It’s Opportunity Knocks meets What’s My Line! I think we’d best crack straight on.
Like many Italian shows, the first five minutes before the commercial break is a pre-game show, setting up for the main course. Cultura Moderna is no different.
Here are tonight’s five contestants, along with the show’s dancing mascot (lobster? alien?) Gabibbo.
Absolutely BONKERS.
Meanwhile, here’s our host Teo Mammucari and that all important €500,000 sign. They’re rather fond of this, and it flashes up 14 or 15 times throughout the proceedings.
It’s not an Italian gameshow without a pretty dancing girl acting as the assistant, and here she is. It’s Juliette, everybody!
The trolley of shells is wheeled on.
This is important for the contestants as it determines the order of play. The further down the order you are, the better the chances of you winning.
Everyone picks a shell.
Inside each shell is one of the numbers one to five. A middling draw for this gentleman here.
Commerical break.
Here’s our tropical beach set, looking a little bit like what our Man o Man set looked like.
And there are the baying punters in the pit.
Dance music.
What is that thing meant to be?
Note the yellow slide tantilizingly in the background.
If you’ve forgotten, there’s €500,000 up for grabs this evening.
And this is what it’s all about.
Hidden in this cabin is a famous celebrity. All our contestants have to do is guess who it is. If they do that, they win €500,000. Easy!
Of course, there are lots of celebrities, so our contestants are going to be given the chance to narrow their odds a little.
Our first contestant walks on set, rather boringly.
And he’s doing a comedy double-act with someone (pretending?) to be his brother.
Each act lasts about a minute.
The unseen jury now give their verdict – one, two or three marks? He’s been given a two.
This means that he can two questions to narrow down the identity of the hidden celeb. As is traditional, he can only ask questions which have yes or no responses.
Usually the host will answer the question for them. It’s a woman.
Sometimes though he needs to get confirmation from the celeb. In these cases, he runs over to the cabin, knocks on the side and the celeb posts a card (presumably with "yes" or "no") out of a slit.
She’s not a Mediaset personality.
And there’s his guess. Not much to go on, really.
As you can see, the advantage of being further down the order is that you have all the previous contestant’s clues to go on as well.
Here’s contestant number two.
YES! HE! IS! COMING! DOWN! THE! SLIDE!
Amazing.
This gentleman is doing a song on the guitar. The Orangutang Song it appears to be called, and it seems to involve singing the word orangutang over and over.
Two marks!
No you’re not seeing things, this gentlemen really is about to slide down a fireman’s pole.
And he’s doing some very impressive perfomrance dance. This is how it ends.
Two marks!
But it’s better than that!
A klaxon goes off, and Gabibbo runs out to give him a bonus clue.
"Ha inciso molti dischi," apparently.
Act four is coming down some stairs.
And she’s doing some lovely opera. Lovely.
And she’s really very good at it as well.
That’s fully deserving of the three marks maximum!
We’ve forgotten to take a picture of it, but the previous clues (although only the first seven, for whatever reason) are listed on the giant screen, as are the previous guesses.
Here’s act five, walking an invisible dog.
I bet we can all see where this is going…
Well we’re wrong, as Juliette walks the dog off stage.
Instead, he’s going to stuff his face with goodness-knows-what, and then pull it all again and then some as one long string of goodness-knows-what.
Two marks!
The contestants are all bought out again to reiterate their guesses.
This is built up with tension inducing heart beats in the background. The €500,000 sign reacts to the heartbeats.
It’s time to open the cabin!
Who is today’s mystery guest?
It’s the legendary Catherine Spaak!
No winners this time on Cultura Moderna!
And everyone gets to dance over the end credits. Lovely.
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It’s a bit of a huge prize for this sort of thing, isn’t it?
I think only like three people ever won on it.
Also I think it was competing against the very popular Affari Tuoi. I’m sure someone will come along and correct it in a minute.