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Double Your Money

Monica helps Hughie slip into something less comfortable "It's going to have to be either Famous Women or Law, Criminal and Civil, Hughie!"

“GOOD EVENING folks!” Perma-grinned Canadian chatterbox HUGHIE GREEN was your host for this, the first quiz show on British telly to offer a cash prize, albeit one that, due to the vagaries of the British IQ, often amounted to one pound. In old money. From a demented, never-ending list of categories, including bridge, opera, good housekeeping, meteorology and, best of all, jazz (traditional) and jazz (modern), lowly Members Of The Public, preferably with an eccentricity that Hughie could riff on, selected questions which, if answered correctly, would compound the sum of their winnings by a factor of two. For the final question and the opportunity to, ahem, grab a grand, contestants were encased in a sound-proof booth for no reason other than, yes, to give Hughie something else to riff on. If Edmonds wasn’t watching, someone he knew certainly was – most probably the whole of the country who’d dared to switch to “the other side”. 15-year-old accounts clerk MONICA ROSE famously won a paltry £8 but proved to be such a popular Cockernee Charmer she was eventually brought back as a hostess. The whole thing ran for ages until the regulators noticed and swung the axe, whereupon Hughie promptly revived the whole thing as THE SKY’S THE LIMIT.

"I know they say I'm wooden, but jeez folks, this is ridiculous!" Hughie helps Monica get her tongue around his instrument
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Glenn A

    August 2, 2010 at 9:18 pm

    A quid in 1960 would have ensured you were totally bladdered by last orders, caught the last bus home and still had two bob to give to the family to get a bag of chips for the next day’s meal. However, you still knew you’d appeared in front of 25 million people and would probably be treated as some kind of local celebrity in Hartlepool for weeks on end. Meanwhile the person who wins 50 pence on Deal or No Deal probably gets a Milky Way out of the sweet machine and is escorted off site for being crap.

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