To think that contestants should be banned from telling us their sob stories on game shows?

[mumofoneAloneandwell]

Now i am secretly rooting for the other person to beat you 😬

Bring back contestants who want the money for a boob job!

The Wheel drives me mad, husband insists on watching it. There’s the overly effeminate/ gay contestant, there’s the disabled contestant and there’s the contestant from a different culture. All with a sob story that tugs at the celebrities heart strings. They all want to take the wider family on holiday to an expensive location, or ‘back home’ and put down a deposit on a house. How much do they think it’ll cost to take 22 people to Disney? Don’t think they’ll be much left for a deposit on a car let alone a house.

Judith Keppel does have amazing general knowledge/deductive reasoning skills - I used to watch 'Eggheads' and she hardly ever got a question wrong.

It would be interesting to see how Queen Camilla would fare on a quiz show. She left school with one O Level but apparently she's been an avid reader all her life, so I think she'd do OK. It's surprising how much random general knowledge you can amass just by reading, even things that don't interest you, you remember because it was mentioned in a novel you enjoyed 20 years ago.

I laughed out loud at this

I'm sure people make those stories up. You clearly don't get your object accepted for repair unless there's a good story behind it, and if you can possibly drag in an elderly relative or a winsome child at collection time, so much the better.

it lightens a bad moment tbf - DD has had a really tough year and whenever the next bit of bad news drops we’ll say ‘ah well, something else for the X factor list - now you just need some singing lessons’

The first big brother winner is who you are thinking of. But he only revealed what he was going to do with the money after he had won the competition. He became a favourite & won it because he was the one who challenged nasty nick who was trying to rig the voting.

Yes it’s never ‘ah this is an original steiff bear from early twentieth century Germany. My great grandfather who it belonged to was a leading Nazi but we would love to have it restored so we can remember his more innocent days’

My repair shop story, were I ever to go on it.

"Well, I bought it on a whim from eBay for £20 about 10 years ago and it sort of worked, then my husband tried to fix it using WD40 and completely broke it and since then it's been gathering dust on top of the wardrobe and I think about getting it properly repaired from time to time but I can't really be arsed."

😄

Absolutely, my general knowledge is good becsuse of this
I was an average student ,not highly academic
But I know all kinds of random facts, becsuse I always enjoyed reading
Often I dont know where I know stuff from.

I saw a clickbaity-type article the other day about how Judith says she hasn't spent any of the money - except maybe treating herself to a celebratory Gregg's steak bake or something (posh equivalent!)

It was all about how wise and amazingly sensible she is, but to me, it just underlines that she was already wealthy and didn't need the money anyway. You'd hardly call somebody foolish for winning a million and spending a third or half of it on a decent mortgage-free family house, would you?

I know there's no law against rich people winning, but it does seem a huge shame when, instead of absolutely transforming somebody's life for the better, a big win will just mean having their accountant shuffle a few figures on the balance sheet of their personal wealth portfolio.

I was a contestant on a radio gameshow with a £1m prize, and the woman who won the million later appeared on The Weakest Link, where she won a few thousand. As it had been on the radio, her face obviously wasn't well-known to the general public. She had every right to enter and win, of course; but I was watching hoping that somebody else who actually needed the money would win instead of her!

😆 I know right!

Thing, apart from 93 year old Grandad George dying, you get George's whole life story too, and told what a legend he was and what a hero he was, and how all the young 'uns in the family looked up to him, and aspired to be like him.

All their family parties would have been damp squibs without him, and he lit up every room he walked into. I salute you George, you were an icon. <<<sobs>>> 😖

Craig Phillips - he went on to have a reasonable TV career in DIY shows (he was a tradie, wasn't he?). He seemed a really nice guy, so good for him.

We used to enjoy Big Brother at the beginning, when it was just ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, but they pushed it further and further - first going for flamboyant, overdramatic, performative types; then moving on to people who seemed very mentally unstable and absolutely should not have been paraded on TV for everybody to mock and judge them.

I always wonder how many of the people will be truly overwhelmed with joy to have such a precious family treasure (which coincidentally happens to have a high open-market value too) restored and back in their lives again... and then stick it straight on eBay as soon as the camera crew has left.

I have actually stopped watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire now, because of the tedious and boring ramblings of the contestants, going through every one of the four fecking answers, and explaining in fine detail why that was isn't the answer, and THAT one isn't the answer, and THAT one isn't the answer, so it must be THAT one blah blah blah fucking BLAH. You know the answer, just say it you boring twat!

On some of the 'episodes' one single contestant would be on for 40 minutes! Because they chatted sooooooo much shit about the answers. They often blathered on and on about all the places they have travelled too, in order to get to the answer!

Yes, the first BBs were really good.

The “sad back story” is even in job applications. Dd threw in the towel with one application: long list of victim tick boxes with plus/minus points. But then to top it all off was a final section asking if the candidate had any challenging stories to tell them. I can’t imagine what the HR dept was thinking - they’ve obviously watched too many game shows!

As an aside I was once watching Stephan Graham on a Talk show ,he was talking about one of dramas he had appeared in
And he said he got talking to an extra who informed him she had always like him since he had won Big Brother ,she had mixed him up with Craig Phillips 😂😅

Thank you for The Despair Shop 😂

I'd have given them that old Boswell 'riddle' from the thread a few years back - it certainly 'challenged' a fair few of us on here to be tearing our hair out and begging for mercy.

Whassat then? Sounds intriguing…

When they do the interviews on The Apprentice I've noticed that the only purpose of one of the female interviewers is to make the candidates cry. She does it to every candidate every year and it drives me nuts.

Interviewer: "So I heard your cat was run over by a bus a couple of weeks ago. What do you think it would mean for little Leo if you were to win?"

The interviews used to be the best episode but I can't watch it.

That was because the OP relayed it incorrectly. It was solved when someone came along with the correct wording

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3475828-Did-we-ever-find-out-about-Boswell

Don't go there - it really isn't.

Oh, I see that @iSage has posted a link. Grrrrr.

That's a link to the solution😄You're right it's not particularly exciting, clever or funny as a riddle. Its legendary status on MN is undeserved.

I used to be raging when people would win the lottery and then say they were staying in their council house and keeping their ancient car because they don't like to splash out.
It seemed like such a waste when I could have had it 😆🤣🤣
I just try not to read anything about it now.