Crush a Grape
Contents |
Host
Co-hosts
Nikki Ellen & Linda Nolan
Broadcast
Border for ITV, 30 December 1987 to 23 December 1988 (Special + 16 episodes in 1 series)
Synopsis
"Ooh! I could crush a grape!" Well done Mr Francis for your unique talent there.
This basically is Stu Francis' Crackerjack V2.0 for ITV with all the gunge and stupid stuff that the original had. Each episode was filmed on stage in front of a large audience of kids. Each episode featured two kid-plus-celeb teams and they'd play two rounds.
In Round One each team get two minutes each to alternately run up to the giant head and pull out a purple or green bean-bag from its mouth. Each one had a question and green ones were worth one point and purple ones two.
In Round Two, they'd have to pull giant balloons off the back of the stage. Behind each one was either a question mark, meaning a question, or an explosion symbol, meaning they'd have to do a quick'n'stupid beat-the-clock style challenges to get the point (bob for apples in chocolate, throw a custard pie at someone etc.) and they'd get three minutes to score as much as they could. Whoever had the most points at the ends won something probably and it wouldn't surprise us if there were some sort of comedy sketches thrown in there somewhere between rounds.
The show would always end with the booths o'gunge. The host would sit in one and a celebrity in the other (the celebrity got to choose which one and the gunge was given a stupid alliterative description based on what colour it was, as had also been done in Crackerjack) and a question was read out. Whoever shouted out the right answer first avoided the gunge. Except sometimes they got gunged anyway. Crazy!
Interestingly, this actually got several series on CITV, and is probably Border Television's highest profile show, after Mr and Mrs.
Theme tune
An all new version of Crush a Grape, originally sang on Crackerjack and quite clearly the defining influence for Don't Look Back Into The Sun by The Libertines.
