Heaven and Hell: Live! News Posted by John Hoare on 29th June 2007, 00:51 I love Bother’s Bar. It’s fantastic to read someone actually discussing gameshows PROPERLY, rather than just dismissing a wonderful genre of programme as tat. And it’s extremely amusing, without resorting to “the kind of puerile humour that blights Ganymede and Titan”. Sob. It still hurts, Rick. IT STILL HURTS. Big Hairy Willies. Anyway, posted recently on Bother’s Bar was a clip of Heaven and Hell: Live! – a pilot Channel 4 broadcast in 1997 featuring Katie Puckrick (cor) and Malcolm Jeffries, and hosted by… Craig Charles. It’s one of those virtual reality games that TV companies were obsessed with in the 90s, when the technology couldn’t really do it properly – but seem reluctant to try again now, even though technology has progressed to the point where it’s actually sensible to do it. (Presumably, the idea that you might as well just play a computer game if you want that kind of thing is a factor – but I think presenter/contestant banter could make it worthwhile. But I digress.) For more information on the show see the UKGameshows entry – but here’s that clip: Great fun – but I suspect it’s probably more fun to watch now than it was in 1997…
For 1997 that’s pretty piss poor, we had quake 2 as an online multiplayer with voice comms by this point and Half-Life and Unreal out within 6 months after that. Graphically this looks like one of the horrible virtual reality machines they had around in the late 80’s. Was this some poor attemp to taunt people who could not afford the internet for online gaming?
I watch it for about a minuet…how can anyone watch the entire clip without feeling the urge to splatter their brains all over the nearest wall?
This is basically the same as The Lord Of The Rings Online except…it isn’t. The word ‘smegma’ is used. You say this was actually broadcast? FFS.
Well, I find the clip fascinating – but I’ll admit that it’s not exactly brimming over with quality, as such. I’d still like to see an episode of Cyberzone…
Cyberzone was similarly rubbish graphically as the above clip, in fact with less animation. Though contestants were studio based wearing jump suits and carrying out tasks, that made the show across between treasure hunt, robot wars, knightmare, watching someone play elite on the spectrum and watching a rather dull screen saver from the days or early pc’s It would amuse you to see how crap it was, and to see the stolen dwarf awooga catchphrase but not much fun beyond that.
Plus the group in the audience forced into Holoship uniforms ‘because it’s science-fictiony’. Yes. Still – Mel Bibby sets. Not enough of those were made. Ever.
