My mum used to say television was the devil's picture box, but even she couldn't resist the absolute chaos of Blankety Blank. Saturday teatime meant Terry Wogan winking at celebrities who'd clearly had a liquid lunch, and those felt-tip pens that squeaked against the answer boards like fingernails on a blackboard. I was probably seven, maybe eight, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a plate of beans on toast, watching grown-ups make complete pillocks of themselves for a speedboat nobody actually wanted.
Those shows were everywhere in the 80s. Proper mental, most of them. You had Bruce Forsyth bouncing around The Generation Game like a caffeinated scarecrow, making ordinary people from Wolverhampton attempt pottery while their nan shouted encouragement from the audience. "Good game, good game!" he'd say, and somehow we all believed him. The conveyor belt at the end was pure torture – watching someone's memory crumble as a fondue set, a standard lamp, and a cuddly toy rolled past like expensive tumbleweeds.
But here's the thing that gets me now, looking back with the benefit of hindsight and a receding hairline – those game shows were basically the first interactive entertainment most of us ever experienced. Yeah, I know that sounds like complete nonsense when you think about it. We weren't pressing buttons or waggling joysticks. But we were shouting at the telly, weren't we? "It's MONOPOLY, you absolute muppet!" when some punter on Family Fortunes couldn't name a board game. That's participation, that is.
The closest thing we had to actual video games back then was watching Cheggers play some primitive arcade nonsense on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Keith Chegwin, bless his hyperactive soul, would demonstrate these coin-op machines like they were alien technology. Which, to be fair, they pretty much were. Space Invaders looked absolutely revolutionary when you'd spent your childhood watching people arrange flowers on Pebble Mill at One.
Bullseye was the absolute king of interactive chaos, though. Jim Bowen with his schoolmaster authority, Tony Green doing the math like a human calculator, and those darts players who looked like they'd been constructed entirely from pork pies and bitter. "You can't beat a bit of Bully!" Jim would crow, while some bloke from Sheffield aimed for treble twenty and hit the camera operator instead. The prizes were magnificently naff – speedboats for people who lived in landlocked council estates, caravans that looked like they'd collapse in a stiff breeze.
What made it properly interactive was the fact that everyone watching became an expert dart-thrower from their armchair. My dad would lean forward during the final round, pint in hand, muttering calculations under his breath like he was splitting the atom. "Needs double top," he'd say, as if his analysis could somehow guide that dart through the television screen and into the board.
Strike It Lucky was Michael Barrymore at his absolute peak madness. Before everything went sideways for him, obviously. Those screens with the hot spots behind them – pure gambling made family-friendly. "What is a hot spot not?" became playground currency. Kids would recreate it in the school corridor, making up categories and pretending cardboard boxes contained mystery prizes. Usually just someone's packed lunch, but the principle was sound.
The really mental thing is how those shows created this whole culture of audience participation that gaming would later perfect. We learned to shout at screens, to feel personally invested in complete strangers' success, to understand that entertainment could be unpredictable and slightly cruel. When someone won the star prize on Play Your Cards Right, the whole living room would erupt like we'd scored the winning goal at Wembley.
Wheel of Fortune was probably the most game-like of the lot. Nicky Campbell spinning that massive wheel (before he got serious and moved to news), contestants buying vowels like they were purchasing power-ups. "I'd like to solve the puzzle," they'd say, and twenty million people would hold their breath. That's the same tension you get when you're down to your last life on Contra, isn't it? That moment where everything hangs in the balance.
The prizes told their own story about the times. Food processors that looked like they could power a small village. His and hers matching tracksuits that screamed "we holiday in Benidorm." Microwave ovens presented like they were some sort of nuclear-powered cooking wizardry. These weren't just prizes – they were aspirational lifestyle packages for people who thought Findus crispy pancakes were haute cuisine.
3-2-1 deserves special mention for being absolutely, completely, utterly bonkers. Ted Rogers with his finger puzzles, Dusty Bin as the booby prize that somehow became more famous than most of the actual winners, and those cryptic clues that made about as much sense as assembly instructions for Swedish furniture. "Say what you see," Ted would urge, but what you saw was usually a bloke in a sequined jumpsuit juggling rubber chickens while someone played the accordion. How exactly do you "say" that?
The closest modern equivalent is probably those mobile games where you watch ads to get extra lives. Same principle, different execution. You'd sit through the commercial breaks during Catchphrase (Roy Walker's "It's good, but it's not right" is burned into my brain forever) just to see if Mr. Chip would reveal some blindingly obvious answer that the contestants had missed.
Looking back, these shows were training us for the gaming revolution that was coming. They taught us that entertainment could be competitive, that ordinary people could become heroes or villains in the space of thirty minutes, that there was genuine excitement in watching someone else take risks. When Pac-Man fever hit a few years later, we already understood the basic concept: navigate challenges, collect rewards, avoid the ghosts that want to end your game.
The 80s game show was peak communal entertainment. Families gathered around the telly like it was a campfire, sharing in the collective madness of watching a postman from Slough attempt to identify mystery objects while blindfolded. These days, we're all playing our own individual games on our own individual screens, but there's something magical about that shared experience of watching someone else play – and win or lose – on your behalf.
Those shows didn't just entertain us. They taught us the rules of interactive media before we even knew that's what we were learning.
