Good Game Guide 11 DJ Games
The Accumulator Quiz
Ed Stewart, Radio 2, ?-1999.
...since when there has been, of course, Steve Wright's rather similar Big Quiz )
The Alphabetical Experience
Simon Mayo Radio 1, late 1980s
One of the less popular games from Simon Mayo's Radio 1 breakfast show.
The Big Fact Hunt
Find something on the Radio 1 search engine for a chance to win a mouse mat.
The Big Quiz
Steve Wright's Big Quiz (Radio 2, since 1999?)
The Birthday Bonanza
From Capital FM's breakfast show.
The Bong Game
The Bong Game from Capital FM's breakfast show
Bits and Pieces
The quintessential Radio 1 Roadshow game. Always trailed by a Tommy Vance jingle proclaiming "One more record to Bits and Pieces", the game itself was a bit of a let-down. Ten clips of records were played, with a brief "wah-wah-wah" sound effect between each. Write down the performer of the record, most points wins. Yes, a written contest. On the radio. Sheer genius.
The Roadshow also featured Smiley Miley's Mileage game, where people had to guess how far the roadshow vehicle had travelled from the previous venue.
Bits and Pieces audio clip at Radio Rewind
Car Park Catchphrase
Chris Moyles ressurects Roy Walker's career with Mr Fish and a large number of double entendres.
Circle of Chance
From Mark and Lard's shows
City City Bang Bang
Sara Cox asks 60 seconds of questions, highest score in any given month wins a weekend break.
County Questions / Wiz Quiz / QED
Radio Leicester's quizzes for villages, Women's Institutes, and Schools respectively. Ran from the late 70s into 2000.
The Crew of Two
Simon Mayo, circa 1990 - Simon also had The Alphabetical Experience and - later, when he was on mid-mornings - Dead Or Alive?
Gary Davies' Day-to-Day Challenge
Gary calls up the same contestant every weekday, and asks questions. The listener wins a bigger prize for each day completed, and also gets to pick the record immediately after the feature.
The line-up was as constant as the year is long. Day 1: three easy pop music questions. Day 2: three general knowledge questions. Day 3: guiess the mystery voice. Day 4: three questions on the contestant's nominated specialist subject. Day 5: tricky questions on pop, general knowledge, and current affairs.
Played at about 1.05 every lunchtime in the mid-80s, Tuesday's feature comes straight after the new number 1 is announced.
Dead or Alive?
It had been a long-running stock gag about bad radio DJs that they would have a phone-in quiz asking whether famous people were dead or alive, but it took the not-bad Simon Mayo to finally do it for real, during his years on the Radio 1 mid-morning slot. Very simple mechanics - Simon would read out the names of famous people born on that day of the year, and contestants responded with either "Dead" or "Alive-alive-o!".
Factasia
Mike Smith's two-year stint on the Radio 1 breakfast show is almost completely forgotten. His one contribution to the quiz genre was "Factasia", where two callers tried to identify a fact from a number of clues. The more clues required before someone got it, the fewer points they scored. Winners would come back until they were defeated, with prizes based on how many points they'd scored during their wins. A few contestants were very good, reached an implausibly high score, and were given the chance to win a portable colour television. For everyone else, a document wallet or Filofax was the best they could hope for.
Audio clip at Radio Rewind
Football Fortunes
Hawksbee and Jacobs, Talk Sport, 2006. Two football fans give facts about players. The facts are matched against a prepared list, with one point for the most popular fact, down to five for the fifth most popular information. Introduced using the Family Fortunes music, don't mention any similarities to Topranko!.
Give Us a Break
DLT apparently legally copyrighted the quack-quack-oops sound effect
Heart Made Me a Million
National local radio station Heart FM gave away lots of £1000 prizes during April 2020. Nine of the premium-rate phonein winners - plus a non-winning caller - were picked out at random for the final. Each drew a number, the hosts opened an envelope, and one of the callers won the million quid.
Hold Your Plums
Billy Butler's quiz, R Merseyside. Brought us the "Hitler" blooper.
The Identik-Hit Quiz
Ridiculously-titled but popular puzzle from Simon Mayo's Radio 1 breakfast show. The title of a hit song was rendered in the form of a sonic rebus using sound effects and the acting skills (such as they weren't) of Simon and his team. Initially played only in the prestigious 6.45am slot, it later appeared twice daily, having ousted The Crew Of Two from the more prominent 8.10am spot. Newsreader Rod "Fence" McKenzie's ennunciation of "C!" in a convoluted montage for Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" lives long in the memory. Longest-running mystery title was "I Ran" by A Flock Of Seagulls, but then the single only got to number 42. You call that a hit?!
I've Half a Mind to Scream!
Bruno Brookes' Radio 1 lateral thinking quiz, is this the correct title for it though? The puzzle book I have was published in 1988.
Last Resort
Game on Jo Whiley's Radio 1 show where contestants had one "Last Resort" where they could ask people to text in with the answer for a bonus three points.
Mystery Voice
Long-time staple of the John Dunn show on Radio 2, still carried on by his successor Johnnie Walker.
