Eight weird and wonderful British gameshows you might have forgotten

Nothing like a weird and whacky challenge... 
Money on the table: Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly presented Red Or Black?
ITV/Shutterstock
Natasha Sporn13 April 2019

If there is one thing Britain loves, it's a game show. We've spent countless hours yelling answers at the TV screen and telling random strangers we could definitely do a better job than them.

This weekend sees another one enter the fray as Stephen Mulhern's Saturday Night Takeaway segment In For A Penny finally gets its own series.

The game show features Mulhern trekking across the country armed with a bunch of questions and challenges and a whole load of cash for unsuspecting contestants.

In honour of our newest Saturday night offering, we've rounded up eight weird and whacky game shows you may have forgotten (or tried to forget)....

Don’t Scare the Hare

This short-lived BBC series from 2011 focused on an animatronic, and quite frankly terrifying, hare. Contestants had to take part in various games to the best of their ability but not scare the animal robot. Each round had a physical challenge and players had to be careful to navigate the obstacles without setting off a piercing alarm and scaring the hare.

Unfortunately for host Jason Bradbury and narrator Sue Perkins, the only thing the show managed to scare off was viewers. The series never saw itself out because the BBC scrapped it after six of its nine episodes.

101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow

Hosted by Steve Jones, the exhilarating show saw contestants digging deep into the trivia books to answer a series of multiple choice questions against the clock. The first contestant to get an answer wrong found themselves ejected from the competition in a spectacular fashion, which could have been anything from falling from a height through a trapdoor to being flung out of their seat and off the side of the arena. The last one standing scooped the £10,000 cash prize.

It was all quite odd and, to that end, only lasted a matter of months before the BBC said farewell forever in August 2010.

Fun House

The oldest offering on our list but, trust us, it was a good one. Hosted by Pat Sharp, with the help of twins Melanie and Martina Grant, the children's show ran for a decade and saw kids' represent their schools in a head-to-head format. Navigating obstacle courses, a series of games and challenges, and buckets of gunge, Fun House was the whacky gameshow everyone watching wanted to be a part of.

Flockstars

This short-lived ITV experiment from 2015 introduced eight famous faces to the art of….sheepherding. Yes, sheepherding. Each week, two celebrities took their doggy partner around an obstacle course with the aim of getting wayward sheep into their pen. One celebrity went through per week, for both the heats and the semi-finals, until it was eventually won by former Strictly professional Brendan Cole and his canine pal Hoggy.

Alas, the series was cancelled shortly after it finished airing because, well, it just didn’t work.

Red or Black?

Let’s just say this…we absolutely love Ant and Dec. But this was not good.

The Deal Or No Deal meets roulette rip off, fronted by McPartlin and Donnelly, involved contestants picking a colour through a series of rounds and being eliminated if they got it wrong. In the first series, four millionaires were made but critics' reception to the show wasn’t good, made even worse by the revelations that one of the millionaires had a criminal record. Things got even worse when it emerged a further two contestants were under investigation, allegations which seriously hampered the already-recorded second series. Suffice to say, that was the last we saw of this particular game show.

Hole In The Wall

Originally hosted by the late Dale Winton, the odd gameshow saw celebrities run at a moving wall and jump through the cutout holes, which were all sorts of outlines, to the other side. It was good fun, everyone wanted a go, but it only lasted over a year until it fell away from the schedules - much to the disappointment of many, many fans.

Small Fortune

This one’s still on, and only started a few weeks ago so you can’t have possibly forgotten about it. May have tried to, though.

Hosted by Dermot O’Leary, the show sees teams take on a series of miniature challenges to bag the big prize at the end. Every round features a scaled-down landmark to navigate, be it a tiny Rovers Return or pint-sized Stonehenge, designed to make it as tricky as possible for the players to take home the £150,000.

Catchpoint

The early evening show, hosted by Paddy McGuinness, challenges players to answer a series of general knowledge questions correctly and catch a series of bouncy balls through every round on their way to a cash prize.

This one, too, is only a few weeks old so it’s not quite forgettable yet.

TV shows to watch in 2019

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