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Part Three: Game Shows


By Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams

First published July 2007

In 1955, Hughie Green was asking ordinary members of the public questions for increasingly large amounts of money and keeping the nation spellbound as contestants won life-changing cash sums. Five decades later, Chris Tarrant was asking ordinary members of the public questions for increasingly … well, you get the general idea. Games and quizzes have been a staple of British television almost since it was invented, with a successful format able to run forever and – the Holy Grail – be sold around the world.

Jeremy Beadle, no stranger to the game show himself, once suggested that the different between a game show and a quiz show is that on a game show the contestants are standing up. This isn’t always the case (the no-nonsense interrogation of Fifteen to One is an obvious exception) but it’s as accurate a definition as any other.

The game show as we know it is almost entirely an ITV invention. Before the commercial channel started in 1955, there were plenty of quiz programmes on the BBC, and many of them were hugely popular – the likes of What’s My Line? and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral would be obvious candidates on any list. Yet these were basically parlour games on television, with no prizes up for the grabs, and the only involvement of the general public being to gaze in wonder at the brainpower and wit of the celebrities and society figures who participated.

When ITV began, one of its major developments was its intention to put real people on television, and its first week on air in September 1955 saw the arrival of two programmes that ran for many years, setting the standard for all future quizzes – Double Your Money and Take Your Pick. The two series were always sold as “rivals”, but both were made by the same production company – Associated-Rediffusion – and both had their roots in the radio, having made their debut on Radio Luxembourg. They were also the first game shows to give away cash prizes, and the first to put demonstratably normal members of the public on the screen.

From a modern perspective, there is much that is eye-opening about these two series compared with those we know today. On Double Your Money, for example, contestants were invited by Hughie Green to answer questions from a choice of 42 different specialist subjects, including bridge, opera, good housekeeping, meteorology and, best of all, jazz (traditional) and jazz (modern). It’s hard to imagine an ITV quiz in the 21st century employing such an erudite selection of questions, but at the time these were subjects the general public were assumed to know about.

Double Your Money also succeeded as the first show to make stars out of its very ordinary participants. 15-year-old Monica Rose was an accounts clerk when she appeared on the show and won eight pounds while answering questions on famous women, but proved so popular with Green and the viewers at home that she was invited back as a hostess.

ITV enjoyed huge success with their game shows in their early days, so much so that by 1956, the Independent Television Authority, who regulated the network, were already complaining that, “There is on the whole rather more giving away of money and prizes in programmes than is altogether good for the reputation of the programme companies, the Authority and Independent Television generally.”

It’s hard to argue with such findings given that, in January 1957, ITV was showing 10 quaintly-titled “give-away” quiz programmes per week (that roll of infamy in full – Beat the Clock, Make Up Your Mind, Two for the Money, Do You Trust Your Wife?, Double Your Money, Spot the Tune, Take Your Pick, Lucky Spot Quiz, The 64,000 Question and State Your Case). The channel couldn’t continue with such excesses and, through discussions with the ITA, it was agreed such shows would be limited to one a day at the most.

Yet the reason for such overkill was simply that the viewers were nuts about them. Quiz game Dotto was the most-watched programme of 1958. It seems as if the thrill of watching people win big prizes, and the ability to play along at home, was a major draw.

This is perhaps surprising given the ITA put numerous regulations on game shows to ensure the genre didn’t collapse into unashamed greed. There were draconian limits on the value of prizes that were not lifted until the 1990s, and ensured The $64,000 Question could not offer a similar-sized prize to the American original when it was imported to British screens. Furthermore, all quiz shows had to an element of skill involved, to ensure contestants could be seen to really earn their prizes.

1960s

While ITV were pulling in the audiences with fitted kitchens and small amounts of cash, the BBC were initially unable to join in. The licence fee meant they couldn’t afford the sort of prizes ITV were able to dish out – indeed, it could be said that the Crackerjack pencil was actually one of the more generous awards given out on a BBC game show in the early days of television. Hence, their quizzes continued to be the likes of What’s My Line? and The Name’s the Same where the fun came from playing the game and absolutely nothing was at stake.

