Happy birthday Noel!

It’s Christmas! And that means it’s Noel’s birthday, and this year he can claim a bus pass as the erstwhile Deal or No Deal host turns 65. I expect he’s not about to retire any time soon!

So in the spirit here’s a clip from Noel Edmonds’ Saturday Roadshow, made in the days when the BBC could afford to build a different lavish set every week. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find full episodes of this precursor to Noel’s House Party, but thanks to gunge fetishists (I’m not asking) there are plenty of examples of the Gunge Tank Game (in actual fact called In Other Words) played every week, or at least the aftermath.

Usually played with a celeb and a civilian, the civilian who stands to be gunged gambles on whether they’ll get 3, 4 or 5 word puzzles correct within 90 seconds for better prizes. Noel would try and convey words to a celeb, and when they said the word it would go into a puzzle, and if you say all the words in a puzzle together and in a certain way they’d usually make the name of something. If the civilian doens’t make the bid, they get gunged. If they do make the bid, they usually get gunged anyway. The contestant doesn’t have to wait for all the puzzle to fill in before guessing.

This clip comes from one of the later episodes and the rules are slightly different – the contestant gets a list of prizes and picks one prize per puzzle. Each prize comes with an attached point value but these are unknown to the player (but the bigger prizes tend to have higher points). The player must not only complete five puzzles in the time but they must not go over 100 points, otherwise they meet a messy end.

That’s the game, they’ve set this one up slightly differently. Fun game and a great little clip.