Top 9 Lessons Learnt from Australia’s Terrible TV Game Shows of the Past

There are many lessons to be learnt from our nation’s blunderings through TV game shows. For every Sale of the Century and It’s a Knockout, there’s still fecal dregs like Keynotes and The Up Late Game Show With Hotdogs lurking under the televisual toilet bowl rim.

So, onwards! Let our future game show concepts learn from the many mistakes we’ve made from the past, as I count down 9 lessons from Australian game shows of the past, who’ve pinned us down and wetly farted on our faces via the medium of television.

Lesson #9: If One of your Team Captains is a Puppet, This Spells Trouble

The Main Event was a celebrity panel game show, which appeared to take place in an alien spaceship where Larry Emdur was irrationally deciding which trifecta of Channel 7 personalities would become his serving galactic lords into the future. Playing on behalf of a set of home viewers who always appeared confused as to how they ended up on the show in the first place, one of the regular team captains was a children’s TV puppet named Agro. Which says a lot, frankly.

Lesson #8: Don’t Let Kerri-Anne Kennerley Out of your Sight or She’ll Start Hosting Game Shows, THEN WE’LL ALL PAY THE PRICE

Kerri-Anne is in her element restraining drug-addled celebrities and dancing with politicians on morning TV. Where she absolutely isn’t in her element is cackling her sinister laugh and flashing her harbinger-of-doom eyes around, fronting game shows. The nation was unlucky enough to experience a string of Channel 10 Kerri-Anne game shows (Greed, Moment of Truth, Who is Willing to Permit Kerri-Anne to Inhale Their Soul in Exchange for Homewares?) until we all drank ourselves to sleep to forget it ever happened.

Lesson #7: Anything You’d Normally Play While You’re Pissed at the RSL Probably Won’t Work as a Game Show

This is one of the more recent lessons, but what did we actually learn from National Bingo Night? That we’re happy to annihilate entire forests by printing an endless stream of auto-generated bingo cards from Channel 7′s website for almost no purpose? That we’ll gladly sit agape in front of the idiot tube inhaling Doritos, while a ridiculously over-sized bingo machine evacuates its bowels, and the drawn numbers are screamed out in a manner that suggests an army of T-1000 model Terminators are marching down the corridor towards the studio? Or did we instead learn that Tim Campbell looks like he’s on the brink of physically exploding if he’s restrained from belting out a song-and-dance number for more than an hour at a time?

No, we just learnt that pub games don’t usually work as a game show. Unless you’re talking about a nation of stoned uni students staring at someone playing a large-scale pokies machine on their behalf, in which case Deal or No Deal seems to be doing quite well for itself.

Lesson #6: If Your Host is a Prat, Don’t Expect Anything to Change When They Begin Hosting a Game Show

All I need to say here is that if you were unlucky enough to endure Vince Sorrenti hosting Let’s Make a Deal, I’ll personally craft you a war medal.

Lesson #5: When Your Prize Models Are Required to Wear Cowboy Costumes, Something’s Gone Wrong

Larry Emdur’s quickly-forgotten wild-west themed game show (you read that correctly) Cash Bonanza appeared to be the result of a retired Movie World stage set quickly recycled into a cheap game show opportunity. The entire experience was quite bizarre -- although the set was Wild West-themed, the audience was split into colour-coded red/blue/yellow stripes. Kinda felt like the United Colours of Benetton were having a right-wing hate rally against rising wheat prices in the Wild West. The games were more painfully crude and random than your younger brother drinking Strongbow Sweet for the first time -- in fact, the over-enthusiastic audience seemed to have been plied with that very beverage.

On the plus side, if Larry Emdur grinning at you toothily while striding around in a pair of chaps is the only thing that gets you off, you were in luck.

Lesson #4: Travel-Themed Reality Game Shows Aren’t Permissible When They Don’t Venture Outside a Single Australian State

Radio’s Matt Tilley seems to suffer from Dannii Minogue syndrome, in that he’s relentlessly pushing against the membrane of mainstream success, but managing to piece through all the wrong places. An extremely forgettable gameshow experience of his was titled The Great Chase. In what seemed to originally take a leaf from The Amazing Race’s book, the show largely took place with four families aimlessly driving around their cars in the back streets of New South Wales’ most skull-numbingly boring towns, apparently searching for pieces of a map to find… oh, I don’t know. I’ve long forgotten the prize on offer, but from what I remember, they’d be hoping it was euthanasia. Memorable for Matt Tilley acting as some evil doctor barking out clues from his evil lair via mobile phone, which didn’t quite work (when was the last time something exciting happened in Echuca?)

Lesson #3: It’s Only Enjoyable to Watch Pricks Yelling at Each Other if There’s Some Redeeming Factor Involved

There’s always a nasty streak in today’s reality game shows, but usually something to bring the mood back up at the end. Even The Weakest Link at least offered a sizable prize after the nauseating verbal scraps which the show became famous for.

But it was Red Symon’s incredibly mean-streaked game show Shafted which got the entire ordeal so wrong. Populated by a nightly bunch of contestants who seemed to have been phone-voted in by their local communities as the resident most deserving to be deliberately set on fire in public, it was downright disheartening to watch. In most cases, the contestants were such dicks to each other in the final round that they both triggered a game rule which meant neither of them won any money. There was not one pleasant thing about the damn show, which is probably why it was cancelled so quickly. The entire experience felt like a high-art game show interpretation of US foreign policy with a sneering, disgusted Red Symons lording over the entire experience like an octopus choking your subconscious into irretrievable depths of misery. I’d rather live as a resident of Kyle Sandilands’ colon than see this return to the screen any time soon.

Lesson #2: Don’t Let Your Show’s Prize Be Won at the Expense of Total Privacy

In the 90s, a short-lived game show hosted by Rob Elliot (later host of Wheel of Fortune) by the name of Talking Telephone Numbers flapped its way on-screen. The basic premise of the show involved a number of in-studio ker-razy games played by celebrities, each of which would result in a number from 0-9 being selected as the outcome. After six games, if your phone number contained all six digits, you were able to phone into the studio to claim a prize. In the pre-internet days of interactive television, you’d have thought this would have blown the country’s psyche off like a dislodged wig after a particularly farty curry -- but it didn’t actually last many episodes.

Quite a simple concept, and it was inoffensive enough. What causes this program to stick in my mind is that when each contestant phoned through, they were introduced by full name and suburb of residence. In the days of six-number telephone numbers in Australia, this made it pretty goddamn easy to track down a winner via the phone book knowing someone’s surname. Just wait a few weeks until the lucky winner had begin inevitably stocking their home with brand new consumer electronics, then go nuts with a crowbar and a balaclava.

Actually, in the age of everyone worrying about privacy, this sounds like exactly the kind of game show we’re about to see: how much of your privacy are you willing to sacrifice in order to win a cash prize? Kind of like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but with genital exposure instead of puzzling geography at the top prize tier.

Lesson #1: Never, Never, Never Adapt a Children’s Game Show for Adult Consumption

It’s so quick to forget that Larry Emdur’s debut appearance on our TV screens was a prime-time version of the kids’ game show Double Dare, threateningly titled Family Double Dare. Quite how Channel 10 ever figured that sliming adults during Physical Challenges and having them desperately clamber through an obstacle course largely compromised of balloons and shaving cream seemed like ratings gold is unknown, but it only ever lasted three episodes.

As much as I wish I had YouTube footage of this particular game show, I don’t -- so I’ll reward you with Larry Emdur having a rap battle with Vanilla Ice, which is equally as painful.

Tagged as: FAIL, Game Shows, TV