As well as proving popular with audiences, game shows were also popular with those picked to host them. Quiz legend Bob Monkhouse said that in the ’60s there was little of the snobbery that greeted game shows in later years and they were programmes that celebrities wanted to appear on.

He also noted they were a lucrative sideline for a comedian – on a variety show, you would more than likely have five minutes to do your act and then you’d be off. If you were hosting a quiz, however, you were on camera throughout the entire duration of the programme and, better still, had a reason for being there. Of course, throughout his career Monkhouse hosted dozens of quiz shows, the first being the wonderfully-titled Do You Trust Your Wife?, where husbands were asked to risk potential winnings by entrusting their dizzy other halves to answer the questions, with no doubt hilarious results.

The dynamic duo of Double Your Money and Take Your Pick remained ITV staples for almost the entire ’60s, but come 1968 both abruptly disappeared from the screens. Rediffusion had lost their franchise, and new London company, LWT, had grand ideas of the sort of entertainment they would be producing – altogether classier fair than the downmarket quizzes of the “old” ITV. However their high-faluting line-up failed to impress audiences, and pretty soon the game show was back. Indeed, Hughie Green had already legged it to Yorkshire TV where he helmed the virtually identical The Sky’s the Limit, with Monica Rose still about.

1970s

The new decade brought a number of new game shows to our screens, but the same old headaches for the ITA and its successors, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (from 1972). Nicholas Parsons’ Tupperware extravaganza Sale of the Century attracted their ire as it was considered to “gloat over the high value of its prizes too much”. The rules and regulations were also continually derailing producers’ efforts to present glamorous television – unforgettable archery-based extravaganza The Golden Shot was forced to pick its contestants at random, meaning a whole host of uncharismatic members of the public were dragged in front of the camera. On one notorious occasion the crossbow was placed in the hands of a partially-sighted woman with a twitch. They were still hugely popular, though, with one episode of Sale of the Century in 1978 pulling in over 21 million viewers (though the BBC were on strike at the time).

Over at Television Centre, the BBC finally managed to find a way to produce successful game shows that didn’t rely on the value of the prizes. The Generation Game, when it began in 1971, was a hugely important series, as for the first time contestants did not simply sit (or stand) around answering questions, but instead were actually challenged to entertain. Here, the prizes – somewhat fortunately for the Beeb – came a distant second for the contestants to the chance to do things they would never normally get to. For a first time this was a game show as a spectacle, and its template would be copied by numerous series over the next few decades (indeed, ITV launched 3-2-1 in 1978 as an unashamed attempt to find a rival).

The importance of prizes was scaled down still further with the BBC’s next game show hit, Blankety Blank, in 1979. The series came about due to the the Corporation’s attempts to find a TV format for Terry Wogan, whose whimsical, self-mocking style had worked brilliantly on radio but for some reason had failed to translate to television. On Blankety Blank, they succeeded by deciding to offer only the most modest of booty – weekends in Leningrad or folding bikes – and instead concentrating on the banter between the host, the contestants and the celebrity panel. This was much to Wogan’s liking, as he claimed that, if the prizes were any better, “we’d all have to concentrate”. Wogan’s successor Les Dawson, who took over in 1984, wanted to go one step further and offer genuinely useless fare.

1980s

If only Blankety Blank‘s BBC stablemates were so self-aware. By the ’80s, ITV were continuing to produce popular and successful game shows – such as Play Your Cards Right, Family Fortunes and Winner Takes All – that offered half-decent prizes and a certain amount of glamour. The BBC seemed to feel they had to compete, but due to a lack of budget for prizes and what appeared to be a general feeling around Television Centre that these were not the sort of programmes the Corporation should be making, there was a general air of cheapness and half-heartedness that permeated out of them. Every Second Counts summed up much of this when, in its final rounds, to ensure the prize budget went further, every time the contestants won a prize, the previous one was taken away from them.

