Skip to main content

Does he like mustard, tomato sauce or brown sauce with his chips?

As a kid in the 70s, I grew up on a diet of Mr & Mrs - Border TV's kitsch game show which tested how much a husband and wife knew about one another. Under the supervision of dapper host, Derek Batey, one contestant would retire to a soundproofed booth while their companion gave answers to a series of trivial questions about life around the home. If husband could guess wifey's answers - or vice versa - the happy couple might head for home with a carriage clock and a jackpot of, say, £50.

Fast forward to 2008, with Batey's 80th birthday looming in the summer, and the show is set for a fantastic new makeover. The hosts on this occasion will be none other than Philip Schofield and Fern Britton. And, in keeping with the zeitgeist, the couples will be celebrities who will happily to donate their prize winnings to charity. This time, the jackpot will be £30k, as inflation means that everything costs 600 times what it did thirty odd years ago. (A £6 chicken today, for example, was just a penny down the Old Kent Road in 1975. A £3 grande cappuccino was a halfpenny, but you couldn't get one for love nor money.)

The real excitement comes with news of the couples who've been lined up for the new show. Neil and Christine Hamilton, for instance. ("If your husband saw a man in a white suit threatening to take his parliamentary seat away from him, what do you think he would do?") Kerry Katona will be popping down the The London Studios in Waterloo with her own hubby. And on one occasion, Mr & Mrs will become Mr & Mr as jungle hero Christopher Biggins tries to second guess his partner Neil. I won't even mention the one with Lembit Opik and that Cheeky Girl. It's all too much to take in.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more