Get Set Go

The very first programme featured on Curious British Telly was Sebastian the Incredible Drawing Dog, which had a young Michael Barrymore at the heart and centre of it. It aired a few months before the first series of Strike it Lucky turned Barrymore into a household name, but Strike it Lucky wasn't his first game show. Two years before, in 1984, Barrymore had presented Get Set Go on BBC1.

Relatively simple premise, really: a word game in which teams of contestants must, in turn, provide a single word to communicate a question to another contestant, with the aim of getting them to guess a word on the screen. For example, “Who-operates-on-animals” is supposed to produce “Vet.” Simple. But, of course, things often go wrong. “Who-is-a-fictional-character-who-never-ages” produces “Dorian Gray” when what they're actually looking for is “Peter Pan.” The rules are straightforward, but human error is not.

Barrymore, young, keen, and chomping at the bit in his first presenting role, doesn’t quite hit the manic peaks of his 90s pomp, yet he remains endearingly watchable, ad-libbing with contestants in a way few could. Julia Gale, glimmering in the glamorous assistant role, is the eye-candy for frustrated males at home, but as with so many others in the same role, she's limited to little more than offering a whiter than white smile. The set, meanwhile, is a dizzying blaze of whites, pinks, reds, and blues - a visual reminder of the 1980s burned onto the retinas.

The game itself is rather manic. I found my heart in my mouth more than once, as contestants’ anxiety and frustration boils over, words flailing in frantic search of sense. This also makes it hard to play along at home, it's certainly no Catchphrase in that respect. There’s also very little variety between the initial rounds, where the red team battles the blue, leading to a final round which is just more of the same. Being the 1980s, the prizes are wonderfully awful: a pine towel rack complete with towels, a French press, an atlas, and the star prizes which include an answerphone and a shower unit with curtain.

Get Set Go, adapted from the US show Go, lasted one series and one series only. This was probably all the country could handle of contestants clad in 1980s knitwear and relying on ozone layer damaging quantities of hairspray to help them stumble over their words. I made it through two episodes. That was probably double what I should have subjected myself to.

I'm always happy to watch a slice of Barrymore on top form, and he does his best here, but he's not embedded into the heart and soul of Get Set Go, relegated too much to a presenter sat on the side of the set. And the format is a little too fiddly and repetitive to truly engage an audience. Giving Barrymore more time to riff with the contestants and injecting more variety to the actual game could have made Get Set Go a more rounded proposition.

Instead it's a harmless, yet limp affair which fails to stick in the memory.