Tales of Rad: 6 Game Show Hosts That Hindsight Proved Were Irreplaceable

Tales of Rad gets a nine letter word every time. And it rhymes with Bingeclap.

In 1938, the Beeb aired the very first televised game show, Spelling Bee, and the genre kind of went downhill from there. Although certainly not the worst fixture of the media industry's lowest creative form, game shows have been plagued by cheating (on both sides) from the very beginning and laboured with the responsibility of being the afternoon entertainment for bored housewives and since the fifties, students and the unemployed. A tough crowd.

Most are nothing more than the desperate answering questions for money so ultimately, it's the host's job to provide any kind of entertainment from the whole mess unless of course, it's a panel show with three to five of the out of work desperate answering questions for renewed fame. I.e., if you hadn't quite grasped that, a celebrity panel show. 

Either way, producers have a problem. You have five or six potentially unstable morons on camera for half an hour. How do you turn flailing pub quiz voyeurism into entertainment? And so was born the very real necessity for the right host. 

The perfect host has to do a few things. Control the more aspergery contestants, generate warm, harmless banter with them and provide a safe, nutritious environment for the guests' young. It isn't easy. But some entertainers managed just that. And not only that, were such a natural fit or pervasive influence on their show's formula that when they left, for whatever reason, their programs just couldn't thrive without them in quite the same way.

N.B.: It is merely a happy coincidence that none of the following are the subject of many violent, racist and sexual convictions. Humour doesn't always have to focus on personal tragedy. It just helps. 

On the face of it, Never Mind the Buzzcocks was a quiz show featuring and about pop music and its stars. But really, it was just three intellectually superior comedians ganging up on shitty artists. Together with captains Jupitus, Hughes and from season ten, Bailey, Lamarr nailed the misanthropic culture cynic so well that to this day, Charlie Brooker has to pay him royalties every time he's an arsehole in broadcast.

It was beautiful. And totally compounded by the BBC's budget. For every legitimate star on each episode, there'd be at least one guest dredged up from opening act on a P&O cruise obscurity with enough humiliating decisions in their past for six highlight reels worth of insults, let alone a half-hour post-watershed slot. Although the show did gestate in the 90s, when you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over a boy band getting their chests waxed.

But when Lamarr left in 2005, he took every pretense of subtlety with him. Not that there was all that much to begin with, since he made about three death threats per episode and is probably most famous for calling one-time guest Chris Moyles a 'fat c*nt' on air. Nevertheless his replacement, Simon Amstell, saw his predecessor's most obvious defining feature: snarky prick, and took it as a challenge. Every episode became a desperate grasp to outdo Lamarr's scathing dismissal of his guests, co-stars and their achievements. 

"It gives me no end of pleasure to give you no points."

Taking over from Lamarr, who'd become legendary for making Buzzcocks what it was, must have been daunting. Amstell was presented with the choice of try to continue in the same vein as before, or try to bring his own angle and make the role his own. And seeing as 'gay and Jewish' don't really count as performance traits, you see where I'm going with this. 

It was almost tragic, really. Especially in comparison. Lamarr was such a celebrated dickmotron that trying to outshine him in the same department wasn't just futile, but pathetically obvious. Sure, Amstell made his name at Popworld "making pop stars uncomfortable", but how could he live up to Lamarr's one-minute diatribe against Phill's impressionist talents? Because it remains one of the single greatest moments in television. As they say in the biz, fuck following that. Behold.

Poetry. Seriously. I've watched that clip maybe twenty times in the last two days alone. 

In the early 1940s, mad Nazi television scientists tried to create a propagandic contest by mixing the eugenic traits of mathematics, Randism and javelins. They were ultimately unsuccessful due to a few fatalities and one disastrous video game sequel, but their experiment lived on in spirit in ITV's Bullseye, a show about darts. Except without all the glamour of our nation's beautiful game. 

But damn it if this show didn't rock. Contestants came on in pairs and took turns to throw darts and answer questions. Which was probably the first time producers realised that getting couples on was an invitation for howling, marital drama and presumably thought that would make for better television than one person being slightly disappointed when they got a question wrong. Oddly enough, this was also the first case of tv execs being right about anything. The second and last being airing The Wire. 

"That will teach you to give a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck."

If you want one reason to explain why Bullseye wasn't a total snore then you must have misread the title and big picture of his face and name two paragraphs up. Jim Bowen brimmed with swarthy, Northern charm. He bled Fray Bentos gravy and confused Etonites. He kept eight whippets and two of them were cats. And like many on the game show host circuit, was a fount of immortal catchphrases.  

Without doubt, his best known is 'BFH [n. Your bus fare home]'. And isn't that a benevolent concept? "Here's what you might have won" but at least you won't have lost anything on transport costs. Wait. Maybe I'm confusing benevolent with sadistic. I'll get back to you on that. 

Brucie's been around so long that the original pitch for the Price is Right was done in cave paintings. He's been inside so many women that Russia declared him their leading feminine hygiene product for two straight centuries. But apart from mocking death and harvesting our young, Bruce Forysth is known for appearing on television more often than advertising.

What's his secret? Many desperate elderly have asked. Well I don't want to scare you but he's been crawling into your bedroom in the dead of night and holding his mouth over yours since you were five. Every time Strictly Come Dancing announces a new series, that's because Brucie reduced a newborn to a husk. And every time a buxom assistant was replaced on the Price is Right? That was because the last one was worn down to a bloodied point.

And what do points mean...?

If you ever stooped low enough to ask my mother for psychiatric help, she would prescribe you two things: a suicidally aggressive exercise regime and one to two episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, to be taken in the evenings but not mixed with confection. 

