We've been on one of our semi-regular sessions of tidying up the teetering pile of old magazines in BrokenTV's spare bedroom. A curious flick through the August 1997 edition of Select magazine (cover stars: bloody Oasis, obviously) reveals this interesting objet d'jour (click to open the full article) :
A box for £99 that allows you to play along with Family Fortunes and Fifteen to One. Or indeed, as was the intention, all quizzes. It could also be used with sport - Ladbrokes invested £20m in trying to win back gamblers lured over to the National Lottery.
Sadly, it didn't really work out, as the fact you haven't got one under your telly will attest. An interesting little curio, nonetheless.
Coincidentally, did anyone buy one? A question not necessarily aimed at the just the readers of this blog. Did anyone at all buy one? We can't remember them ever going on sale. Quite likely the manufacturers realised Sky Digital was less than a year away from launch, while the internet was starting to become something normal people were interested in*, and it was given up as a bad job.
(*We're not being snooty when we say that, we'd already been on the glacially slow mid-90s issue internet for over a year by that point. You needed the patience of a saint - specifically Saint Francis de Sales - for it to do anything remotely interesting, and web browsers actually cost money. )
Bonus scan: a short article saying how skill Nightingales was.
A box for £99 that allows you to play along with Family Fortunes and Fifteen to One. Or indeed, as was the intention, all quizzes. It could also be used with sport - Ladbrokes invested £20m in trying to win back gamblers lured over to the National Lottery.
Sadly, it didn't really work out, as the fact you haven't got one under your telly will attest. An interesting little curio, nonetheless.
Coincidentally, did anyone buy one? A question not necessarily aimed at the just the readers of this blog. Did anyone at all buy one? We can't remember them ever going on sale. Quite likely the manufacturers realised Sky Digital was less than a year away from launch, while the internet was starting to become something normal people were interested in*, and it was given up as a bad job.
(*We're not being snooty when we say that, we'd already been on the glacially slow mid-90s issue internet for over a year by that point. You needed the patience of a saint - specifically Saint Francis de Sales - for it to do anything remotely interesting, and web browsers actually cost money. )
Bonus scan: a short article saying how skill Nightingales was.
2 .:
Ha! No, but I saw it on Tomorrow's World or a show of that ilk and decided I'd quite like one, as you could probably imagine.
These days you get to play along on Freeview and satellite with BBC1 lottery shows, of course.
Well, there was that Two Way TV, that carried on on cable for a bit didn't it? I have to say, at that time I was still excited at playing along with Play Your Cards Right via the cards in The Sun.
It's great to look back at old features on what telly will be like, I remember The Box magazine around that time doing a piece on it and all the new channels the likes of Granada were going to launch. I remember there was going to be a crime channel, which we're actually now getting ten years on. Whatever happened to ONE TV?
In other news, what a great magazine Select used to be, you wouldn't get a music mag doing a feature like this these days. If you still have the following month's issue, you'll find a letter from me moaning about Jo Whiley. Sadly at the end of 1997 it went completely wrong, with its terrible po-faced relaunch, and I never bought it again.
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