This low-budget approach was beginning to look laughable when you compared it to the strides ITV were making. Although the questions on jazz (modern) and jazz (traditional) had long since been abandoned, there was still a level of intelligence and sedateness about their quizzes. That was until March 1984 when The Price is Right first made it to our screens. A hugely controversial programme in its day, this series was unique in that, for the first time, the contestants and questions very much took a back seat to the prizes. Although the IBA regulations still limited what could be won, such unashamed avarice was highly unusual, and its first run was actually taken off mid-series for a few weeks to allow it to be toned down a little.

Whatever the value of the prizes, however, broadcasters welcomed any successful game show because they were probably the most cost-effective genre around. As long as the format was sturdy enough, all you needed was a host and a supply of contestants and it could happily run forever – in marked contrast to how long was actually spent making the programme. In the 1990s, Bruce Forsyth was able to make a 17-part series of Play Your Cards Right in less than a fortnight, meaning he could enjoy four months’ continual exposure while spending most of it on the golf course.

It also meant that, if a gap showed up in the schedules, a game show was the easiest way to fill it as there would almost always be dozens of episodes on the shelves. Indeed, when ITV came back from a 10-week industrial dispute in 1979, the first week’s schedule included numerous stockpiled editions of 3-2-1. Later, TVS productions remained on our screens for two years after the broadcaster lost its franchise in 1992 due to an enormous backlog of episodes of Catchphrase recorded before they went out of business, while a marathon Big Break recording session in 1997 meant unseen programmes were still turning up on Saturday nights in 2000.

1990s and 2000s

Finally, in the early ’90s, when the IBA gave way to the Independent Television Commission – who pledged a “lighter touch” in regulation – the limits of the value of prizes were finally lifted for ITV. This didn’t initially give way to an absolute free-for-all, but slowly the prizes became more and more important. Yet this still didn’t mean anything if the programme wasn’t good enough – ITV’s Raise the Roof in 1995 received numerous column inches as it offered a house as its star prize, but this didn’t translate to big audiences as the format proved so uninspired. The launch of the National Lottery seemed to prove this, too – utilising game show set-up where studio contestants won thousands of pounds, after the chance of viewers themselves winning millions failed to keep audiences spellbound.

By the end of the decade, most of the successful quizzes on television were based on formats that had been around for several years – indeed, Take Your Pick had even found its way back to ITV screens. However all was to change in September 1998 when Who Wants to be a Millionaire? made its first appearance. There was little new in the format that hadn’t been done on the daddy of all game shows, Double Your Money, but it ratcheted up both the prize money and the tension, and pulled in audiences not seen by a quiz show for many years.

A further achievement by Millionaire was that it was a British format that managed to be exported around the world. Previously, it had always been American TV that had led the way – even polite series such as What’s My Line? and the demented Blankety Blank had originated across the Atlantic. Millionaire reversed this trend, and indeed the series managed to revitalise the fortunes of ABC in the USA.

Suddenly game shows had become fashionable again. It helped that Millionaire had changed the perception of what happened on a quiz. Where previously contestants at the end of Strike It Lucky would announce they’d had “a lovely day” regardless of the result, on the new breed of game show it wouldn’t be unusual to see members of the public having a terrible time, going through the mill of emotions. This was taken to extremes on the likes of The Weakest Link, which invited contestants to stab each other in the back and rubbish their opponents’ chances of success, while losers didn’t even have a consolation prize to make up for missing out on the jackpot.

The latest game show success takes this one step further, by dispensing with any notion of skill whatsoever, leaving contestants on Deal or no Deal? to put their faith in simple guesswork and luck to land a big cash prize. Its huge success, however, seems to prove that there will always be a fascination with watching other people win big.

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