KEY POINTS:
The game show is a television phenomenon that simply refuses to die.
The genre is seeping back into New Zealand television schedules after a quiet few years. This week alone we've witnessed the birth of yet another local game show called The Rich List (TV One), and the local version of the international hit game show Deal Or No Deal (TV3).
Flick open your TV guide and you're bound to encounter a plethora of overseas game shows with cheesy titles all vying to win over your TV remote's devotion.
From the tasteless, the crass, to the downright bonkers, the general format for any game show seems to be the wackier and better. And when it comes to true innovators of the game show, the Japanese undoubtedly do it better...
The Japanese have taken the worst of American TV and Japanese TV and pushed it to its limit.
Imagine the tastelessness of a Jerry Springer TV show, the weirdness of pro wrestling and the crass greediness of a daytime game show, with hefty doses of gratuitous nudity thrown in for good measure.
Japanese game shows involve a never-ending succession of human torture, toilet humour, bare breasted women and oodles of public humiliation for a succession of fame hungry (and some would argue deranged) contestants.
To celebrate the weird and wonderful world that the game show occupies, we take a look at some of the loopiest game shows known to man.
Japanarama
In this Japanese game show, a grandmother has to answer questions about pop culture in order to prevent her grandson from being catapulted into the air by a bungee machine. Grandma doesn't have a clue who the Backstreet Boys are, so the audience gets to enjoy the man screaming "Grandma, Graaaandmaaaa!" as he is launched hundreds of feet into the air. Genius.
"Guess what's on your head?"
Four very brave men playing "Guess what's on your head?" - a game show in which contestants try to guess what type of insect or reptile is crawling around on the top of their heads. The contestants wear head contraptions that supposedly keep the creepy crawlies under control. Yeah, right.
The Big Moment
During a time when game shows were unheard of on primetime television, one American production company devised a game show that delivered high on entertainment, but seriously low on originality. Each week, the producers would locate a family willing to take a risk. Given a budget of $25,000, each family selected a group of prizes that they really wanted. Then, one member of the family, or perhaps everyone, was given a challenging task, such as memorising the square root of 3 or learning to identify 30 ice cream flavours by taste alone. Riveting stuff, we kid you not.
Supermarket sweep
Dreary daytime game show aired in the UK and hosted by camper than Christmas presenter, Dale Winton. The premise of the show involved teams of two contestants, one of whom would run about a supermarket filling carts with groceries. The team securing the largest cash total worth of groceries won the game, and was given a chance to win some cash.
The Generation Game
"Life is the name of the game, and I wanna play the game with you. Life can be terribly tame, if you don't play the game with two." So sang Bruce Forsyth in possibly the best-loved Saturday UK entertainment show in the history of television. Each week four couples would battle it out in contests such as pot throwing, name that dog and batten twirling. The two winning couples would go through to the next round, which invariably involved a play, featuring ill-fitting costumes, enough double entendres to fill a whole Carry On film and some singing from Brucie.
Catchphrase
"Say what you see. If you see it, say it!" so went the catchphrase of this popular, yet hideously dull, UK game show. The main game involved contestants identifying common catchphrases from computer generated graphics displayed on a TV screen. Indeed, about as exciting and enticing as swallowing razor blades.
Something for the weekend
Traditionally a euphemism used by British barbers when offering condoms to their clients, the phrase "Something for the weekend" was taken to another level by ladette TV presenter Denise Van Outen in the late 90s. The game show's first programme had a son trying to guess the sex secrets of his own parents, a brother guessing the identity of his younger sister's boyfriend from five of his best friends and a soon-to-be newly-wed spotting her fiancé from the dressed-up genitalia of five men in a game called Private Dicks.
Celebrity Big Brother
A riff off the original Big Brother format which pitted mortal contestants against each other, the UK's Celebrity Big Brother gave has-been 'celebrities' whose careers were on the skids a second chance at the fame game. Sounds like a sure-fire ratings winner. The only problem being that celebrity contestants come with inflated egos and a penchant for making racial slurs which ultimately spell out the demise of the show.
Strip Questions
Back to Japan. In Japan a number of shows exist that defy classification by most standards. For instance, in one infamous show, failing to answer a question correctly led to one's own mother being buried in tons of rotting fish. In another, those who failed to answer questions correctly were dumped at locations remote from transport or assistance, e.g. in the Arctic, and had to perform such feats as drinking beer while sitting on blocks of ice first one to run to the outhouse was left behind. In a show colloquially called Strip Questions, a nude woman stands behind a pane of glass with strips of paper embedded in it; every time she misses a question, one strip of paper is pulled away.
Super Jockey
Game show Super Jockey, hosted by the infamous Beat Takeshi, featured people with products to promote (usually semi-clad, beautiful women) playing a game where they have to change into a skimpy bikini before a curtain drops which will reveal their birthday suits if they haven't finished changing. Oh, and then they have to sit in scalding hot water. For every second they manage to stay in the water, they are allowed to promote their product for one second.
