Steal
Synopsis
Not to be confused with that awful Paul Hendy should-be-on-radio-but-they-have-the-audacity-to-use-it-as-a-bumper show (Stash), this rightly had little success on Saturday night, but if anyone reading this wants to remake it for a, say, weekday 5:30 ITV slot, that would be fine by us.
Two teams of three tried to win as much cash as possible by picking squares off a 4x4 computerised board. And that's it. AND YET! It isn't, for this is a memory game with a twist - literally - and that's why we kind of like it.
For a start, the contestants were given 15 seconds to memorise where everything is on the board. Then, and here's the explanation on the clever wordplay in the above paragraph, the board would then go blank so all the squares were hidden and then the grid would turn through 90 degrees (180 degrees in Round 2) so the players needed to have a good memory and fine mental agility skills if they wanted to win.
The squares themselves had quite a bit of variety too. The main 'character' of the show was a burglar who stunningly was also a cat (respect to whoever thought up the cat burglar idea). Some squares started a sort of Roulette thing where the player currently playing would stop a flashing totaliser which was randomly flashing cash values which would be added to their stash (which also included minus values).
Then there would bad squares which would show the ultmate humiliation of the cat becoming a 'jailbird', and then there were the excellent First Class style computer games. One of the games was called "Laundered Lolly" where Jules (the cat burglar) had to grab pound notes out the sky (Grab-A-Grand style) and peg them on a washing line. This game was so hard that very few contestants ever won much on it...
Round Two was played for double cash (i.e. this was probably a Stephen Leahy show) and the winning team went through to round three where they played for £3000. If we remember correctly, six bags of cash were shown to the contestants, the rest were dud squares. They had to remember the positions, then the grid would turn so that the inner four squares went 90 degrees one way and the 12 middle squares would rotate 90 degrees the other way - so as to really confuse the contestants. They had to uncover the cash without hitting too many dud squares within a minute.
A show with a sense of humour then (even if it was hosted by Roy Walker's son - arf!) and had some good fun moments.
Inventor
Ian Messiter and his 14-year-old grandson, James Beaumont. They demoed the principle to Central TV bosses on that workhorse of 1980s game shows, the BBC Model B.
