Television Scrabble
Contents |
Host
Broadcast
Callender Company / Primetime Television in association with Celador for Channel 4, 9 January 1984 to 2 August 1985 (2 series)
Synopsis
Strangely anal and slow-moving version of the popular wordgame.
Two teams of celebrity-contestant pairings (both mixed sex, to make it more confusing still) aim to make the best scoring word using the same set of tiles, in the usual Duplicate Scrabble format. The winners of each game went through to the next round in the knockout tournament.
10 PRINT "TEDIUM", 20 GOTO 10Two things stick in the memory - the teams had to enter the words in themselves, using a complicated set of foot pedals to get the cursor to go into the right place. Secondly, the teams had to work out their own score for each word and, if claimed incorrectly, the other side could challenge the arithmetic and claim points for their word instead or somesuch.
Featured celebrities included the likes of John Junkin, Richard Baker, Clement Freud and Rachael Heyhoe-Flint. A shame that neither the quality of the guests, nor the considerable wit and wisdom of host Alan Coren, could make the show anything other than mediocre.
Trivia
The consolation prize was a deluxe version of the game, featuring red leather and gold-embossed lettering.
