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Following the news that Jeremy Beadle has just died from pneumonia at the age of 59, I thought it would be apt to mark his passing with the show that first brought him fame in the UK, Game For A Laugh, and paved the way for Beadle to become a household name when it came to anything to do with practical jokes.
Game For A Laugh first hit our screens in 1981, and was hosted by Jeremy Beadle, Sarah Kennedy, Henry Kelly and Matthew Kelly (the latter two of course not being related to each other). The show was a mixture of practical jokes, quizzes, games and stunts that involved members of the general public. As Beadle was always keen on reminding us it was the show where “The People Are The Stars” and the closing catchphrase of the show was “Watching Us Watching You, Watching Us Watching You” which was delivered by each member of the team saying a quarter of it each.
The featured practical jokes usually involved some hapless person had being set up by their spouse, family or work colleagues to be made a fool of, normally by having something nasty happen to them like their car being crushed in front of their eyes (of course, it wasn’t really their car). These were normally prefilmed segments where the person being humilated and the person who set them up were invited to sit and watch the mayhem commence.
Everybody loves Love Hearts, don’t they? Those little fizzy sweets with a little message in red text embossed on the side and surrounded with a heart are just as popular today as they always have been. The sweets were made in different pastel colours, although I think they all had the same flavour – I certainly couldn’t tell any noticeable difference between them anyway.
Has anybody ever used Glade Shake ‘n’ Vac when vacuuming their house? I never understood the thinking behind a product that causes you to make more mess when tidying up around the house. The product was supposed to bring an air of “freshness” back to your carpet, and the way it achieved this was for you to sprinkle something that looked a bit like talcum powder all over the floor, then hoover it all back up again. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, I really don’t know, but the product will always be remembered for it’s well remembered (if somewhat cringingly terrible) television advert.
As a child I was always confused about the board game Mastermind. I didn’t see how it related to the BBC TV quiz show for eggheads, as it involved guessing codes rather than answering questions about general knowledge or your specialist subject. Of course, the reason is because the two versions of Mastermind were completely different entities, but I was convinced that they must have been the same just because there was a man sat in a chair on the box of the game, and Mastermind the quiz show is famous for the black chair in which the contestants sit whilst they are grilled.
There’s no denying that Hanna Barbera have created some wonderful cartoons over the years. Scooby Doo and The Flintstones must surely be the cartoon studios two best loved series. However, Hanna Barbera are also guilty of a large amount of internal copy-catting. For The Flintstones there was The Jetsons (luckily The Jetsons was actually quite good though) but when it comes to the basic premise of Scooby Doo – a group of teenagers and their mascot investigating mysteries – things get a little out of hand. Some were good (e.g. Captain Caveman) whilst overs were terrible (e.g. the introduction of 
With the plethora of digital TV channels available to us via satellite, cable or even Freeview TV, it seems strange to think that at the beginning of the 1980′s we only had three TV channels to choose from – BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. It also seems unthinkable that with such a small number of channels, at certain times of the day we didn’t even have programmes airing on all three. Early mornings and late nights were when TV stopped, and the test card took over.
Every man and his dog must have played Pacman at some point in their life, and if not, then they surely must know who Pacman is. I consider him to be the first real videogame “celebrity”, if I can call a collection of yellow pixels a celebrity. His arcade game debut was in 1980 in the classic game created by Japanese company Namco, and since then he has been the star of countless other games and even a cartoon series.
Today there probably aren’t many kids who don’t own a Nintendo Gameboy or one of it’s many variations. Back in the 1980′s such technology was the thing of Science Fiction, so we had to make do with our Palitoy Pocketeers instead (or the less catchily named Tomy Pocket Games in the US).