Popmaster
Long-running Ken Bruce pop music quiz on Radio 2, and easily the best thing on in daytime on that station. The questions are set by Phil Swern. Two contestants face ten questions each, highest score on the day wins. The scoring was originally 3 points for a correct answer and 1 for a partially-correct answer; later a "bonus" question was introduced whereby the contestant chose a number from 1 to 10 and when that question came up it was worth double points. Relaunched as "New Popmaster" in 2002(?) with a new "specialist subjects" twist whereby three of the questions are on a subject selected from a choice of two (originally three) and worth double points. In the early days there were often quite specific subjects (on a particular artist or genre) in the selection; nowadays these are rarer and the subjects tend to be pretty wide-ranging, like songs with colours in the title, "female singers" (so that'll be about half of all solo artists ever, then) and the much-hated "Name the Year". The quiz was run in two parts (at 10.25 and 11.15) for several years but is now back to its original all-in-one form (indeed, practically a show within a show) at around 10.30. The last major tweak (in January 2005) was to have the two contestants on air simultaneously, answering alternate questions, with unanswered questions passed over to the other contestant for a bonus, which only lasted a week or two before being given up as A Really Bad Idea. (This format was briefly revived for the Children In Need Celebrity Popmaster week in November 2006.)
Winners go through to endgame Three In Ten, naming three hits by a given group or artist in ten seconds. This is very much pot luck - sometimes it'll be someone like the Rolling Stones or Status Quo, but sometimes it's a real stinker like Shalamar or Go West, where you think "have they even had three hits?". Top prize is a DAB radio worth about £100, which isn't bad for a daily phone-in, winners who don't name three in ten get a "Space Radio", whatever that is. Occasionally someone still asks for an inflatable chair, even though that particular consolation prize hasn't been given away in years. The year's top scorers come back in December for Champions League Popmaster, with some posh hi-fi equipment for the overall champ.
Radio One Record Race
Peter Powell - where a caller would attempt to win the top ten singles by shouting out the name of a record as its introduction played... the countdown from ten showing how many records had been won.
Seven Song Shuffle
(Jo Whiley, 2005-)
Identify the seven mixed up songs to get seven albums, the text listeners steal any you don't win. To date, only three people have ever gor 7/7.
Six of the Best
from UKGS list contributor zadoc_2000:
Six Of The Best. Classic FM (late 90s) Presenter: Quentin Howard (CFM station Engineer) Time slot: Saturday, 10pm - 1am (live phone-in) Synopsis: Six highly cryptic clues are read out in the first hour or so of the program. In the next segment callers ring in to decode and explain each one.
Prizes: The first caller to fully decode a clue won a box of Charbonnel et Walker chocolates. The first caller to get the set won a magnum of Champers.
Surprisingly this almost always went right down to the wire, with some fearsomely involved (but entertaining!) and convoluted clues.
Digging around on Google brought up an item saying that SotB started with Dave Jameson on BRMB (Friday nights).
Staff Wars
Employees from different companies go head-to-head in a quiz. Five wins in a row earns a DAB radio.
Sucking Diesel
(Colin and Edith, Radio 1, 2004-5)
A national pride quiz. Four people - one from each of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales - give up half an hour each day for a week to play the quiz. A single wrong answer means the player is eliminated from the day's contest; the last surviving player (or the one winning a tie-break after three rounds of questions) is declared the winner. The number of days won by representatives of each nation is totalled up over a six-to-eight week period. Some iterations of the quiz featured specialist subjects chosen by the previous day's winner.
A second version of this: Suckin' Diesel:The Sexes was introduced which was a simple game: the first person to score five points wins.
Thirty One Days in May
If you'd ever wanted to go paint-balling with Iron Maiden, or win your height in CDs as measured at the top of the BT Tower, this was the quiz for you. If you were Radio 1 controller Johnny Beerling, desperate to increase audiences during the quarterly listening survey, this was the quiz for you. Named "31 Days In May", and voiced by the station's resident gravel-throat Tommy Vance, they did it on all thirty-one of the days in May. Brilliant!
Each day, there would be a cue to call - this was a record announced at 8am, or an annoyingly loud siren. Callers would ring up, and would be asked three questions related to the prize. The first caller to give three correct answers would win the day's grand prize. Sometimes the questions were so difficult that the quiz ran for the best part of an hour. Other times (such as when they were playing during the Top 40) the questions were easy to the point of ridiculousness.
In the finest BBC tradition, the contest gave away "prizes that money can't buy", such as having a jingle recorded with your name on it, or going fishing with Bruno Brookes. The concept came to an end after 1993, partly as a signal of change by incoming controller Matthew Bannister, but mainly because the new RAJAR measurement system ran for almost the whole year.
Tosser's Challenge
Part of "The Steve Penk Breakfast Experience" on Virgin Radio, 2001. Andy Collins went round the country, making unfunny jokes as he went. In each town he visited, someone stepped forward and put something valuable on the line, such as a set of fine china. If they won the toss of a coin, they would win something nice, like a weekend overseas. If they lost, the stake would be destroyed live on air.
Tug of Peace
From Mark and Lard's shows
Two Strangers and a Wedding
Month-long ratings stunt by a Birmingham radio station during January 1999. Applicants from the listening audience were put through interviews, counselling, lie detector tests, psychometric monitoring and had their biorhythms checked for compatibility, before meeting each other at the altar. Greg Cordell and Carla Germaine split up within three months. The station repeated the stunt in early 2006; the winning couple also split within weeks.
Twelve Inches of 12s
A chance to win a cubic foot of vinyl on Annie Mac's Radio 1 show by getting the record to the right speed (up or down by a certain number) within three attempts. Losers get a booby prize such as a hair from Zane Lowe's head or a bottle top. Very difficult.
Whattity What
On Chris Moyles' Radio 1 show. Like Blankety Blank only a million times worse. Blank obviously is substituted for what.
