Hello and welcome to the latest lot of behind-the-scenes adventures from our Guest Blogger George Long! Last week, you’ll recall that George had been employed as a writer and adjudicator on Going For Gold, a BBC lunchtime game show which ran from 1989 – 1996. We join George now as he begins his second series on staff…

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The crew of ‘Going For Gold’; George is in the front row on the extreme left.

For the next series of Going for Gold I worked on, my reputation for question-writing and adjudication was clear – we had great questions, great contestants and the BBC were very happy. They did, however, decide to cut one set of four shows for each half of the contest… Which meant we had to rework the way the contestants qualified. We now allowed a ‘highest-scoring loser’ from each side of the draw to go through to the final round. From my point of view, I was now in another very fortunate situation; they needed someone to do the morning camera rehearsal on every record day, as the previous associate producer had recently left. Our host Henry Kelly liked to rest his voice for the gruelling five episodes we would record after lunch. I was selected to do this run-through, while still fulfilling my roles of adjudicator and question writer.

My first few camera rehearsals were, from a director’s point of view, a complete disaster… Although the contestants responded well to me, there were no mispronunciations of the questions, I was good at putting them at their ease, making them laugh, exploring their bios and generally making it a pleasant experience… The professional description of all this was “going off script”! But after the first few, the Director and crew got what was happening, stuck with it and enjoyed it greatly. The warm-up guy Wally Mardell loved these rehearsals too, as they made the contestants laugh and put them at their ease.

The show didn’t change in the way we ran it, and we continued to get great ratings for the BBC. The only real change was that for the final we had arranged for Barbara Castle – the former Labour cabinet minister and, by then, the leader of the Socialist Group of the European Parliament – to give the prizes. Remember the timing requirements mentioned earlier (where we had to finish right on time, in order for Neighbours to begin on time after us)? That came into play on the final, in a very unfortunate way. I had to remove all the ‘hard’ questions from the final itself and put in fairly easy “Who am I?” questions. The finalists were a chap from the Netherlands and another from Denmark who had twice come through the ‘highest-scoring loser’ repechage unexpectedly. I had calculated that we would finish with a four-question round and come in on time, allowing Barbara time to give her speech and award the trophy. Whoever played first would likely score 4 and then the other contestant would then score 4, then the original would do the same and then be on 8. The first contestant would then likely score 4 and win… But it was all over very quickly and the Danish contestant had an easy win. I never thought this was the best way to end the series, but it was fair; they both had an equal chance of victory.

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And that’s where we leave George’s Going For Gold journey, but there’s still loads more to come as he takes us deep behind the scenes on the UK versions of Jeopardy!, Press Your Luck, Sale of the Century… and more!

See you next time.