Family Fortunes.

Today was a beautiful day. The sun beamed down, the sky was blue, everyone was outside playing and generally enjoying life. I spent my day lying on the sofa absorbing the cancerous rays from the television.

I found myself after 7 episodes but what felt like 3 weeks of "Two and a Half Men" skipping through channels and landed quite steeply onto 'Challenge', for those who are not from the UK, 'Challenge' is a channel devoted to playing old game shows (mainly produced by Granada) from the late 1980's and 1990's, shows such as "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", "Catchphrase" and God's gift to entertainment, Michael Barrymore's "Strike it Lucky" are regularly shown here. However today I committed a big sin, a visual equivelent to drinking a pint full of hot trans-fat and then injecting a 6 pieces of bacon into your main artery. I watched "Family Fortunes".

It's not that I just watched "Family Fortunes" it's that I led there, on my arse and watched 5 or 6 episodes in a row finding myself shocked and suprized to my newly found masochistic tendencies. "Family Fortunes" a game show based upon an American format which was called "Family Feud", puts two gimpy families against one another and is asked by the Gimp-God himself Les Dennis who usually wears a male leather lingerie under his suit and often sucks on a rubber ball off camera. Basically each family is asked to find a list of most popular answers which have been found through a survey for questions as dull as... "Another use for a tap..." Then each family goes into a competition to who can slip in the answer "Make love" followed by any other sexual innuendo in a desperate bid to make it into a "TV's Rudest Moments!" type show produced by ITV2 sometime in the future as future generations can watch it and go "I WISH I WAS ALIVE THEN WASN'T TELEVISION RADICAL BACK THEN!!!".

After this stage of the game the family with the most points is chosen for the BIG MONEY round. This sounds exciting doesn't it! Well it is. I'm not being sarcastic, it really is. Les Dennis and the camera crew take the winning family outside on the streets and each member of the family is challenged to try and open a fire hydrant with they're teeth and after an hour of teeth snapping on metal and agonizing screams each families mouth is inspected and for each tooth they have left between them they receive £5. It's fucking brilliant!


Les Dennis in 2002, when he had that terrible gigantic tumour which cost him every penny he ever earned to have removed.