Happy New Year! Details of the Poll of 2015 will go up tomorrow evening.
Anyway apropos of nothing I found myself listening to Dave’s Mr Gameshow podcast (iTunes link) the other day which I had no idea about except it turned up on the recommended podcast section of my iTunes. It’s a mildly amusing series of half hour shows hosted by Mike Wozniak as Mr Gameshow ably assisted or otherwise by Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk from Charlie Brooker’s XWipe) in the increasingly prolific gameshow as comedy farce genre, where two comics you probably haven’t really heard of in theory battle it out over a series of quiz rounds but are really just there to gamely react to what’s going on. I do like the Know Your Enemy jingle. Anyway it’s quite funny, although you’ll have worked out in about three minutes flat if you’re going to listen to the whole run of six episodes or not.
However in looking for more information on it I came across this terrifying monstrosity. You could buy this, it will almost certainly murder you in your sleep:
WE HAD THIS!!
I bought this for my younger brother, late 1980s from TJ Hughes in Blackburn. It was surprisingly fun – hi-tech for the times, with crude artificial intelligence…you could buss in for questions, and if you were right you’d win the right to play a mini game of your own – I seem to remember a version of Hangman as one of them – where you won cash…the biggest cash pile at the end was the winner. I remember he had some stock phrases for when you got things wrong, like “Dig a hole and crawl in…”…I think this explains both mine and his love of gameshows to this very day…
Oh wow, never realised this was released in the UK. It looks like there are different overlays for different games, although what you can play on it other than rudimentary versions of Wheel of Fortune I don’t know.