Food Fight
Contents |
Host
Co-hosts
Team captains: Sara Cox and Henry Naylor
'Colin Bunter': Steven Burge
Broadcast
Channel X for Channel 5, 4 February to 22 April 1998 (12 episodes in 1 series)
Synopsis
Comedy double-act Parsons and Naylor joined ladette babe and former Girlie Show host Sara Cox in a battle to see who did the washing up. Each team captain had a celebrity guest join them each week.
The opening round consisted of blindfolding celebrities and forcing strange slippery substances in their mouths. No, this wasn't that area of Soho, this was the "guess the weird food" game. While this could have been gut-wrenching (q.v. Endurance UK) in fact it was pretty entertaining. Some of the foods were tamer than you'd imagine (e.g. blancmange), but some of the foreign delicacies they managed to come up with were pretty darn awful.
We also had the "let's play Call My Bluff with names of embarrassing products from foreign countries" round, which was probably the weak point of the show.
There was also a physical round which somehow involved food - dunking for objects in a huge tank of baked beans, that kind of thing.
In-between the jollity, we saw Parsons' grumpy schoolboy assistant 'Colin Bunter' (a reference to fictional character Billy Bunter) eating the leftovers of the rounds.
The show had an excellent end game which included some ingenious lateral thinking food props questions. So, for example, if Parsons held up some thick, black-rimmed spectacles in a bowl of semolina-type stuff, the answer would be "Ronnie Barker in Porridge". Geddit? And there was also a special fruit each week that was the answer to some of the questions. You had to be there.
All in all, a good effort and somewhat harsh to have only been given one series. And apparently Henry Naylor reads these pages so "Hello!" to him.
Catchphrases
The winners got a bottle of champagne, while the losers got a bottle of Fairy with which to do the washing up, or as Parsons put it: "A bottle of bubbly for you, and a bottle of bubbles for you."
Similarly, the score checks went something like: "So it's time to see who'll be in the pink, and who'll be in the sink."
