They don't make quiz shows like they used to

[George 1978]

I have heard of Winning Streak but wasn't that one of the National Lottery game shows? (He looks on the UK Game Shows website to find out, and surprisingly, he doesn't find it listed). ITV had a 9.00 pm drama in the mid 1980s called The Winning Streak, but I know it wasn't a game show.

I was going to say that Bruce Forsyth hosted a game show with that title in the United States in mid-to-late Reagan-era 1986, (around the same time that he made a cameo in Magnum PI, playing a game show host), but then I realised it was actually called "Hot Streak" (or pedantically, "Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak"). Ironically enough, no British version of that game show has been made to date.

[George 1978]

Here's another observation about old quiz shows - it used to be very rare that contestants would leave with nothing. Usually even if you went out in the first round you'd get some sort of token prize, like an umbrella on Wipeout I think, or the "bus fare home" on Bullseye. I remember a Strike It Lucky contestant winning no prizes so Barrymore just pressed a couple of screens for him at random so he had something to take home. Who Wants to be a Millionaire was probably the first I can remember where the risk of winning nothing was part of the drama, then the likes of The Weakest Link took it to a sadistic level. But now, the likes of Pointless and The Chase appear to have quietly phased out the idea of consolation prizes.

I used to find Jim Bowen's "Bus Fare Home" catchphrase quite ironic considering the fact that by the early 1990s, Bullseye was recorded at Central's Lenton Lane studios in Nottingham, which was indeed a bus ride away from where I lived as I lived just a few miles away - what it meant that just like contestants on other game shows, whoever appeared on the show had their travel expenses paid for by the TV company whether they had won prizes or not. The fact that Bowen disguised this by its initials "BFH" was almost a bit pointless - did he mean, Big Fat Hamster, I wonder? Of course not. Another irony was on the Bully's prize board - one of the prizes circa 1990 was a weekend in London; somewhere where around 15% of the UK population, i.e. almost any Thames/LWT region viewer at the time really wouldn't get excited about it due to its locality. Indeed, someone from Croydon was close to winning it, and I bet that they would have taken advantage of the "two in a bed" reversal if they did. On the other hand, I seem to recall those who did win a similar prize were from the Tyne Tees and Scottish Television regions and had probably never visited the English capital in their lives.

When Michael Barrymore did that on Strike it Lucky, he never seemed to strike a Hot Spot; the screens that he chose were on the right hand side of the viewer's screen where the contestant had not reached that far by the time their opponent had got to the Question at the end, and they seem to display more low-ley prizes such as a black leather briefcase and £150 or something - I assume that they would have been the prizes that would have been revealed anyway had the contestants had got that far across.

Around four contestants went home with nothing on Millionaire which was a lot less frequent occurrences as the 2000s went on, although only a couple of nights ago I had been watching on YouTube a montage video where around a dozen people got a question wrong such as someone thought that Jane Austen had written a book called "Jane" rather than "Emma". Thinking about it, the video could have also included some contestants from the American version as well. Even Charles Ingram managed to get to £1,000 without any lifelines, although ironically enough, he also went home with nothing if you know what I mean.

One of Anne Robinson's catchphrases at the end of each show was: "you leave with nothing". Enough said.

[culnara]

WE HAVE A QUIZ HERE IN IRELAND THATS SHOWN IN NORTHERN IRELAND CALLED WINNING STREAK AND ITS IMOPSSIBLE TO NOT WIN AT LEAST 20 K. THERE ARE SEVERAL ROUNDS OF DIFFERENT GMES ONE GAME COULD BE A ROULETTE WHEEL WHERE SAY THE LOWEST SEGMENT COULD BE 5 THOUSAND AND THE HIGHEST 50 THOUSAND


HERES AN EPISODE.

https://youtu.be/4fQs__fvBHE?si=hKlUVECfcY2H_195

Jeezo, they didn't hold back did they, that would have been a lotta cash back in 93 :O