Game Shows
Monkhouse was well known for hosting television quiz shows. One of his biggest successes was The Golden Shot during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was broadcast live for 52 weeks a year and drew in up to 17 million viewers. His tenure ended with allegations, which he denied, that he had taken bribes to include branded goods on the programme as advertisements. He returned in 1975. The dozens of other shows Monkhouse presented included Celebrity Squares, Bob's Full House and Family Fortunes. Audiences regularly topped 15 million. In the late 1980s he hosted two series of the revival of the talent show Opportunity Knocks which aired as Bob Says Opportunity Knocks. He then moved to ITV to front two more game shows, Bob's Your Uncle and the $64,000 Dollar Question, neither of which were popular successes.
Between 1996 and 1998, Monkhouse presented the National Lottery show on Saturday evenings on BBC One for which he created the catchphrase "I know I'm a sinner, but make me a winner!" The opening to each show would see him deliver several minutes of topical jokes, and on one occasion where his autocue failed, he improvised a new and still topical routine. This talent was used in Bob Monkhouse On The Spot, a return to pure television comedy, in which audience members suggested topics and Monkhouse came up with a routine. Monkhouse returned to quizzes when he took over hosting duties on Wipeout from Paul Daniels, when its studio recordings moved from London to Manchester. Monkhouse hosted Wipeout between 1998 and 2002.
Read more about this topic: Bob Monkhouse
Famous quotes containing the words game and/or shows:
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will’s need to will is no less strong than Reason’s need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)