Get Wet

Synopsis

Now here's an interesting one, a kids gameshow that tries to do something adventurous and different and just about succeeds. Who would have thought that a quiz and scuba diving would have made good bedfellows?

Two teams of two (boy and girl) play through a number of aquatic rounds in order to win points to increase the greatness of their prizes.

The first round was an obstacle course with each player trying to collect as many tags as possible within the time limit. The majority of tags were floating on floats (natch) in an open section of the pool at the end. These are grabbed by travelling using a giant inflatable wheel, the 'Wonderwheels'. But, if a team wants to it can scupper the chances of their opponents by getting a member to the pontoon at the end of the course where a giant water cannon awaits...

Round Two was the true or false round where a celeb would come on and ask questions relating to themselves and the players, sitting back to back would put their thumbs up if they thought it was true or down if it was false.

Round Three would be another aquatic based challenge which changed from week to week. There was a good variety in these games, such as trying to cross floating 'lillypads' with footballs but the floats weren't connected so they'd drift further apart as the game wore on, trying to force floats under water and inside a pyramid that sort of thing. There was also a game involving a pyramid where you had to keep sponges dry, which wasn't so logical. Another game involved the contestants fishing out crabs and lobsters from a shallow pool with fish nets.

Then another True or False round with the other team members but this time on random facts.

At this point, the scores would be totted up and prizes would be given out depending on how many 'levels' they'd acheived, which is a nice idea and works well in principle. The winning team, however, got to plunder the ship in search of its treasure.

This was impressive as a lifesized ship was built down one end of the pool. Just outside the ship, over a rope bridge was a stage with a giant treasure chest which sadly had two locks on it. There were two golden keys. One was on the ship, and the second was under the water.

What this bit was is essentially a mixture of The Crystal Maze and Finders Keepers. Each person had their own set of tasks, one person's tasks were on the ship and the other's were under the water so they got to wear scuba equipment. The puzzles were of the 'use the shovel to dig up the pump to pump water into the valves to raise the...' and so on, and whilst we at home were shown the correct routes to take the players weren't (or so we were told). The players had three minutes to do their treasure Quests, and they were done simultaneously - which was nice.

Catchphrases

"Ready, set, Get Wet!"

Theme music

Paul Boross and Henry Marsh

Trivia

According to a 2008 interview, executive producer Elizabeth Partyka (now managing director of STV Productions) devised the idea for Get Wet whilst taking her son to swimming lessons on Friday evenings.

The impressive set was built in a real public leisure centre rather than a purpose built pool. It was filmed at Drumchapel Swimming Baths in Glasgow.

In a suprising move, STV decided to re-run the series locally almost eleven years later as part of their wknd@stv kids' strand. Once all the episodes were used up, two other slightly old STV productions, On Safari and Twister, got the same treatment.

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