off of Red Dwarf.
In the absence of evidence one way or the other, I’m hoping that that theme wasn’t by Ed Welch. Nice background horn for a second and a half, shame about the rest.
Changing the subject, here’s a possibly interesting piece of UK game show trivia that I can’t recall being mentioned before.
I was surprised to learn that, according to both UKGS.com and Wikipedia, at least one TV game show (*) has appeared on four different UK channels. I’m not talking about Christmas specials, charity one-offs, repeats, radio versions or Game Show Marathon celebrity episodes. Furthermore, I’m not using the cop-out of considering “The Family Channel” to be different to Challenge or anything like that; it had first-run series on four different channels (indeed, the four primary channels) at different times. That’s pretty impressive when you consider it. Name the show!
Follow-up question: are there any others for which similarly, or more, impressive claims can be made? Does relaxing the criteria mean there are other shows with similar, or more impressive, claims?
(*) Or, perhaps, a succession of game shows with the same name – but, in practice, I genuinely think it is substantially the same show with the same name.
The best I can do off the top of my head is Jeopardy which was C4, ITV and Sky One. Perhaps there was a secret fourth one.
Off the back of this we’ve been talking at work about which game show might have had the most different hosts over it’s time.
For a one-host-show I’m betting on Chain Letters at six, with Gladiators as the two-host-show with six as well although if all UK Fort Boyard’s are fundamentally the same show, then that does seven. No real idea about multi-host shows, maybe knockout?
Have I Got News For You, surely?
It doesn’t take very much cheating to get Countdown having seven: you simply declare 8 out of 10 Cats to be the same show, then count Jimmy Carr, then you count William G. Stewart’s one-off hosting job as well. If that’s too much cheating for you, just wait another three or four years and the show will probably have got to seven properly. OK, I’m being very conservative by saying “three or four”.
Family Fortunes has five so long as you consider All-Star not to be distinct from civilian, plus you could stretch to two more by counting Ant and Dec in their Game Show Marathon. (Mmm, there’s a thought: shows that have been hosted by both one person and two at different points, but it’s very hard to work out what the distinction between two hosts and host-plus-co-host is.)
For adjudication on this, let’s turn to ukgameshows: it lists Countdown as having had 6 including WGS’s one-off, but counts 8oo10 as a separate show. For Family Fortunes it lumps All-Star in there, and includes Ant and Dec bringing the total to 7. But curiously, for rotating host shows HIGNFY and Buzzcocks, it doesn’t just list “many guest hosts” or such, it actually includes probably-not-full lists, giving HIGNFY a total of 89 (including the Masterchef hosts as two separate hosts and Nick Hancock on Have I Got Sport for You, but not John Lloyd on the unaired pilot), and Buzzcocks a total of 45 hosts (not double counting Simon Amstell guest hosting and his reign as permanent host) making it probably second.
(nothing linked to avoid the spam filter, you know where to find all this)
The UKGS elves have been given a talking-to, and thrown a few back issues of The Radio Times, and HIGNFY and Buzzcocks have host lists updated.
Fighting Talk hit 20 hosts last weekend, with Freddie Flintoff’s guest turn. The Personality Test, a Radio 4 quiz designed to have a different host each week, ran for 16 episodes.
I’m not sure how I feel about guest hosts, I think HIGNFY is deliberately cheating to get up the rankings.
Ant and Dec on the other hand are one person, well, one presenting team, in my eyes. Even if you count them as two, that makes all their GM formats two-host affairs and disqualifies them anyway!
I had a few ideas to look up on ukgs and a cheeky one paid off, Come Dancing has been passed around more than a hot potato with ten regular hosts (Plus four if you include Strictly). Another in the ‘but is it a game show’ category is World’s Strongest Man with fourteen hosts (and four different channels too).
Yeah, these days it’s more of a ‘sporting event likely to be of interest’ now it’s all professional, it’s lost a lot of the showmanship and imaginative looking events it certainly once had. The format’s basically exactly the same as Jeux Sans Frontieres, so it’s a fine line.
Password! (BBC 2, BBC 1
Good answer! I knew it did one of the BBC channels and definitely ITV and C4, but not both!
… C4 and ITV. It’s due a revival on Channel 5.
Correct! Fun while it lasted. I was hoping people might guess Blockbusters.
There must be some more interesting threes (for instance, I had forgotten all about Jeopardy) and I wouldn’t be that surprised if there were other fours as well, hence the sneaky (er, cop-out-y?) “at least” in the original question.
Wouldn’t mind a revival at all and 5 seems as good a place as any. Surely wouldn’t be too hard to shoehorn a call-and-lose in, in the style of Brainteaser.
The reversioned Million Dollar Password is still going in France, I think, although the stakes are a fair bit lower.
Yep – every Saturday on France 2, €50k top prize.
Also, french news – Tout le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place’s win record got broken this week – the new record-holder, Julien, lost quickly after with a final tally of 152 wins (€154000 won)
Am I being thick, or isn’t Blockbusters a perfectly good answer? ITV, BBC2, Sky One and Challenge TV?
*reads the question again*
Yes, I’m being thick.
I can only add Fort Boyard for ITV/Five+Challenge and Through The Keyhole for BBC1/2/ITV+Sky One
It’s an even better answer than I’d thought (I’ll let you decide which version I had completely forgotten along the way) and it’s only the last little cover-my-butt “the four primary channels” addition I made at the last minute that spares my blushes. One to you, though!
Mastermind?
BBC One / Two and Discovery. But in its ‘downtime years’ I wonder if it had a run on another commercial channel as a repeat or a one off special.
Radio Four and S4C!
Easily good enough for me!
And this feeds into the Most Hosts thread above. Mastermind has had a few regular hosts: Magnus Magnusson (BBC1), Peter Snow (Radio 4), Clive Anderson (Discovery), John Humphries (BBC2), Betsan Powys (S4C); there’s also Des Lynam (Sport Mastermind) and Nora Owen (TV3 in Ireland).
The intersection between Doctor Who and game shows might just be a clip on this page by one Simon Cartwright, of whom I am not aware, impersonating Bob Monkhouse with skill and passion (though, arguably, insufficiently many chuckles) and discussing said links. It’s part of TV Cream’s very loosely specified but lovingly and skilfully made “50 greatest Doctor Who moments” podcast series.
Yes, mentioned this on Twitter a few days ago, I think it’s a very convincing impression – initially at least, I’m told he’s the official Bob impersonator.
And yes, the set of podcasts is a lot of fun, Doctor Who fan or not.