Because it’s quiet, I thought I’d link to a video.

Growing up, I had a lot of fond memories of an Italian show called Il Grande Gioco dell’Oca, an apparently live show that used to go out on Friday nights on Rai Due, back when you could get those sorts of channels on cable. The Grand Game of Goose, as it translates to, was a giant board game – contestants roll the dice (apparently pre-loaded so as to make sure the show doesn’t overrun too much, contestants pick their colour by lot) and move forward earning cash for each square passed. When they land they might earn a bonus or penalty, but more usually they’d be given a stunt to do. These were sometimes funny, sometimes action packed, usually scary and occasionally quite disgusting and almost certainly dangerous looking. The contestant makes a bet on them completing the stunt from the money earnt. The one contestant who manages to land on the final space by exact count (if time was running out they’d drop the stunts to find a winner) won whatever they had built up.

Well this just blew my tiny little 11-14 year old mind (I forget when), I hadn’t seen Fort Boyard by this point yet I don’t think, but I do remember Clive James mentioning it on one of his shows, alongside clips of a contestant with his feet in quick dry cement trying to chisel his way to freedom, and an older contestant trying to keep his heart rate down whilst some scantily-clad females danced around him.

I later discovered the Italian one decended from a Spanish show, El Gran Juego de la Oca, and the clips I’ve seen suggest it’s copied pretty much exactly. So with this in mind, here is a clip from a later version of the Spanish original, in which a man attempts to staple some overalls with himself to a bit of board with a view to hanging on for ten seconds when it’s lifted into the air. Also includes dancing girls!

I’ve always really wanted a full episode of this to do a feature on. Maybe it will happen in the future.

Tom Scott off of Treasure Hunt sent me a link to a part of a show of his, The Technical Difficulties, called The Battle of the Beer. If nothing else, it’s very well produced, but lucky it is something else, and that something else is being quite fun.

Well that’s my next hour-and-a-half ruined/sorted, it’s The Grand Knockout Tournament!

Features a pre-Nightshade Nightshade from Gladiators!

Thanks to Setsunael for flagging this up on a forum elsewhere, it’s Les Bon Gènies, France’s very French version of Match Game (i.e. Blankety Blank) It is, of course, hosted by the legendary Patrice Laffont, and this clip comes from 1996.

You have the internet’s Tony du Mont to thank for discovering this, the entire Krypton Factor 1989 final… from New Zealand. Dougal Stevenson hosts.

Part 2 can be found here and the final part here.

There’s something that’s slightly off about it, I think it’s the pacing. They’d stopped doing knockout mental agility rounds in the UK by ’89 (correct me if I’m wrong), here with intriguing scoring. The intelligence test feels like it goes on for ages (or I think so anyway). Incidentally, the rather brilliant The Last Duet with O’ Connor and Martin was also used in the UK 1988 final. We’ve no idea why it shows the ‘general knowledge’ sequence when they mean ‘observation’. Also interesting use of non-diagetic background music you wouldn’t have found in the UK version.

So all I need to see now are a) really old UK episodes, b) 1995 UK episodes and c) the brilliantly titled German version, The Krypton Faktor, which from what I’ve discerned seemed to consist of about 26 different rounds, and then I can be happy.

Incidentally a lot of people coming here searching for information on the Spanish The Whole 19 Yards. What you’re looking for here is Los Ultimos 20 Metros. Yes there are videos, but be aware that it sounds as though the show’s being modified a bit for the UK audiences (four contestants, “a tense endgame” and up to £100,000 to be won). Let’s hope they aren’t doing the rather cheap thing with the questions to determine the money where the first clue is something like “place”. I’ve applied for a ticket, so.

I watched a little bit of Take Me Out over the week and whilst not completely awful or anything, it did seem to lack a certain something. Substance, I think it was.

But over ten years ago ITV were doing a sort of similar thing on Saturday nights based on a popular European format of the time: Man O Man. “Girls,” the theme tune rhetorically asks, “what are we looking for?” before ending with “they don’t have to be cool they just have to be fun, a perfect body doesn’t matter just a cute little bum!” In Man O Man, a group of confident guys attempt to impress a large group of women across a number of different disciplines (talent, chat-up lines, swimming trunks, that sort of thing) in order to win a motorbike. And if they fail, Nell McAndrew pushes them into a swimming pool.

The show did alright – it only got one series but was bought back for several one-off specials over the next few years with a more modern looking set.

Of course loads of people said “yeah, but you couldn’t do it the other way round could you?” and the answer is “no, of course not, and that is because of history and gender differences which aren’t just going to go away just because it’s suddenly the 1990s.” Besides anything else, Man o Man was basically immensely silly and hence entertaining.

Have you ever got up in the morning and thought to yourself “hmm, what I really want right now is the ability to watch every single title seuqnece of Treasure Hunt with Kenneth Kendall in sequential chronological order”? Did you think that very thing this morning? Well, I like to make dreams come true, so here is a video somebody else put up of precisely that very thing:

Yes.

In the eighties, did you think Blockbusters was rather futuristic? Well you were wrong, because it was not as futuristic looking as the German version of the format, Super Grips.

Unfortunately, what we really wanted to show you was a video of the show that had their version of the Gold Run actually overlaid across the whole screen, turning the contestant purple behind it. It is a rather spooky effect, unfortunately I can’t find that video now.