Right, yesterday TV’s Greg Scott uploaded something quite interesting to Youtube, an (almost) full studio recording of a 1996 panel show based around the football pools called The X Factor.
Some of the younger readers might not know or understand the football pools, but basically they were the sort-of national lottery of their day, each week you got a coupon listing typically 55-60 matches taking place that Saturday, which would be all the main league ones English and Scottish and cup ties and whathaveyou and then using your skill and judgement (or like most people picking at random) pick ten (or more if you were willing to stake more) matches you reckon would finish with a score draw. Each match was worth a certain amount of points (3pts for a score draw, 2 for a no-score draw, 1 if it isn’t a draw) and if the best eight in your selection was worth enough points you’d win a dividend of the prize pool, the best result being eight score draws which is the jackpot.
Back in the day the pools were a really big deal with the classified results on Grandstand and the ITV News always ending on the winning numbers, and in the early nineties the jackpots were seven figures. The Football Pools still exist today although it is fair to say that the top prizes are not nearly so big, around £100,000.
The timing of this show then, in 1996, is quite interesting in that the pools where starting to decline in the face of the lottery but presumably someone at ITV saw the success of the lottery draws and wanted to try their own version and so we have this pilot where Tom O Connor challenges football expert John Helm, Countdown‘s stats-whizz Carol Vorderman and astrologist Russell Grant to use their skill and judgement to predict the numbers for that weekend’s games, with time filled with football gags and a celebrity having a go, sort of a Fantasy Football League-Lite (which had been running very successfully few a few years on BBC2 by that point). It’s kind of frothy and fascinating, there’s a large question mark as to whether this is the sort of thing anybody would watch week in week out, but to its credit it’s not completely awful.
This is a 90 minute studio tape including about 20 minutes of warm up from Greg (sound only – visuals kick in around 17 minutes). If you’ve never been to a studio recording before not much has really changed although they’re a lot slower. Also most studio recordings don’t get the host entertaining the audience whilst they type the graphics up. Surprised they didn’t have Russell Grant shuffle his tarot deck before the show and then do a fake shuffle so they could have the graphics ready.