Following in the slime-covered footsteps of ‘You Can’t Do That On Television’, Double Dare invited teams of two to take on a variety of messy games interspersed with trivia questions. Hosted by Marc Summers, and with the same VO artist Finders Keepers would later use in Harvey, DD was a huge success in terms of viewership and popularity. It tripled Nick’s afternoon ratings with over 1 million tuning in each week.
Each round began with a physical challenge to determine control of the game, and a cash reward for their score. After this challenge, the team in control would be asked trivia questions with $10 awarded for each correct answer. An incorrect answer would forfeit control to their opponents, however, the team in play could dare their opponents to answer if they thought they wouldn’t know it, doubling the value of the question. In response, the opponents could answer it or Double Dare the team in control meaning they’d either have to answer or take part in a physical challenge in lieu of an answer.
The kind of challenges they’d take part in would last between 15 and 30 seconds and would usually involve getting X amount of substance A into a container filling it above a certain mark. For example, using a slime-filled squirt gun to fill a bucket the other team member was holding on the other side of the set. The final round saw the leading team take on a messy obstacle course. Run in a relay, each team member alternating on obstacles, they’d have to finish 8 obstacles in 60 seconds. The prize for teams that could finish all 8 obstacles within the time limit was usually a holiday. DD ran from 1986-93 with a brief initial revival in 2000, and a current revival running in the US which started in 2018. The show has become ingrained in American pop culture in much the same way shows from British childhoods have over here, as such it was made a key plot point in an episode of ‘80s set sitcom ‘The Goldbergs’ in 2016.
In the UK, Double Dare wasn’t it’s own show but rather featured as a segment in Saturday Morning show ‘Going Live’ on BBC1. ‘Going Live’ ran from 1987 to 1993 and Double Dare was a segment of the show from the start. Hosted by Sarah Greene and Phillip Schofield, now known for his presenting work on This Morning, ‘Going Live’ featured a number of regular segments such as phone-in interviews with celebrities so viewers could ask questions to, and occasionally insult, the guests. Another well-known element of the show was comedy duo Trevor and Simon who would do a range of sketches using a variety of characters.
But it was DD that was the game show element of the mornings programming. Like with Finders Keepers, it was all played for points instead of cash with prizes for the winning team at the end. It stuck to the same format and carried over mostly the same games from the US version. In 1992, in the last year of ‘Going Live’s run, Double Dare transitioned into another show/segment: ‘Run The Risk’. Hosted first by Shane Richie, then John Ecclestone (who’d be recognizable more by his voice from his work as a puppeteer) then finally Bobby Davro, it carried over most of the same format points but it became a contest between three teams rather than two.
It started with an opening stunt/challenge contested by all three teams, then a series of questions. Whoever answered the last question of the round would them be given the choice to either ‘Run the Risk’ by taking part in a challenge, like in DD, or they could make another team do it. Challenges at this stage included, for example, one team member in a hammock stretched across a gunge moat which made up part of the set having to pick up bananas from the gunge while the other teams shake the prop trees the hammock was strung up from. The final round saw numerous changes over the years but the basic concept of a race remained the same. It saw all three teams take part with the team with the most points getting a headstart.
- from point A to point B in costume,
- collect Item C,
- race to point D,
- hand over the item to teammate 2,
- teammate 2 would then do something with Item C,
- then have to jump the gunge moat,
- haul themselves up a huge inflatable ramp with gunge dropping at unhelpful moments,
- reach the top,
- grab item E then slide down the gunge covered inflatable into the waiting moat at the bottom to win the race and the prizes. And all whilst Peter Simon, who had been carried over from DD to be a co-presenter and commentator on RtR, inevitably got covered in gunge.
RtR was a more successful format in the UK than DD because whilst American audiences consider DD to be messy/slimey/gungey, UK formats take it to another level with gallons of the Natrosol based gunk used. US shows threw a bucketful, UK shows dropped people in vats of it. Liza Koshy on the current run of DD has kids splashing about in it, we had Noel Edmonds virtually drowning people in contraptions dispensing it while foam rose up from beneath. By the end of RtR's run, it had been promoted from a Saturday morning segment on Going Live and its successor Live & Kicking, to its own show on CBBC on a weekday afternoon (for those old enough to remember when CBBC was 3pm-5:35pm on BBC1 rather than an actual channel)
Next Week: the BBC send Sgt. Bash to invade America with ‘Robot Wars’
No comments:
Post a Comment