Did you know that this 41 year-old radio comedy was the inspiration for this blog's title? Of course you don't because you never take any interst in me. I swear, I do all the work in this relationship. 

I suppose it's now irrelevant to point out that this show is dear to my heart. Or was, rather. Because, in a classic case of nerd aversion to change, this show died for me with Humphrey Lyttelton. 

Let's give some context. ISIHAC began as a parody of straight-lace quiz shows. And let me be absolutely clear about this: they didn't give a fuck. If your finger accidentally slipped in the car and tuned Radio 4 and you didn't immediately scream and flick back to Radio 1 for fear that the mere act of listening to the otherwise ponderous, elitist dickrot would cause every driver around you to instinctively try to run you off the road, you would have no goddamn clue what was going on. 

Games often had no objective with the famed example being 'Mornington Crescent', where the contestants just named random Tube stops in an effort to confuse the non-enlightened. Exactly like the drinking game, 'Black and White' now that you mention it, yes. 

"Aha. If I'm reading this correctly, yo bitch ain't shit."

But the absurdist non-games and onslaught of puns paled in comparison to Humph's constant, acidic commentary. He opened every episode by insulting both the host town and his guests and relaying the kinky exploits of his entirely fictitious assistant, Samantha. 

Now, I imagine actually seeing a sweet septuagenarian make tissue-thin innuendos about his sexy, yet imaginary scorer could have been awkward but over the radio, it was fucking golden. He insinuated that she gave handjobs to the teams. That she spread her legs for science. That she gave it up for the local high society. And your plumber. And to the gamblers. And the IT technicians and the butchers and the bakers and candlestick makers in a way that wasn't at all horrifying, but hilarious. Compare that to fellow fossil, Forsyth, who these days would be less sexually awkward if you found him replacing all your children with changelings.

And Lyttelton was also a sweet jazz musician. Deal with that, your brain. What have you done today? Recorded an elegant trumpet solo and hilarious quiz show episode? Or spent another day at a menial job you hate to come back and read some shit on the internet? What's that? You only plan on doing that until you're 70? Well Lyttelton worked in these two uniquely kick-ass jobs until he was 86. Check and mate says Humph. From beyond the grave. Because he's better than you.

Back in the far off, pre-Socratic age of 1986, there was a failed American quiz show about piss-poorly animated cliches that proved a hit in dear old Albion. Catchphrase proved to be that specifically satisfying kind of show where shrieking the answers at home wasn't just limited to the remedially educated. Because the answers were always common-as-muck turns of phrase, here, even the dullest of wit could excel. Yet during the first few episodes, something happened that no-one had quite intended.

I'm sure inadvertently, ITV had created the world's first Freudian Slip production line. They positively milked contestants for parapraxises. Catchphrase's catchphrase, which I've waited my whole life to not type, was "say what you see" about some, I'm sure I already pointed out, Parkinson's studio animations. The answer was always something that was, unless you were the victim of some severe head injury, or living in a cave, truly inconceivable that you wouldn't know. The only barrier was the schizophrenic artist's idea of what that thing might look like. 

"Is it ham-fisted?!"

Here's where the magic happened. Under pressure, the human brain is known to panic and make, to the bemused bystander, truly deranged assumptions about what it's seeing. Catchphrase practically forced that. It was an avalanche of pressure on perfectly normal contestants in no way prepared for it. And my did they say some truly stupid shit under all that pressure. It was public humiliation masquerading as competition.

What set it apart from obvious analogue, reality tv of course, was Roy Walker. 90% of the time, he took random peoples' projectile word vomit completely in his stride. Deflecting it with his classic: "It's 'good' but it's not right." But on a few beautiful occasions, the extent of the contestant's answer's absurdity utterly broke him. I've seen Davina McCall bounce off responses that would barely register as the chimp language for 'throw shit/make autobiography', and yet something about Roy Walker's total inability to give a shit while he's howling with laughter at a contestant's retarded answer, strikes me as nothing less than blissful. 

A bliss not equaled by Brylcreamed, pseudo-Cockney ponce Stephen Mulhern. Because when he laughs at the contestants, it just seems mean.  

"Eh. You're kind of a dick when you do it."

Now, I know that Fry isn't dead or been replaced on the game show he's most known for but hindsight will, eventually, prove my right on this. It isn't his fault, but no-one will ever match Fry's contribution to QI, ever. The whole point of the show is proving people wrong about things they were sure about. Have you ever tried that? If not, speak to anyone who has ever met me. People hate being contradicted and when it's something they believed was common knowledge, pointing out their mistake is like offering them half a grand to break your jaw. It's not only unpopular, it's full-on fucking dangerous.  

Guests often voice their disgust at the intellectual egotism that is QI down to its privileged, Oxbridge core. I'd sum it up to the kind of culturally bankrupt cretin that might not have seen it like this: Think you know when the sun hits the horizon? Well then you get to eat shit, retard. You couldn't have been more wrong if you'd just screamed for your nurse while evacuating yourself. 

No human could tell you you're wrong about what you thought you knew like Stephen Fry. He is the only human being in the entire world who could explain why black is in fact, white and not make everyone in earshot rush toward whatever fucking said that and try to kill it with whatever they're holding. He once made my idol, Phill Jupitus, almost cry with the question in the last paragraph. And even I don't hate Fry for that. He's provided me with more opportunities to be a complete bastard than Wikipedia and a Grammar school education combined. Maybe I'm biased. Because if there's one thing I love...

No-one will ever prove a replacement for Fry. I'm willing to bet real money that the show will be cancelled long before Fry leaves or dies, and should he, the BBC will see sense and, like Bullseye, just cancel the show. Because otherwise, they really would be running the risk of a triple homicide on set. And even a heartfelt apology from Forsyth couldn't get you out of that.