Source: Nicola Irvine, quoted in Sean Day-Lewis (ed.), One Day in the Life of Television (London: British Film Institute, 1989), p. 213
Text: The television is on in the living-room and the cassette player is playing in the adjacent kitchen. One of my favourite programmes is on at 5.15 pm. and I try my best to concentrate on Blockbusters, amidst the barrage of questions, people arguing, and shouting at someone to shut the door. I live with four, sometimes five, other students (or ex-students) and the cooking and talking causes quite a racket. Then the telephone starts ringing
I love watching Blockbusters because getting the questions correct is due to a skill acquired from watching the programme repeatedly and not from a vast general knowledge. The ‘easiness’ and ‘hardness’ of questions goes in patterns and depends on the rhythm of the game, and also how badly a contestant is losing. For instance, you know that the answer to ‘K’, a picture card in a pack of playing cards, is ‘knave’ and not ‘king’. This will give the slower contestants a chance to win a point because the quicker competitor will immediately guess ‘king’.
As with most of my experience of watching game shows (which I do rarely) I shout insults at the television, regarding the contestants. The schoolchildren on the programme are invariably those types who are considered ‘characters’ or what a school report would describe as ‘outgoing’. On television they appear obnoxious and embarrassingly precocious, as emphasized by their cuddly mascots. I am further aggravated when Bob asks them questions about themselves, especially when they say they want to go into advertising. When I was at school, people wanted to be teachers and nurses and footballers, but now everyone wants to awaken to a Maxwell House 7 a.m. shoot and be a media person …
Comments: One Day in the Life of Television was a project organised by the British Film Institute which documented one day’s television broadcasting in the UK (1 November 1988) with impressions specially recorded by hundreds of television professionals and ordinary viewers. Nicola Irvine was a student in Birmingham. Blockbusters (originally broadcast 1983) was a long-running British TV quiz show, based on an American original, and hosted by Bob Holness.
