Blankety Blank (game/quiz)

[beccabear67]

This is my favorite of the quiz shows. I preferred Les Dawson as the presenter/host, but Terry Wogan started it. Any favorite celebrity panelists? Maybe Barry Cryer or Lenny Henry...

The top prizes used to be microwaves and small colour tv sets, and if you did poorly you still got a Blankety Blank chequebook and pen set. Some of the fill-in-the blank questions produced a lot of surprising answers though being the Beeb it was fairly clean.

There were always three women and three men on the celebrity panel to be matched with, and I think it was the same with contestants; one man and one woman.

[George 1978]

What was it about the "car aerial" shaped microphones which I assumed didn't work and were just props? Were they just there so that Kenny Everett could bend them in half, I wonder?

[beccabear67]

Les Dawson broke one mic in half once and I was wondering what that was about...

It's interesting how for quite awhile contestants had to do some of the work and flip over the markers that counted a 'match' had been made (besides the big number in lights below). In the U.S. Match Game they had coloured lights, but I think maybe they malfunctioned sometimes, so perhaps it was a smart thing to keep Blankety Blank a bit low tech.

[beccabear67]

There was some sort of routine with the mic when Wogan was the presenter so Dawson breaking the mic was sort of saying it was his show now?

Watched the 'An Audience With' they did for Les Dawson twenty years after it was supposed to have been done (he died two weeks before) and that was informative. He and Roy Barraclough (I knew from Corrie) as older ladies was hysterical and all the bits with pianos too!

Why did they have such dismal prizes on the old Blankety Blank I wonder... some sort of regulations of the day? Winning a 'Teach Yourself Esperanto' book seems taking a joke a little far. There was a crack by Les about them not leaving it in the foyer on their way out.

[Richard1978]

I think many quiz shows were subject to a prize limit in the past.

[George 1978]

Les Dawson broke one mic in half once and I was wondering what that was about...

They do seem to be rather fragile objects just like radio aerials are (managed to snap a few of those when positioning it for a good radio station reception). I am surprised that they didn't have "clip-on" microphones instead.

[George 1978]

I think many quiz shows were subject to a prize limit in the past.

The IBA certainly limited cash prize limits to around £5,000 in the mid 1980s - around the price of a brand new car. In other words, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? would never have been made in the IBA's time, unless it ended at Question Seven. Inflation and the laid back rules by the time that the ITC took over allowed the WWTBAM jackpot to be a reality, just before 2000.

Winner Takes All briefly lifted that limit in the late 1980s (during the final series where Geoffrey Wheeler was host, and Tarby went and done his Frame Game) when someone won over £6,000 - not sure if special permission was used from the IBA to lift the limit of cash prizes given back then.