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. These would involve the cat and his assistant doing something vaguely naughty, such as throwing glass bottles over to each other or something, and every time they manage to do something correct they'd win cash, and if they dropped a bottle (or whatever for which game they're playing) they'd invoke the nastiness of the guard dog, who probably ate the cat with hilarious consequences. There were other squares too, but we can't remember them.
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, the grid would turn through 270 degrees and we think 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.
