Well this is a bit of a turn-up, an entire episode of Box Clever on Youtube. I used to bloody love this when I was about five.
In this show football player and Question of Sport captain Emelyn Hughes spends about twenty minutes explaining the rules of the game (UKGameshows has a good explanation, but it can be boiled down to: answer questions to turn squares your colour, if you don’t complete the set your opponents can nick it, try and box your opponents in on the board – it’s a bit like Blockbusters but you’re trying to claim territory). Hughes frankly not a great host, Dr Sue Kingsman has some quite fun questions (although seems to allow multiple guesses on a whim), aurally and sonically it is very eighties. Also was there a second computer game with a dog that I remember, presumably that’s series two.
I make Hughes’ rules explanation for this two minutes and twenty-five seconds.
In the days when Tara TV used to broadcast Irish shows over here, there was a brilliant schools quiz whose name I sadly can’t remember but at the start of every programme there was a 3 minute lecture on how to play the game. I never did fully understand the rules but its gameplay was not a million miles away from Box Clever.
Ooh, with Derek Mooney.
(rustles around) a-ha! Nine minutes of this should confuse anyone; it’s edited down from an original half-hour.
If you can explain what a Gridlock is, please write to Derek Mooney care of RTE in Donnybrook, because he’d still like to know.
Aw, I don’t think it’s THAT complicated:
* Questions on the buzzer, 10 points each. If you get one right you have to sit the next question out.
* If you can plot a diagonal of three or four boxes you get a bonus.
* If you fill up the last box of a quadrant you score a bonus and the quadrant disappears.
* You have to be able to place a block next to one if your colour, if you force the board so that it’s impossible for someone to do that in a quadrant you can shout ‘gridlock!’ and score a bonus.
It’s not actually that tough, although in Brig’s Big Book Of Audience Rules you should try and avoid using words like ‘quadrant’.
Hooray, wonderful find and nice to scratch the mental itch.
I think one of the things I missed when watching this originally was that only diagonals score the bonuses, not any direction like Turnabout.
For those interested, this is all coming from someone cataloguing all their old VHS tapes. For those interested it’s http://vhistory.wordpress.com/
That IS interesting, I wonder what else might turn up.
Quintessential Bar post, this one, thank you. I particularly enjoyed the description on UKGS of the raspberries as Crackerjack-like, so thank you whoever wrote that. (Might’ve been me years ago!)
Like you, I was delighted to see this again and had mentally filed this away under shows I would never get to see again, but someone has done the business on YouTube. (And yet still nobody has uploaded the episode of Britain’s Brightest where Liane and the young bloke play the escape-the-room game? I live in hope.) The whole thing does feel badly like a slightly underrehearesed pilot; I remembered Hughes as being very good, though the evidence suggests far otherwise (again, first episode!) and the Kingsland blooper is funny, but arguably gameplay-prejudicial to the point where I’ve very surprised they didn’t stop the tape and redo the round. The question-writing is very variable, though more in length than in difficulty, which is a big issue in a show like this where the length of questions is crucial in a short timed round. I’d very happily watch several more episodes of this.
The other thing that surprises me is how game-y the show sets the bar as being, to the point where it (mis-?)sets my explanations of how game-y an audience will take. It may well be that the audience, back then, had rather more patience for game-y games than is the case now; on the other hand, this only got two series, and the properly game-y R->G->B->R initial rules of Turnabout only got two series as well, and that might be an indication why they only got two series (and possibly even those might have been off two-series initial commissions).
I wonder if there will be any pre-massive lake in the middle set Turnabout turning up anywhere.
Also from the wonderful world of youtube. Have some Scavengers in, Italian I think. a whole 3 minutes forty-seven seconds, from the brief glimpse of the game shown, I’d say it is not one of the UK ones.
Ooh, it’s the Spanish one!
Interesting to note they’re four individuals, not two teams.
I understand that the original set of games was devised on the basis of having a team of 4 with a “players vs the game” mechanic (a la Crystal Maze) but ITV panicked when they heard that there wasn’t going to be a “winner” every show so they had to redesign all the games at the last minute.
That’s why, on our version, there’s a strained kind of co-operation required on some of the games.
The international versions are played for cold hard cash as well, IIRC.
Here’s something confirming what we already suspected.
https://es.tv.yahoo.com/blogs/es-tv/nostalgia-televisiva-record%C3%A1is-scavengers-153539739.html
I actually rather liked the games on Scavengers where the teams co-operated, it added bit of a break from the competition, it was clear that some games were artificially split, like Pulsar. Rupture sill gets on my wick as it was clearly intended as a team of four game, and works really poorly as two teams. It does make me wonder which games might have been played as individuals. Crusher I imagine, and Communication Tower from the finals.
Oh Scavengers, why couldn’t you have been better, so much potential.