Blankety Blanks
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- Not to be confused with an unrelated American game show of the same name, hosted by Bill Cullen, or with the British game show Blankety Blank.
Blankety Blanks was a popular Australian game show hosted by Graham Kennedy on Network Ten. Regular panelists were Ugly Dave Gray, Noeline Brown, Carol Raye and Stuart Wagstaff. Other panelists included Noel Ferrier, Belinda Giblin, Abigail, Nick Tate, Tommy Hanlon Junior, Dawn Lake, John English, Wendy Blacklock, Peta Toppano and Mark Holden. Blankety Blanks initially ran from 1977 to 1978. It was screened at a rate of five, thirty-minute episodes each week, stripped across an early evening timeslot. It was broadcast at 7.30 PM in 1977, and at 7.00 PM in 1978 [1].
Kennedy won a TV Week Gold Logie Award in 1978 for Most Popular Personality On Australian Television. When Kennedy succumbed to laryngitis the show's young announcer Don Blake was forced to host the show for an episode.
The series was a Reg Grundy production based on the long-running American game show Match Game, which had been created by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman. Indeed the Blankety Blanks set looked strikingly similar to that of its American counterpart. Neither show has any connection to another American game show called Blankety Blanks.
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[edit] Game play
[edit] Main game
Two contestants, including a returning champion, competed. The contestants were always a man and a woman or two women; at no point did two men compete head-to-head. The object was to match the answers as many of the six celebrity panelists as possible on fill-in-the-blank statements.
The main game was played in two rounds. The challenger was given a choice of two statements labeled either "A" or "B." Rayburn then read the statement.
The show's questions were designed as double entendres, such as "Did you catch a glimpse of that girl on the corner? She has the world's biggest _________."
While the contestant pondered his/her answer, the six celebrities wrote their answers on index cards. After they finished, the contestant was polled for his/her answer. Frequently, the audience responded appropriately as Kennedy critiqued the contestant's answer (for the "world's biggest" question, Kennedy might compliment an answer such as "boobs" or "rear end", while expressing disdain to an answer such as "fingers" or "bag").
Kennedy then asked each celebrity – one at a time, beginning with #1 in the upper left hand corner – to give his/her response. The contestant earned one point for each celebrity who wrote down the same answer (or reasonably similar as determined by the judges) up to a maximum of six points for matching everyone.
After play was completed on the contestant's question, Kennedy read the statement on the other card for the challenger and play was identical.
Many questions were quotations of a fictional character named Cyril, and would begin "Cyril said..." with the quotation recited by Kennedy in a stereotypical gay male voice - Cyril was Kennedy's middle name, and he rather hated it. Another recurring character in the questions was Dumb Dora. In a routine borrowed from Match Game, Kennedy would read the question which began "Dumb Dora was so dumb..." and be greeted with the chanted reply from audience and panel members of "How dumb was she?", after which he would read through the entire question. A recurring comedy skit between Kennedy and Gray involved discussion about a man named "Dick", leading to "Did Dick?", "Dick did!" exchanges between Kennedy and Ugly Dave Gray.
The challenger again began Round 2, with two new questions, unless he/she matched everyone in the first round. Only celebrities that a contestant didn't match could play this round.
Tiebreaker rounds: If the players had the same score at the end of "regulation", the scores were reset to 0-0. The tiebreaker went on until there was a clear winner.
[edit] Super Match
The winner of the game went on to play the Super Match, which consisted of the Audience Match and the Head-to-Head Match segments, for additional money. On the CBS version, the winner of the game won $100.
[edit] Audience Match
A fill-in-the-blank phrase was given, and it was up to the contestant to choose the most common response based on a studio audience survey. After consulting with three celebrities on the panel for help the contestant had to choose an answer. The answers were revealed after that; the most popular answer in the survey was worth $100, the second-most popular $50, and the third most popular $25. If a contestant failed to match any of the three answers, the bonus round ended.
[edit] Head-to-Head Match
The contestant then had the opportunity to win 10 times what he or she won in the Audience Match by exactly matching another fill-in-the-blank response with a celebrity panelist of his or her choice (ergo, $1100, $550 or $275). If successful, he/she won the money accumulated in both parts of the round.
There was a crew member who remained behind the show's sets pulling a lever that uncovered the correct answers on the board. Kennedy dubbed him "Peter the Phantom Puller". To reveal each answer in turn, Kennedy would call out "Peter could you have a pull", "Pull it Peter!", etc.
The series has been repeated many times since its run ended. It was shown by the Ten Network many times though the 1980s. In the 2000s it has been screened in Foxtel's TV1. Other Australian programs using the same format appeared in later decades. There was a 1985 version hosted by Daryl Somers on the Nine Network but it had little success. This was followed by a second revival in 1996, again on the Nine Network, which had slightly more success lasting two seasons. Both of these versions followed the same format as the Kennedy version, but with a top prize of $5000 (Audience Match amounts were $500-$250-$100).
A DVD set of 30 episodes of Blankety Blanks was released in late 2005.
See also Blankety Blank, the very similarly-named British version of the format.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Moran, Albert. Moran's Guide to Australian TV Series, Allen & Unwin, 1993. ISBN 0642184623 p 676-9
