You Bet! - When Talent Shows Were 100% Dancing Dog Free

It's been over a month since the last post. Life has been busy, things have been hectic, and everything's been a bit bleh. But while I've got some free time in the office, I thought I'd look at the other show I liked maybe a little too much.

Everyone's got one unusual, maybe even weird skill that it could safely be assumed isn't all that common. No show took advantage of that quite like You Bet!. 

Based on the German language format "Wetten Dass?", You Bet! invited celebrity guests to bet on the outcome of a very wide range of weird and wonderful challenges taken on by members of the public and some of these challenges were the kind of feats you wouldn't really see anywhere else.

First hosted by Bruce Forsyth in 1988, followed by Matthew Kelly then Darren Day, You Bet! was a talent show that featured the bare minimum of singing, dancing and illusion. Instead, you could see feats such as a dutchman driving a flatbed truck up and over an arch without disturbing the dinner service set up on the back of the truck. Or if that doesn't take your interest, how about a teenager identifying makes and models of car just by looking at the shape of the rear lights. Or a driver cracking eggs using the teeth on the bucket of his digger, whilst blindfolded.

Noel's House Party - Saturday Night Marmite

 When I was small and weirder, I was highly entertained by shows that would merge fiction and reality, TCM being the obvious example but there were plenty of others. Shows that would take real people and have them experiencing life in, to some degree, a fantasy world. Knightmare took its contestants and made them have an adventure through a swords-and-sorcery style greenscreen-scape. Scavengers took contestants to a derelict space cruiser and made them work in the recycling sector for the viewing public's "entertainment". Gamesmaster - Oil rig, hell, heaven, island... they were determined to inject a little fiction into the art of having children play Mortal Kombat II. This mixture of fiction in reality would spill into BBC1 Saturday nights with the help of a short beardy bloke off of the radio.

Crystal Maze Parodies/Sketches Extra (Another Video)

The bane of many a schoolteacher having to deal with their kids shouting 'Bogies', Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow was a weekend morning show (Two hours on a Saturday, one on a Sunday) that had kid contestants playing daft games throughout the mornings. Examples of such games saw them having to stick toast to themselves with chocolate spread, betting on who would win a race between a group of crawling one-year-olds, and spending points on forfeits for their friends, one of which saw a girl wearing a large gutted fish on her head. The finale of the Saturday show was always an overblown excuse for everyone to throw custard at each other to the sound of 'Ace of Spades' by Motorhead, often punctuated by a bucket of the yellow stuff slipping from one kid's hands to crack another in the head. For the last series, they made this segment into a game show parody which culminated in a muck-muck fight. 'Bullseye' was reincarnated as 'Bullsmuck' complete with original co-host Tony Green calling the scores, 'Strike It Lucky' became 'Strike It Mucky', and The Crystal Maze became...