PODIUM: "When did TV game shows replace joy with greed?"

shows replace joy with greed?"

DO YOU remember that school fete staple: ‘buzz wire’? It involved careful manoeuvring of a handheld ring along loops of a mildly electrified wire.

Touch the wire, activate the buzzer, and it was game over. In simpler times, it could be nerve-wrackingly compelling, especially if you were playing against friends for “the big prize” which in my day was a tube of Smarties or a packet of crisps!

But watching a contestant playing a much simplified version (not even any twists and turns in the wire!) on prime time TV recently, for a life-changing £120,000, I found myself questioning the shift in our values.

This coincided with remembering my good friend Jim Bowen, who died last year.

Formidable host of Bullseye, Jim’s gruff exterior bellied a generous core, as many local Cumbrian and Lancashire charities will be appreciatively aware. But I’d bet ‘the big prize’ that his opinions on today’s dumbed down, high prize game shows would be pretty unprintable.

In Jim’s heyday, you earned your prize decoding impenetrable riddles (321), wrestling clay on a potter’s wheel (the Generation Game), or throwing a treble twenty (Jim’s own Bullseye).

Rewards ranged from practical (a vacuum cleaner), or the aspirational (a set of crystal decanters), to the irresponsible (a St Bernard puppy!) and the mega jackpot was usually a small family car.

In the strike-hit seventies, people just like us dreamed of winning a fridge freezer or a set of matching luggage. Later dreams grew with prizes getting even more aspirational: often it was a choice of a holiday or even a Robin Reliant!

Until 1993, strict regulations laudably restricted prize money to £6,000. However, once these were relaxed, prizes went stratospheric, culminating in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

At least ‘Millionaire’ still required using your grey matter.

Today contestants on many game shows won’t step before the camera without the lure of a small fortune through luck rather than exertion, or, increasingly, by cheating someone else out of it.

Our growing desire to see someone ‘do the dirty’ to win big was epitomised by Goldenballs, where two finalists faced a moral dilemma: share or steal the prize fund. If both picked share, the money was split. If both picked steal, it was lost.

America’s Greed went further. Contestants ostensibly worked as a team, until urged to betray each other. With $10,000 for eliminating a team-mate, and a top prize of $2 million, sadly very little encouragement was required.

Yet it’s not all roses should you win the big prize. A sudden windfall can lead to winners becoming alienated from family and friends, chasing unsustainable lifestyles and burning cash; ending up poorer and unhappy.

Vulnerable in the full glare of TV, viewers also know who you are, where you live and what riches you now have. Winners find themselves subject to pleas from ‘long lost’ relatives, ‘good causes’ (or scammers disguised as), and, of course, our modern scourge of online abuse.

Where once we felt genuine delight at someone winning a washing machine, a massive financial prize now invites bitter envy, jealousy and attacks.

Counterintuitively, and perhaps encouragingly, the high rolling game shows with unimaginable fortunes and increasingly fatuous or cruel tasks are actually losing audience share.

Doubtless TV companies will continue to chase audiences with headline-grabbing lower morals and higher rewards, but I’m cheered by the enduring popularity of intelligent, entertaining formats such as Countdown and Pointless. University Challenge still has no prize for winning and the game show Tenable is played for very little money.

So rest easy Jim; ‘Top of the Pops’ in our house are the two ‘Bendy Bullys’ you signed for my daughter Mel. Simple kindnesses and great memories last far longer than transient fortunes grubbily gained.