One of my favourite podcasts, Play Your Pods Right, has revisited our favourite game show. In what may be a surprise to some my podcast subscriptions aren't all Radio 4 comedy, or Cheapshow's knob gags.
Available wherever you get your podcasts, Steve, Hayley and Adam discuss the embedded episode below, and even give a lovely little plug to yours truly.
Strike It Lucky or Strike It Rich - Whichever name it went by, it was great fun and now there's probably the nearest there'll ever be to some official uploads.
Yesterday whilst scrolling Twitter, as I'm one to do, I happened across something that caught my eye:
The best way to start the weekend is with a dose of Eric and a good belly laugh! A good cure. The FULL episode is over on my YouTube channel (link below) X pic.twitter.com/0Msakyx1HQ
— Michael Barrymore (@MrBarrymore) June 11, 2021
The key bit that I noticed, "The full episode is over on my YouTube channel". Michael Barrymore is uploading episodes of Strike It Rich himself and I'm all for it. There's a lot of shows I've been watching on YouTube over the last year and a bit, and I'm very well aware they probably aren't from 100% legitimate sources. I don't imagine all those episodes of Indoor League I've enjoyed came from someone at Yorkshire Television. And if you like Indoor League, I highly recommend twitch.tv/nikkiandbunty on a Sunday evening, their watch-along streams usually include some Indoor League and Fred Trueman being the most Yorkshire Yorkshireman that ever did Yorkshire.
Strike It Lucky/Rich was a great show, it's quite hard to find anything not to like. An easy to follow format that doesn't suffer from one of my biggest bugbears of modern TV, overproduction. Nowadays everything seems like it's timed to the second, positions and timing are adhered to very strictly and there's no room for spontaneity. In stark contrast, Michael Barrymore found time to completely derail a show from the running order, start dancing with contestants, rant at production about giving an elderly couple trapeze lessons as a prize. One great example, the show starts with an introduction to the contestants which just never ends because MB just gets such great entertainment out of a couple. It goes so long, the episode goes on to skip the first half of the game just to make sure the show still fits its half-hour slot.
If you've never seen it, give it a half hour of your day, it's simply enjoyable throughout:
And I can't mention Strike It Lucky without mentioning the parody from Dick 'n Dom, Strike It Mucky. You know what they say about imitation. Mark Lamarr was less than complimentary about a similar parody of himself on "Never Muck the Buzzcocks" but I hope MB doesn't mind Dave Chapman's impersonation.
Fun fact: Dave Chapman, with his other talents as a puppeteer, would later be behind BB8 in Star Wars
I fully intended on doing this a few weeks ago while my 90s favourites were still fresh in my mind, but then life got in the way. However, I was watching one of my preferred Twitch streams (If someone's watching game shows on Twitch I'm either lurking or annoying the streamer and chat room inhabitants with a pile of pointless info) and it just got me back to wanting to get this done.
This list is going to be distinctly shorter as I'm only choosing one game from each round of filming. All4 might have the revived series down as 8 series, but those have been put together as 8 runs from 3 rounds of filming. One round a year in 2017, '18 and '19. This is why most games were seen in multiple series.
So, my 3 favourite games from the revived incarnation of The Crystal Maze. Here we go.
