Gameshows have always held a special place in the heart of British viewers, and this new series of Gameshow Marathon will celebrate many of the old favourites

Vernon Kay will be putting celebrity contestants on the starting block as they prepare to take a trip down memory lane in Vernon Kay’s Gameshow Marathon.

The line up of celebrities taking part in the Gameshow marathon is:
Andrea Catherwood, Ben Shephard, Jamelia, Graeme Le Saux, Michael Le Vell and Wendy Richard MBE.

The shows featured in this series are: The Price is Right, Blockbusters, Blankety Blank, The Golden Shot, Name that Tune, Mr & Mrs, Bullseye, and Play Your Cards Right

This week the featured show is Blockbusters – so our celebrities will be putting themselves in the hotspot, aiming for the Gold Run and in all likelihood saying ‘Can I have a ‘p’ please Vernon!’

Each week the winning contestant will go straight through to the quarter-final (Mr & Mrs) as they play to win money for a charity of their choice, and the series will culminate in a grand final when the two best-performing celebrities battle it out for the title and of course the cash.

Each of the shows will feature the original sets, a mountain of ‘super, smashing, great’ prizes and of course those all important catchphrases!

First letter first

The UK version of this original American show consisted of twenty lettered hexagons. If a contestant nominated a particular space (say, ‘W’), host Bob Holness would read out a question in the format “What ‘W’ is the most north-westerly state in mainland USA?”
Buzzing in and answering the question correctly meant that space would be turned your colour. One player had the white spaces, and a team of two players had blue. The idea of the game was to fill in as many spaces as necessary so that a contiguous line of your colour went across the board horizontally (for the blue team) or vertically (for the single player, who could make the journey in one less space.

Getting a question correct also allowed you to choose the next letter.

The Gold Run

The side who won the best of three matches went on to play the Gold Run. In this game, the participant (either the single player, or a nominated player from the blue team) had to work their way across the board from left to right within 60 seconds. The hexagons had letter combinations such as “MTOC” and the contestants had to guess what these stood for using clues given by the host. e.g. “Famous humanitarian from India” would be “Mother Theresa of Calcutta”.

Regardless of whether the player won the Gold Run or not, the champion(s) went on to play another team or single player. Winning successive matches earned a chance at further Gold Runs with increasingly impressive prizes. A fourth Gold Run tended to be a holiday break somewhere in Europe, while winning the fifth and final Gold Run led to an excellent adventure holiday in anywhere in the world. A failed Gold Run meant that the contestant(s) would get £10 for every correct answer. Correct answers during the main game were worth £5.

Set and match

There are a couple of features of the set that are worth mentioning. The first is the game board, which was quite a feat of engineering. It took up the entire height of the studio, and was powered using 38 slide projectors, each with their own set of slides for the different letters, colours and Gold Run questions.

The second is the giant figureheads that adorned the top of the studio. There was a whole set of them, featuring famous people from the past. They were all made out of polystyrene that had been modelled using a hot metal wire. The chief Greek god Zeus took pride of place.

Channel hopping

The show was dropped by ITV after ten years, only to be snapped up by Sky (with Holness still at the helm) shortly afterwards, though these episodes were also shown in some ITV regions. A spin-off ITV series, Champion Blockbusters, invited former winners back to play again. BBC 2 experimented with a cheaper afternoon version for adults which did not have the charm of the original show.

Magic moments

The students showing off their “lucky mascot” toys they had brought with them.

The famous out-take where a contestant answered a biology question with the response “Orgasm” instead of “Organism”, and the lesser-known one where another student offered the answer “Kama Sutra” instead of “Kamikaze”.

The student audience always did the hand jive at the end of every fifth programme. This is because five programmes were recorded during one day, and the producers let them do it as the final thing before they went home.

There was a lot of joking around with the way in which contestants nominated the next hexagon to play for. It started with “Can I have a P please, Bob?” and progressed to “I want U, Bob” and then in the eighties - “I want an E, Bob.”

Catchphrases

“Put yourself on the Hot Spot, please!”
“Gold to gold in 60 seconds or less”.
“Let’s play ‘Blockbusters’!”

Inventor

Blockbusters started life in the USA in 1980, one of the many Mark Goodson game-shows. The idea was spotted by a producer who piloted the show in the early 1980’s in the UK.

Trivia

Blockbusters was notable for being the first show on British TV to run five times a week. Many thought this was overkill, but this was subsequently shown to be wrong as the show ideally slotted into the invariably tricky 5.30pm slot.

ITV1 Network Saturday 14 April 8:40 PM to 9:40 PM