Money Unlimited: The Touch

Host

Co-hosts

Broadcast

Recorded for BBC-tv, 30 April 1956 (non-broadcast pilot)

Synopsis

Now here's a format that's surely ripe for rediscovery. In this pilot show, various people made appeals for money. However, it seems that you could only win the money if you were lying through your teeth. Remarkably, if the series had been commissioned, the overall prize was going to be £500,000 - a whopping sum in 1956. We have no idea where the prize money was going to come from.

One was a pole vaulter who wanted to go to Israel (we don't know why); other contestants wanted to start a circus, to set up a political scholarship, to have their nose shortened, and to buy false teeth. They were grilled by the panel (Andrews, Spain and Byers) and a clapometer decided who should go through to the next round.

Obviously it never made it to a full series, but in these days of Without Prejudice? and Dragons' Den it sounds like a winner to us.

Trivia

The BBC notes for the show also mention that at the end of the telerecording "ANDREWS explains rules of game for N American audience (interesting in that it gets so long & involved that it becomes totally incomprehensible!)". Lo and behold, a clip of this pilot has been unearthed by the UKGameshows.com librarians on a 1991 BBC documentary called What's My Quiz?.

Eamonn spoke thus: "There is only one rule to this programme, one rule only. We have the money here, the money is just for the asking. The rule is that people who ask for the money must not tell the truth. If we discover that a successful Toucher subsequently has told the truth, then he or she will be disqualified. Now the winner, apart from the normal television fees, will not receive the money that he or she asks for, but the winner will go forward to the eventual Touching Target of £500,000. Losers will get compensatory awards but the winner can go forward to the next week with a new story and a new fixed Touching Target, which will become clear as we go on." Oh, no it won't Eamonn...

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