The word “legend” is probably overused in TV circles but I don’t think it can be used nearly enough for Fred Dinenage who turns eighty today. Sportscaster, kids TV presenter, newsreader, true crime author and documentary maker, I grew up with Fred and Fern Britton reading the news on TVS before I moved to Anglia-land in my early teens and it was certainly the age where suddenly having different news people was quite jarring.
The nation probably best knows him for his stints across three generations of kids show How, but for me my favourite thing will always be his rather bolshy hosting of Gambit, which I’ve said before and will say again, in a just world would be repeated as much as Bullseye on Challenge. He only just retired from reading the news in the South of England last year.
Don’t forget Gordon Burns’ own 80th on Friday, too. 😉
Anyway, here’s Fred presenting the first series of Pass the Buck in 1998:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqMWtkZt2A&ab_channel=PerryCree
Actually had a fair few similarities with Going for Gold, didn’t it? It was a BBC1 lunchtime game show, it was made in Manchester (although, of course, GFG was originally made at Elstree), it had a system of daily and weekly winners – and even the graphics in the final round were not dissimilar to those in GFG’s head to head.
The two big differences, of course, were that the contestants came only from the UK and not from all over Europe, and that it was produced by Zenith rather than Grundy.