Knightmare – Well Eye Never

Welcome to the second part of my nostalgic look back at TV programmes I enjoyed during my childhood. In the previous post I looked at shows involving animation and puppetry, and now for this post I want to explore my top 40 game shows, again covering the period of my life up to the age of 18.

I enjoyed keeping my brain busy as a child, often with my nose buried in puzzle books, especially when travelling, so I enjoyed word games and quizzes. But I also adored the many game shows for children where they got to play silly and messy games, and I often wished I could be on them. As I was rather a shy, quiet, well-behaved child (yes, I was a good boy most of the time, honest!), it was a great form of escapism and excitement.

Of course, this is just a summary look at the shows I enjoyed, so I haven’t gone into detail about the history of each one, how the formats were sold between countries, all of the revivals that have taken place, any DVD releases that a few of the shows have had, and so on. And I haven’t listed any programmes that I already have on DVD or Blu-ray either. The occasional mention of such details will come up here and there, but ultimately you can find out more about the shows at the Wikipedia articles, websites and videos I’ve linked to below, and you can do further searching online if you wish.

So I hope you find this second part interesting, and that it brings back more fond memories for you like it has for me.

One of the programmes I’ve been enjoying on TV recently is Dara Ó Briain’s Go 8 Bit, a comedy game show where celebrities compete against each other on a variety of video games, both old and new. It’s great fun, and it’s got me thinking about some of the games I used to play when I was younger. So I figured it would be a good excuse to wallow in the nostalgia by writing a post about them.

These days I spend more than enough time on computers as it is – as part of my job all day, and then doing other things in my spare time like going on social media, blogging, watching videos, etc – plus I go out and about a lot too. So I’m not big into gaming as well, as I just don’t have the time, money or inclination for it. And the friends I have aren’t big gamers either.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t play modern games though. I would gladly give them a go if I had the opportunity, and I’d love to try Virtual Reality out of curiosity, as it would be interesting to see how accessible and immersive such experiences are these days, especially for someone with sight loss like myself. After all, it doesn’t matter how amazing the visuals or audio or storyline are, it can still be an awful game if the menus are tricky to navigate, text instructions and subtitles are hard to read, the controls are a nightmare, or it’s impossible to see what you’re supposed to be doing.

But thankfully there were many games that I was able to enjoy when I was younger, despite not having perfect vision, ranging from very basic PC programs to heavily detailed console titles. So I hope you enjoy reading about them here, and feel free to comment with your own favourites!