Blankety Blanks

"Cyril said ...'OOOOHHHH, my friend Derek got his hand stuck in my (BLANK)'. Hosted by the irrepressible Grahame Kennedy, it was bawdy, rude, and occassionally hilariously funny. Kennedy himself toed a fine line between naughty and offensive, and often goaded his panelists into the same. A cavalcade of celebrities (mostly minor), attuned to comic timing and the double entendre, completed the task. Contestants didn't win much, but it didn't matter. The series was revived, with Daryl Somers as the host, but it didn't have the verve, the nerve or the wickedness of the original

I just bought this on DVD recently for $20, and my hopes were not high. I thought, "well, this may be mildly amusing. I don't see how a bunch of unknown-to-me celebrities turning a card around will be funny." But what I discovered was fantastic. The show is absolutely hilarious. It begins at the top with the somewhat neurotic and flamboyant Graham Kennedy, who is to Australian TV as what the Beatles were to Music.

The contestants were hardly a fixture in the show, it was all about the celebrities and their answers.

The reason it did not work on return was because the original was raw, and censorship was much tighter back then. Nowadays, saying something on TV such as "have sex" does not even raise an eyebrow. Back then it was very strict, and that was the funny part. With questions like, "When Bob found his wife Mindy with another man, he asked were you blanking him?" celebrities had to come up with a clean answer, and this always led to hilarious results.

9 stars.